The Godfathers may have come up with one of the singles of the year in "Birth, School, Work, Death," a nihilistic rocker that stands as a sort of "Satisfaction" for the twilight of the Eighties. With the gritty kick and menace of the Stones, plus the Kinks' quintessential Englishness, the Godfathers threaten to be the Next Big Thing. "Birth, School, Work, Death," a two-chord triumph rife with mean guitar hooks and a chain-gang chorus, will almost certainly lead the way.

The band's classic setup of two guitars, bass and drums packs a hefty wallop, making a sound that the band has described as "neat, hard and not at all watered down." Superb guitarists Kris Dollimore and Mike Gibson are walking encyclopedias of British rock guitar, and drummer George Mazur whacks out a backbeat with an effective kill radius of fifty yards. The Stones-Kinks connection is borne out by the presence of producer Vic Maile, who engineered recordings by both those groups way back when. He's succeeded in making one of those records that sounds loud, even if you haven't turned it up.

Like the Cult and Screaming Blue Messiahs, the Godfathers treat the blues as a distant ancestor, getting it secondhand from bands like the Stones and the Yardbirds. The New York Dolls also exert an influence, as do a number of vintage English punk and New Wave bands.

These south Londoners get a lot of their vitriol from the modern English working-class experience, where drugs and the dole queue loom large. "When Am I Coming Down" seduces with some languorous psychedelic guitar, then tums into one of the scariest bad-trip songs to come down the pike in quite some time. On "If I Only Had Time," lead singer Peter Coyne fumes about how "things ain't what they used to be/A generation raised on poverty."

True, the lyrics aren't always terribly graceful or original, but they do manage to make their point, in a thuggish sort of way. Coyne and his brother Chris used to form the nucleus of an outfit called the Sid Presley Experience, which should give you an idea as to their sardonic nature. The razor-sharp Soho-gangster get-ups complete the picture.

All but one of the songs are in the first person, and that person is usually an embittered misanthrope. Lyrics like "I keep myself to myself/And I don't need no friends/I'm nightly crucified/No need for womankind" (on "The Strangest Boy") sound like the kind of young man's blues Pete Townshend used to try to bash into submission. The band drops the tough-guy stance on poppy numbers such as "It's So Hard" and "Just Like You," and there are some high harmonies and even a middle eight on "Love Is Dead," which is a tad more upbeat than its title suggests. In a typically charming gesture, the band saw fit to release that tune in the U.K. on Valentine's Day. (RS 524)

MICHAEL AZERRAD