Tops in Pops

By JAY COCKS

Rockin' through summer

Bob Dylan: Street-Legal (Columbia). Step over here, kids, and watch how the big boys do it. Dylan's past couple of records have found him hitting, missing, mostly flailing, but Street-Legal lands home pretty clean. Among jugular reveries and cyclonic voyages to the end of the night, it is the love songs that stand out. Dylan sings them in a variety of moods: surly wit ("Do you love me/ Or are you just extending good will?"); sidelong irony ("Betrayed by a kiss/ On a cool night of bliss/ In the valley of the missing link"); even a certain smarmy desperation ("I'm lost in the haze of your delicate ways"). In live appearances, Dylan has lately converted himself into a sardonic showman, tossing around patter between numbers, glad-handing the audience, carrying on as if he wants to bellyflop straight into the mainstream. Street-Legal has strong pop overtones, and at least two cuts (Baby Stop Crying and We Better Talk This Over) sound shaped for the Top Ten. Dylan's heat still burns, though, and blazes bright.

The Rolling Stones: Some Girls (Rolling Stones Records). Raw, saw-toothed rock 'n' roll, rightly acclaimed as the best Stones album since Exile on Main Street (1972). Some Girls does not have the below-the-belt punch of Exile, despite low-down tunes and sulfurous lyrics. Keith Richards often sounds as if he is going to burn his fingers off on the guitar. Charlie Watts' drumming rolls all the way between a fondle and a mugging, and Mick Jagger sings with spirited cool. The problem may be that after all this time, the brimstone is dying out. The Stones, as ever, are looking to stun and outrage. But whether they are singing little anthems to S-M (When the Whip Comes Down), deflating stereotypes (Some Girls) or giving the finger-pop to overbearing paramours (Beast of Burden), they seem less fierce than jaded. The songs, the attitudes are meant to have some savor of the streets. Instead, they often sound too much like cafe society for anyone's comfort but the Stones.

Laura Nyro: Nested (Columbia). The record that asks the question: "Can we mend/ transcend/ the broken dishes of our love?" In pressed wallflower ballads and rhythm and blues slicked up for the cotillion, this garland of lovelorn billets-doux shows no sign of Nyro's lyrical gift. Most of the tunes have to do with being wronged, often romantically, sometimes legally: "Autumn's child is catchin' hell," she sings, "for having been too naive to tell/ property rights from chapel bells." These are the best lines on the record. They are promptly diluted, then wasted, like every other tune in this set, by sunblind personal reflections.

Etta James: Deep in the Night (Warner Bros.). Seems like great casting. Etta James is one of the great rhythm-and-blues singers. Producer Jerry Wexler, during his days at Atlantic, set down much of the finest big-city R & B ever put on record. Here, James and Wexler are working together for the first time, and the results do not match the potential. The direction of this record seems wrong, away from roots music and into pop. Matched against feeble material like Alice Cooper's Only Women Bleed, James' four-channel sensuality tears the song to shreds. With tunes that can stand up to her raunchy intensity, like Allen Toussaint's Sweet Touch of Love, we are reminded that she can still dress a song to kill.

Buddy Holly/The Crickets: 20 Golden Greats (MCA). You'll hear no better rock 'n' roll this year. When Buddy Holly died in 1959, he had been making hit records for only a year and a half. This album, lovingly compiled, has been released in conjunction with the film of Holly's life and contains his most celebrated tunes, from the best-known (Peggy Sue, That'll Be the Day) to songs like Think It Over and Rave On, which burst with the driving, wiry simplicity that helped shape rock.

The Kinks: Misfits (Arista). Satiric broadsides and lyric hotfoots from the dauntless Kinks, who have been dishing out rock-'n'-roll mockery for over a decade and show no sign of letting up or simmering down. In Hay Fever, Ray Davies laments the crimp that allergies have put in his social life ("I can't make love when I can't hardly breathe/ We start to dance and my nose starts to bleed"). Davies also updates Lola, the Kinks' jolly classic of transvestite confusion, in Out of the Wardrobe. The new song recounts the marital stress that arises when Devoted Spouse Dick takes to wearing dresses. Panic is avoided by a salving insight ("He's not a faggot as you might suppose/ He just feels restricted in conventional clothes"), and equilibrium of a sort re-established when Dick's adaptable wife Betty Lou takes to wearing trousers and smoking a pipe. Fine, corrosive fun from one of the perennials of British rock.

Tom Robinson Band: Power in the Darkness (Harvest). Rock with heavy political underpinnings is provided by a new bunch of young English spoilers. Leader Tom Robinson has a robust conscience to match a good back beat as he and the band wrestle with many weighty matters, from the humiliations of alternative sexuality (Glad to Be Gay) to warring, restless teen-agers (Up Against the Wall) and the stirrings of British fascism (Power in the Darkness). They lighten the load by providing a couple of good-time automotive rockers (Grey Cortina and the wonderful 2-4-6-8 Motorway) that stand among the most joyous of all new-wave British rock.

Carlene Carter (Warner Bros.). Genealogy first: Carter's stepfather is Johnny Cash, her mother June Carter. But instead of following the family route, Carlene has enlisted some of the best young English rockers (Brinsley Schwarz, Graham Parker, Nick Lowe) to play and sing harmony behind her, buttressing her music with high-octane spirit. The result is an album so congenial and accomplished it hardly sounds like a debut. You can still hear a country inflection in Carter's voice, which may miss a certain roughhouse quality but has a crystalline sensuality full of flirtation and promise.

The Moody Blues: Octave (London). The first Moodies album since 1973, and there must be someone out there waiting. With sales on the Blues' seven previous records working past 28 million, there is no indication that Octave will fall on deaf ears. Sensitive ears is another matter entirely. Octave is music to pour on waffles, simpering melodies gift-wrapped in heavy orchestrations and tagged with lyrics ("You won't see the woods/ While you're a tree") that ought properly to be crocheted and converted into doilies.

Garland Jeffreys: One-Eyed Jack (A & M). Jeffreys is a tough-strutting street laureate, part black, part white, part Puerto Rican, whose jazz-tinged, rock-based tunes can hit you hard and cool you down like a blast from an open hydrant on the hottest day of summer. This is big-city music to play anywhere, made with the scrupulous avoidance of sentimentality that becomes a sweet mood all its own. The album's dedication ("In memory of my childhood idol, Jackie Robinson") tips Jeffreys' hand, especially when he follows it with two lines from the wonderful title cut: "Here comes the One-Eyed Jack/ Sometimes White and sometimes Black."

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