**** Buick MacKane

THE PAWN SHOP YEARS

(Rykodisc)

So Alejandro Escovedo, the roots-rock hero of Austin, has got himself a trashy punk band? Not quite. True, their name is borrowed from a T. Rex song title, and one of their tunes is borrowed from the Stooges. But Buick MacKane sound too polished to be punk, too grungy to be a throwback, and too straight-ahead to be anything but a terrific rock-and-roll band.

Escovedo's songwriting chops are still here -- the album's one ballad, "Say Goodnight," is a classy homage to the Band -- and this album is just as satisfying as the thoughtful acoustic stuff on his solo albums. It's also more fun, especially if you like feedback, fuzz bass, and the sound of a garage band cranked into overdrive. "Black Shiny Beast" whomps the living daylights out of a John Lee Hooker riff while pulling one of the classic sex-as-car metaphors. "The End" features the best dumb guitar line in recent memory; "Edith" could be a '60s punk nugget from one of the Back from the Grave compilations, except that Escovedo wrote it. The one song he didn't write, the Stooges' "Loose," sounds just as over-the-top noisy as it oughta.

-- Brett Milano