Robyn Hitchcock's songs are a lot like the genetic code. They're tough to crack, but the secret of life is in there somewhere.

Take "The Devils Coachman," on Queen Elvis. The song has no coach or coachman. The devil is an odd piece of work, too; he appears in the nude and pokes his horns through a plate of scrambled eggs. But once you've been suckered in by the fractured waltz rhythm, the sweet 'n' sour strings and Andy Metcalfe's burping glissando bass, the images of Beelzebub in the buff and "a long kebab through your ovaries" start to make plain, if scary, sense. In a droll voice laced with cool menace, Hitchcock takes a hard look at a strained relationship ("Everything you say you won't is what you will eventually") and finds the devil in himself ("He was leering in the mirror when I looked again").

It's a great one-two punch. First Hitchcock bends your brain, then he probes your heart. And Queen Elvis is as taut, funny and compelling as Hitchcock records come, right up there with earlier mind warps like Fegmania! and the 1981 classic Black Snake Diamond Role.

Whereas the enigmatic intensity of last year's Globe of Frogs was tenderized by low-key arrangements, Queen Elvis is more electric and, for Hitchcock, surprisingly confrontational, as stinging as it is surreal. "Knife" gets right to the point: "Here is a dream/Here is a sweet and terrible dream.... And we're in the middle of it.... Do we have to go through all of this again?" In "Freeze," the song's surface whimsy and spunky raga garnish, supplied by R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, belie Hitchcock's ironic bitterness. "I know who wrote the book of love," Hitchcock sings. "It was an idiot ... a slobbering fool with a speech defect and a shaking hand/And he wrote my name/Next to yours."

This is not an album of bum trips, despite the lack of happy endings. "Autumn Sea" includes a delightfully bizarre narrative about a man with brown fluid seeping out of his head who turns into "some kind of helpless diseased housefly," delivered in a comic, upper-crust Masterpiece Theater accent. You can easily imagine Hitchcock hallucinating in a Victorian sitting room over a glass of sherry and a good cigar. Yet Queen Elvis is only as strange as life itself. Consider this passage from the Hitchcock short story on the LP sleeve: "Suddenly the phone rang in one of the abandoned kiosks nearby. He lumbered over to answer it. 'Hi! This is Brent Queegwoz from the Washington Embalmer. Is it true that you're a bit weird?' 'Not if I can help it mate,' he grunted and hung up." We should all be so normal. (RS 550)

DAVID FRICKE