The great flaw in the éclair of power pop is its gooey center: a sugary good nature that quickly spoils your appetite for this dessert of a rock genre. The guitars may be crashing out feverishly peppy riffs, the drums may be bashing tough little beats that hit you below the belt, but most power-pop bands seem to be fronted by some toothy pretty-boy who wants only to chirp about his keen girl or his keen car or the keen time he and his buddies had on Saturday night.

The Knack shoots fresh custard into the center of the power-pop éclair by being unrelievedly cynical about all the junk-food topics that fill their debut album, Get the Knack. These guys are a serenely energetic Los Angeles quartet fronted by lead singer songwriter Doug Fieger, for whom the sneer is a badge of honor. Fieger's smirk, composed of equal parts contempt and lust, permeates his vocals and tunes. Under his guidance, Get the Knack is a trip through the dark side of adolescence, a trip so dizzying that the group's speed and force nauseate as well as exhilarate.

For the Knack, unadorned drumbeats and a couple of curt, loud guitar riffs are all-important. Drummer Bruce Gary, lead guitarist Berton Averre and bassist Prescott Niles provide beats and riffs in abundance, while producer Mike Chapman follows closely behind, cleaning and polishing the rubble they leave in their wake. Other self-conscious power-pop bands have tried for a simply recorded, stripped-down sound (e.g., the Flamin' Groovies, Dave Edmunds' Rockpile), but these outfits sound almost rococo in comparison to the Knack's steely barrage of precise playing.

Infusing all the smart primitivism, however, are Doug Fieger's elastic whine and appallingly bald opinions. Legions of jaunty rockers have uttered repressed moans for their girlfriends, but Fieger comes right out and salivates with the drool of a witty satyr: "She's your adolescent dream/Schoolboy stuff, sticky-sweet romance/And she makes you wanna scream/Wishin' you could get inside her pants."

That's from "Good Girls Don't," just one in a series of songs addressed to young women whom the singer wants to know only in a carnal sense. Fetid ideas like Fieger's are usually the stuff of panting heavy-metal bands, and easily ignored in the blare. But by couching his rampaging id in the locutions of classical pop rock, Fieger makes his callousness inescapable: he practically rubs your face in it.

On a neck-breaker called "Frustrated," the Knack does something more than create scabrous rock: they offer an artfully veiled metaphor for their leader's professional ambitions. Doug Fieger is not the horny kid his persona projects — this is the group's debut, but he's been around the music biz for years—and "Frustrated" limns him as an ingenious overreacher just now closing in on his real goal of securing power by whipping up a pop-rock treat that'll have kids begging to rot their minds on it.

I've seen the Knack play a number of times, and it's all I can do to look at Fieger. His rancid grin pushes a shudder up my back. I'm thankful for the existence of Get the Knack because it transmutes his protean nastiness into merely dirty intensity. Did I say merely? Dirty intensity in power pop this clean and arousing is amazing. (RS 297)

KEN TUCKER