Over the years, Nashville has seen its share of renegades storm the place gates from the rock flank, only to be rebuffed. On their consistently entertaining fifth album, Trampoline, the Mavericks win the war – not by force, but with seduction. The band is as polished and stylized as the overseers of the country-pop assembly line could hope for, but while Trampoline finds the Mavericks dishing out breezy, lovelorn melodies, they're also sneaking a lot of genuinely eclectic weirdness past the oblivious gatekeepers: mariachi trumpets, Latin rhythms, Sixties Brit-pop melodies, electric sitar, high-reverb guitar obbligatos from the Duane Eddy school and other smoothly integrated oddments.

The fact is, with a singer like Raul Malo, the Mavericks could ingratiate themselves with an album of Slayer covers. Malo opens his trilly, operatic tenor full throttle in "To Be With You," invoking the paranoia and grandeur of Roy Orbison circa "It's Over." While there's faintly discernible irony in the Mavericks' recherché pop and vaguely Vegas-y country, it's undeniable that they really care for this stuff, buffing it to a craftsmanlike high gloss. So while they're slick, the Mavericks aren't exactly glib or schmaltzy.

For Trampoline, the band was joined by a studio-filling roll call of Nashville's finest – including horn players galore and a string session eighteen members strong – for a pop-orchestral blowout the likes of which hasn't been heard since Orbison's days on the Monument label. The Mavericks sound downright baroque on "I Hope You Want Me Too," which brings together disparate genres, decades and continents on a toetapping tune that might make the Top Forty in a more ecumenical age. Kudos to Al Anderson, late of NRBQ, whose three co-writes with Malo provide some of the disc's liveliest fluff, especially the classy-cheesy Fifties retro of "Someone Should Tell Her." Trampoline reaches its bounciest peak with "Save a Prayer," a gospel-blues breakdown that Elvis himself would have torn up in his heyday. (RS 783)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH