Like Eleventh Dream Day, Thin White Rope is part of a tough new breed of guitar bands with roots that extend through smart, crunching Seventies renegades like Crazy Horse and Television to the bedrock of the Velvet Underground. These bands use six strings, rather than lyrics or vocal melodies, to construct hooks and bring home the often sour emotions in their songs.

On Sack Full of Silver, Thin White Rope's fourth album and strong major-label debut, that tactic is taken even further. Only four tunes – the title cut, "Americana," "Yoo Doo Right" (a Can cover) and "On the Floe" – have sung choruses. The rest depend on the tightly twined guitars of Roger Kunkel and Guy Kyser to create compact, memorable segues between verses.

"Diesel Man," which portrays a homeless man's descent into psychosis in fourteen spare lines, uses a filthy, tremolo-saturated rhythm guitar to establish a feeling of imbalance. When Kyser's not singing, an electric lead sails into the mix, howling and gnashing with pent-up rage and lonely desperation. "Whirling Dervish" gets its exotic, creepy feel from an Eastern-sounding guitar that blasts into country-rock accompaniment for Kyser's hoarse voice with the force and acceleration of a sand-bearing windstorm.

Not that Thin White Rope uses its grungy virtuosity as a crutch; the band is also interested in writing rawboned poetry. And the combination creates songs as open and elemental as the rural landscape near the Rope's home in Davis, California. (RS 580)

TED DROZDOWSKI