Roundup at the Rock Corral

By JAY COCKS

From lush Linda to contrary Kinks, a list of holiday pleasures

Bruce Springsteen: Shut Out the Light (Columbia). This single song is under four minutes long but packs a punch stronger than most albums. His Born in the U.S.A., released in May, not only has no serious competition for album of the year (except maybe Prince's Purple Rain), it marked Springsteen's breakthrough to a wider audience. Newcomers should be tipped off to some information well known to fans of long standing: it pays to buy the single versions of the album's hits because stashed away on the flip sides are entirely new songs unavailable elsewhere. Shut Out the Light, recorded for Born in the U.S.A. but weeded out in the final editing process, is simple, stark, folk-inflected and filled with a kind of cold-sweat compassion for its protagonist, a Viet Nam vet returning home. The lyrics are full of stabbing detail: this vet's wife "called up her mama to make sure the kids were out of the house/ She checked herself out in the dining room mirror/ And undid an extra button on her blouse." As in Ernest Hemingway's seminal short story Soldier's Home, the reunion is full of restless memories and long shadows. The vet lies in bed, next to his wife, staring at the ceiling, his hands paralyzed, terrified of the darkness and the narrow future ahead of him. There have been a number of fine books written about Viet Nam, but so far music beats fiction in getting to the quick of things. That seems totally appropriate to a so-called rock-'n'-roll war. Perhaps an enterprising producer might put together an album anthology of a dozen of the best Viet Nam songs (Run Through the Jungle, Fortunate Son, Still in Saigon); the profits might fittingly benefit a Viet Nam veterans organization. Shut Out the Light could stand proud as the centerpiece of any such collection.

Linda Ronstadt: Lush Life (Asylum). Also starring Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. This is a sequel to last year's surprising smash, What's New, in which Ronstadt, her arranger-conductor and his orchestra proved that anything old could be renewed again, probably-given this kind of talent-in perpetuity. Lush Life is rather more playful and relaxed than its predecessor, as if the singer felt vindicated by her decision to refurbish some of pop's sturdiest standards. There is a kittenish sexuality singeing the edges of some of the twelve songs here; Mean to Me sounds as if it is being purred on a rumpled-up bed by a woman who has missed an entire night's sleep and is still bright-eyed. When I Fall in Love is both heartsore and heartfelt, Falling in Love Again a music-box minuet that turns into a full-swing romp, and the classic Billy Strayhorn title cut a cocktail lounge elegy of elegant despair. Barroom or bedroom, Lush Life is right at home.

The Kinks: Word of Mouth (Arista). At last, a good robust antiexercise song. In typically contrary Kinks fashion, however, Too Hot, with its sardonic image of an entire generation beefing, toning and shaping up, has a get-moving melody that is probably perfect for a workout. Head Kink Ray Davies knows how to write songs that cut several ways, including into his own heart. Missing Persons is a lovely piece of brooding melancholy that seems, almost nakedly, to be about the dissolution of his relationship with Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. The Kinks are still one of the most fearless, feckless bands in rock, and their guitar work, as ever, sounds like short circuits in an electric chair. Word of Mouth also tackles such subjects as gossip, unemployment, sudden death and the decline of the British Empire. The boys may reach a little wide and wild, but when they finally get hold of something, their grip is still sure and distinctive, like being strangled with one hand and tickled with the other.

Rickie Lee Jones: The Magazine (Warner Bros.). Rickie Lee Jones was unique and wholly left field even when she had a surprise hit, Chuck E.'s in Love, from her debut album back in 1979. She sounded like a saloon singer with Listerine in her shot glass and wrote songs that came off like juke joint Kerouac. This is only her third full album, and she seems bent on proving, quite unnecessarily, what she has already established: she is the most enterprising woman writer making records today. The Magazine, a spiraling cycle of songs organized around themes of loneliness, defiance, memory and renewal, seems as if it was long and hard in coming. Lustrous lines ("If there are three girls running,/ there are three girls running nowhere") alternate with hand-me-down Ferlinghetti, sometimes even in the same song ("We walk in easy snakes/ through the roulette rattling of the ethyl"). In songs like Juke Box Fury, the music, jazz inflected and flirtatiously arrhythmic, keeps the language lofted nicely in the thin air as Jones' husky voice snakes around the lyrics. But the record turns dark in mood, and heavy. This is not to say that it takes on real weight, however, only that it seems to be buckling under the pull of some nonspecific gravity. A woman who can work up a fail-safe two-line recipe for romantic bliss ("Make him some catfish/ Fry it up in bed") has humor to spare and no further need to flash her credentials for high seriousness. The same notion remains: if the next record comes faster, it ought to be even better.

The Del-Lords: Frontier Days (EMI/ America). When a rambunctious band makes a debut album as good as this, it should be all set. The Del-Lords' influences range from Warren Zevon to Alfred Reed, whose vintage How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live kicks the album off in high style and even higher spirits. The music is all rhythmic rush, and the songs-most of them original compositions by Scott Kempner-combine street smarts with some angry political savvy, as in the caustic Mercenary. There are echoes of the Band here, and of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Byrds, but the Del-Lords are assimilators, not imitators, and they have been listening to some of the best. If they keep on this way, they may even step up into that kind of smart company before too long.

The Ramones: Too Tough to Die (Sire). These four unreconstructed New York City punks have been around so long it would be reasonable to assume they would need a breather. No way. This new record is heady evidence that the band has flourished during a career that began before the Sex Pistols and has survived what seems to be virtually mandatory punk burnout. They are as hot as ever, though, and still laying into those guitar chords like hardhats working rivet guns. They get occasional instrumental help-Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads turns a fine hand to synthesizers on one of the album's best cuts, Chasing the Night-but their songs are as funny and full of 360-degree mockery as ever. Endless Vacation, which sounds like a sort of Beach Boys pastiche, is in fact a paean to homicidal teen angst that features this reflection on the mutability of contemporary existence: "Like takin' Carrie to the high school prom/ something's always goin' wrong." The Ramones are the philosopher kings of nerddom ("Every one's a secret nerd/ Every one's a closet lame"), the laureates of losers everywhere. They have no interest whatsoever in being cool, and for that alone may they always be blessed.

David Bowie: Tonight (EMI/America). Cool, however, is meant to be the core of David Bowie, as if he were some sort of Amana appliance. This new record has fielded one of Bowie's most infectious Top Ten hits, Blue Jean, but the album has taken some hard knocks for being less a fresh direction than a kind of holding pattern that is good for dancing. Indeed, several of the songs are vintage items from the portfolio of Bowie's pal Iggy Pop; one is a nifty old Leiber and Stoller tune; and another is an unlikely remake of Brian Wilson and Tony Asher's Beach Boys classic God Only Knows, on which Bowie starts out sounding like Bing Crosby crooning from deep inside Plato's cave. But underneath all the precision production and the surgically assured musicianship are messages of lyrical turbulence, full of fleet, elusive imagery that hangs in the air like a haunting. As the album's last song, Dancing with the Big Boys, reminds us, "Where there's trouble there's poetry." On Tonight there is plenty of both to go around.

J.D. Souther: Home by Dawn (Warner Bros.). Smooth ballads and caustic rockers about misfired romance and misguided adventure by one of the most adept exponents of what has come to be known, somewhat derisively, as "the L.A. sound." Back in the mid-'70s, Los Angeles was the capital of cool, and Souther and the Eagles were the cornerstones of close harmony and acrid social observation. Punk and new wave blew this kind of music out of the water, or at least seemed to. But the substance of new wave could not always keep pace with the style, which may be one reason why Souther sounds so good right now. Another, of course, is that he is a very skillful writer whose love songs have both the toughness and the solid sentimentality of film noir. A tune like the title track is a very neat piece of backbeat sleight of hand. It starts out like a celebration of male swagger ("He said goodbye and just walked right out the door"), then turns into a deft bit of deflation ("He looked so good he must have practiced it before"). Songs like this have the grit to make the long run. -By Jay Cocks