*** A3

EXILE ON COLDHARBOUR LANE

(Geffen)

England's A3 project Southern-storefront idioms onto a rippling canvas of acid-house rhythms, hip-hop grooves, and tent-show mayhem. Their debut, Exile, is a colorful party favor that makes lots of cool noises. Like G. Love & Special Sauce, A3 -- led by evangelical MC the Very Reverend Dr. D. Wayne Love -- mine a world of greasy guitars, bleeding harps, and woozy revelations. This is a concept album of sorts, with the good doctor and his sidekick Larry Love linking arms to explore temptation, freedom, and redemption. In short, the mythic themes on Exile should be familiar to anyone who's spent a Saturday night staggering, as Love puts it, "in the heat of the moonshine . . . searching for salvation." The Reverend and Larry soak A3's grooves and brain cells in sixpacks of O.P.T. (an acronym for the high-alcohol-content beer "Old Purple Tin," which gets its own song here). When they exhort their congregation to "go back to church," I get the feeling it's not a specific denominational edifice they're talking about but the spiritual space inside the music. Or, maybe they're just referring to the healing power of O.P.T.

-- Jonathan Perry