When it comes to political protest, punk rock is still wet behind the ears. The Irish have been angry for centuries. Having spent most of the Seventies singing Irish folk music and playing guitar with such traditional groups as the Johnstons and Planxty, Paul Brady knows this full well. But why denounce the landlord's agents and recruiting sergeants of another era when Ireland, one of the most economically depressed countries in Western Europe, has plenty of contemporary troubles? By plugging in an electric guitar and trading his cittern for a synthesizer, Brady has updated his medium as well as his message, and has made an album that heralds the arrival of a striking new talent in rock.

Hard Station's opening track, the hellbent "Busted Loose," describes a jailbreak in gritty detail with a rhythmic rush that suggests not only Brady's exhilaration at having escaped the constraints of traditional music but also the desperation of a man seeking asylum from political injustice and personal betrayal. It's not to be found, as subsequent songs make plain, in Ireland, where there are "hard times all around," and certainly not among the English, in whose eyes the Irish are "nothin' but a bunch of murderers." As for America, where a brother in Boston boasts of his "two cars in the driveway/Summer house way down on the Cape," well, it's too cold and too far away. By album's end, Brady can only throw himself at the mercy of the morning tide and pray that it will waft him to a "Promised Land" of romantic refuge.

With a husky tenor similar to John Martyn's, sputtering growls like Van Morrison's and a fondness for harmonies like Gerry Rafferty's, Brady is not without antecedents. Indeed, Hugh Murphy, Rafferty's producer, coproduced Hard Station, and the title track's plush arrangement echoes "Baker Street" so distinctly you keep waiting for Raphael Ravenscroft's saxophone to join in. Yet especially on the bristling rockers that dominate the album's first side, Brady has a way all his own of breathlessly running over the ends of lines, as if his well-wrought verse couldn't contain his intensity, "the hurricane down in my soul."

Hard Station's second side bogs down a bit in slower tempos, ponderous arrangements and maudlin sentimentality. Even here, however, the keening earnestness of Brady's singing invests an unexceptional melody like "Crazy Dreams"–Ireland's Number One single for weeks last year–with passion and power. Folk music's loss is rock & roll's inestimable gain. (RS 383)

KEN EMERSON