Lone Star Gothic

By RICHARD CORLISS

PERFORMER: LYLE LOVETT

ALBUM: JOSHUA JUDGES RUTH

LABEL: MCA

THE BOTTOM LINE: Twelve fine songs take you riding on the strange stretch of Texas inside this country singer's mind.

With his kitchen-knife physique, sour face and a hairdo resembling a road-kill toupee, Lyle Lovett looks like a serial killer in Southern Baptist preacher's garb. That must be what inspired Robert Altman to cast the singer as a spooky detective in The Player. Anatomy is destiny in modern show biz, so it doesn't hurt Lovett that he looks like his songs. He could be a death-row denizen musing about the ends of life and love.

It happens that Lovett, 34, is a gentle Texan who dedicated his first album to "Mom and Dad." His songs abound in comic irony: I Married Her Just Because She Looks Like You, She's No Lady (She's My Wife) and the antic, bluesy Here I Am, which won this country singer a 1989 Grammy. The wit, merging Larry Gatlin's folksy humor with Randy Newman's city sickness, cued you that Lovett was not to be mistaken for the losers in his Lone Star gothic laments.

In Joshua Judges Ruth, the weirdness is harder to laugh off. The lyrics are gaunt and elusive, the melodies so familiar as to be generic, the arrangements as spare and naked as the sentiments. The album's intertwined themes are keyed in its title: three books from the Old Testament -- the all-time best seller of wrath and reconciliation -- that pun on a man's need to pass stern judgment on women.

Lovett's favorite characters are "the cowboys down in Texas," as he sings in North Dakota, who "look across the border/ To learn the ways of love." But they never do learn. They are in the habit of hearing women say no or goodbye. The lost soul in All My Love Is Gone limns a broken triangle in words as simple as heartbreak: "She was angry/ He was free/ She loved him/ Then she left me." In She's Already Made Up Her Mind, a bereft man needs a friend to "sail with me out to that ocean deep/ And let me go easy down over the side/ And remember me to her." Suicide: that'll show her.

This could seem like a terminal display of down-home misogyny. Women treat men like cow patties; men get even writing country music. But Lovett touches on more elemental issues: religion and death. Religion can make you laugh, as in Church, where a ravenous minister eats "a great white dove from up above." And death can offer solace. In Since the Last Time, a man at his own funeral is happy "Seeing all those people I ain't seen/Since the last time somebody died."

The glorious waltz Family Reserve is a list of family deaths, including that of a baby who choked on peanut butter and jelly. "The help, she didn't know what to do/ She just stood there and she watched him turn blue." But then this bizarre vision turns into a communal sing-along with the departed: "We're all gonna be here forever." Looking across the border separating life from the afterlife, Lovett sees they are part of one seamless journey. The dead will teach the living how to grieve for lost friends and lorn love.