The Knack have a lot to answer for, and they know it. Only someone with an incredibly short memory could forget the trumped-up Beatlemania of their 1979 debut album, Get the Knack, and their arrogant stonewalling of the media. Such strategy merely reinforced the suspicion that the runaway success of the LP and its flagship single, "My Sharona," was actually a triumph of marketing over music. "My Sharona" – with its wicked, Led Zeppelin-style kick, brash vocal attack and yahoo celebration of teenage hots (a kind of "I Want to Hold Your Glands")–deserved to be the summer-of-'79 single. But, like the rest of this Los Angeles group's otherwise good-to-average, spunky Anglo-pop repertoire, the song was undercut by the smug misogyny and pedophilic fixation of singer-guitarist-tunesmith Doug Fieger. And though the Knack were only indirectly to blame for the resultant plague of Knack-alike clone-pop bands that followed in Get the Knack's double-platinum wake, their artistic credibility took a severe beating when the imitations weren't that much worse than the genuine article.

Like Icarus in a skinny tie, the Knack flew too close to the sun and got burned real bad. Now they'd have us believe that they want to make amends. If the message of the first album was Get the Knack (or get lost) and the second LP insisted that the critics don't know...but the little girls understand, then the gist of Round Trip is, "We're sorry, give us another chance." Consider, for example, Fieger's contrite plea in "We Are Waiting," a campy psychedelic smorgasbord of Gary Numan-type vocals, tubular bells, sitar, backward guitar and alien poesy: "Oh we are waiting to show/You a different view ... /Please let us into your home/It's the least you can do." Or "Pay the Devil," lead guitarist Berton Averre's country-music waltz. It's slick, sub-Eagles fluff, with Doug Fieger admitting in the chorus: "Everybody's got to read the reviews/ ... even you/Got to learn to give the devil his due." Would you believe that Fieger maintains "I ain't a Chauvinist" in his latest cock-teaser anthem, "Boys Go Crazy"?

Given another chance with Round Trip, however, the Knack acquit themselves better than we had any reason to expect. If this were their first record, it'd be an impressive, entertaining debut. As their third, it's a somewhat remarkable comeback from beyond the grave of superhype. Now that their "phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust" (to quote the Clash's Joe Strummer in "London Calling"), the Knack still have quite a bit to lose and everything to prove.

At the top of the list is the true nature of their debt to the Beatles. Of course, any similarity between Round Trip and Revolver – right down to the album titles – is scarcely coincidental. With its mock-Indian intonations, karmic instrumental clowning and a touch of Lennon in the vocals, "We Are Waiting" is the mutant offspring of "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows," with the heavy cellos from "I Am the Walrus" thrown in for good measure. The LP's opening blast, "Radiating Love," a strident invitation to play that's driven by a "My Sharona"-like riff, bears a strong comic similarity to "Got to Get You into My Life."

Yet, for all their good-natured borrowing here (which isn't to be confused with their cynical burlesque of Meet the Beatles in the packaging and promotion of Get the Knack), Fieger & Company are, for the first time, applying the essential lessons of British Invasion bop – succinct and exhilarating melodies, lusty teenage-hosanna harmonies, Sensurround guitars–as a creative means to a legitimate end, much like fellow Beatles apologists Cheap Trick and the late, great Raspberries. Though the jazzy strut and cool brass of "Africa" might seem to imply the progressive fuzak of Steely Dan, the heady charge of the Prescott Niles-Bruce Gary rhythm section and Berton Averre's overdubbed guitar pack the same virile punch as the bright, Byrds-style twelve-string ring of "Just Wait and See": i.e., Sixties classicism in the extreme. The Knack certainly deserve an A for ambition with "Lil' Cals Big Mistake," a hyperactive outlaw narrative crammed with staccato rhythms, sniping guitars, Tom Scott's smarmy sax in a brief disco flourish and passing lyrical references to Bobby Fuller's "I Fought the Law" and Fieger crony Donald Fagenson of Was (Not Was).

The flak, however, is likely to fly over "Sweet Dreams," a dangerously imitative variation on John Lennon's "I'm Only Sleeping" that deals obliquely with the ex-Beatle's assassination last December. "Go to sleep/The little ones never sleep/Have a care that you never meet one/Go to sleep," carols Doug Fieger in an unnervingly accurate John Lennon whine, joined at various junctures by Averre's guitar-in-reverse and assorted tape harpies modeled on the original. Fieger and producer Jack Douglas (who, ironically, coproduced Double Fantasy) have paid fanatical attention to detail, and no doubt many people will feel this kind of literal imitation isn't the most appropriate form of flattery. But there's an unmistakable sincerity, a sense of both loss and dread, in Fieger's voice when he sings: "Yeah these children of the night, man/Will have you dancing to their tune/They'll extinguish all the lights, and/Then you're no one/Really no one." Unfortunately, as the boy who cried Beatles once too often, he may not get anyone to believe him.

Believe the beat, though, if nothing else. Why? Because, despite all their shortcomings, the Knack have the potential to become a first-class pep-and-roll band, and they show it in "Boys Go Crazy" and "Another Lousy Day in Paradise," two spirited performances bolstered by Douglas' full-blooded production. Whereas Mike Chapman, the Knack's original producer, whipped them in and out of the studio in record time in the interests of economy and immediacy, Douglas has gone for the slow boil, fortifying Niles and Gary's bass-and-drum fire with plenty of napalm guitars in Round Trip's banzai finale, "Art War."

The Knack still have a lot to answer for, and the new album is hardly beyond reproach (note this steamy rhyme from the sluggish, heavy-breathing boogie "Soul Kissin'": "She'll be chargin' up my battery/Ooo Wee such a far out feelin'/She's the wild wet one/She's a true taste treat"). Yet, with Round Trip, they've openly confessed their sins and really worked for our favor, not simply bluffed for it. If there's any moral here, it's that you don't just get the knack–you earn it. (RS 358)

DAVID FRICKE