Everyday Armageddons

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: DAVID BAERWALD

ALBUM: TRIAGE

LABEL: A&M

THE BOTTOM LINE: Rock noir: Baerwald's songs are pitch black as they spin toward pop apocalypse.

Punk Jim Thompson? It's a nice suit, but it doesn't quite fit. Raymond Chandler on mescaline? A wild ride, but a little off the right route. Let's just say intriguing in inspiration and unique in application. We can start there.

David Baerwald's Triage is a work of cold boldness and romantic despair, filled with cynical, fatalistic humor and a desperate, fading hope that the center, wherever the hell it is, will hold just until the dawn breaks. Tough music's not in short supply just now, thanks to rap's street attitude, street come-ons, street aggression. Baerwald's songs, flinty and rock-rooted, aim higher. They are full of rage, melancholy and regret for fates that get mixed up and mangled in the course of everyday Armageddons.

Triage resonates with the kind of frustrated compassion that underlies film noir. Movies seem to be the deepest part of the long shadow it throws: the scary, night-crawling beauty of Taxi Driver crossed with the corrosive, explosive political parables of Oliver Stone. It is -- in the best sense -- a deadly combination.

Baerwald's cast of misfits, misbegottens and woebegones are not merely marginal types. They live on both sides of the margin: under it, like bats clinging to the top of a cave, and above it, delineating it, marking off new limits for themselves to cross. Triage is inhabited by both the victims and the perpetrators of power -- those whom it intoxicates, others whom it trashes. In order to remove any doubt about this, the record is dedicated to members of the diplomatic and espionage elite -- Henry Kissinger, the Dulles brothers and James Baker, among others -- "in the sincere hope that there is a God and that He is vengeful beyond all comprehension."

The album kicks off with a track that never made it to Bedtime Stories, Baerwald's fine solo debut: A Secret Silken World, a chronicle of a Saturday- night pickup. Then it ricochets into The Got No Shotgun HydraHead Octopus Blues, which takes up -- with pulsing drums and crunching guitar -- the matter of reciprocal footsie between government and drug dealers. The record is not an editorial, however. Baerwald is not interested in pointing fingers; he wants to nail a mood of corruptive malaise and the autoeroticism of power. One of the record's spookiest and loveliest songs, The Postman, takes a central image straight from the pages of James M. Cain, then expands it with a melody like a carbolic lullaby and with voice samplings from Jim Jones and George , Bush. As Triage closes, the focus narrows: to the shattered serenity of youth in China Lake and the tenuous promise of Born for Love, where a relationship can be, if not a redemption, then at least a reprieve from despair.

Baerwald is assured and savvy enough to mock his own obsessions (notably in AIDS & Armageddon: "I dream assassination/ I hallucinate cash") and to give even his most dour lyric excursions a solid foundation of rhythm throughout. You might not be able to party down to Triage, but you sure can dance to it -- right over the edge.

Baerwald making a short film based on the Triage album