Steve L. Burt One Chord Wonders

FRANCES GUMM Cruella (CD: Landspeed) & NEW RADIANT STORM KING Rival Time (CD: Homestead) An hour west of us, two years ago, there were five colleges, a mental institution, a bunch of small towns, and two new bands with a lot in common: a crisp, visceral punch, a fondness for odd rhythms and offbeats, strained singing, and atonality. (Those aren't "chords" Frances Gumm plays; more like "bunches of notes.") As the two new bands started releasing singles and playing out in New England together, they both got better by sounding less alike.

Frances Gumm, which has toured with Pavement (and now is based in St. Paul) developed a simpler sound you could duplicate night after night, show after show: short songs, no jazz, no instrumentals, with the melody locked up in the jumpy bass lines. Eric, the singer, started singing as if his lungs were being torn from his body and his liver ripped apart by vultures every time the two-line choruses began. Cruella is therefore one of the year's most emotionally wrenching rock records, if you can get used to the singing; the whole package reminds me of DC's primal post-hardcore band Rites of Spring, whose singer used to break down and cry onstage while the rest of the band rocked on undiminished.

New Radiant Storm King, who stayed at home, evolved a sound you'd be more likely to sit in your room and enjoy than to thrash to. On Rival Time there are numerous tempo changes and a few failed sonic, or Sonic Youth, experiments. NRSK's successes, however, are more accessible than Frances Gumm's--especially "Phonecall," which my roommate describes as "a good college-rock song that's actually about college." Sample lines: "Are you enjoying all your classes/Running round in the woods on too much acid?" Beat that for a capsule desription of the Five-College Area. New Radiant Storm King performs at the Middle East Nov. 3.

LOIS Strumpet (CD/LP: K) "I've died/A hundred times nightly/But I did it politely" is only one of the lines on Lois Maffeo's new record that you're likely to remember after you've heard the whole thing through a few times. It's also a good summary of Strumpet, Lois' second LP/CD, whose hushed strums and muttered frustrations will satisfy neither the punk-by-numbers crowd (who've always hated her--she's too wimpy), nor the people whose idea of authentic "folkrock" is, say, the Indigo Girls.

Lois (who prefers just a first name, maybe because Maffeo is hard to pronounce) used to be in a duo called Courtney Love, named for, but otherwise unrelated to, Mr. Cobain's troubled spouse. Courtney Love (the duo) used just an acoustic guitar and drums, which meant they could be aggressive, simple and fairly quiet all at the same time. One Strumpet Lois adds electric guitars here and there as well as supple basslines to pull the songs through their minorchord changes; the sound still has a simplicity Lois probably wouldn't mind your calling "folky," though it owes a lot more to obscure British groups (notably the Marine Girls) than it ever could to Joni Mitchell. The singing is breathy, intimate and casual without sounding contrived: the very reasonableness Lois conveys in denouncing herself, or denouncing an ex, or attacking romantic pretensions, guarantees the depth of feeling she conceals. Restraint over anger over disappointment approach and recede like waves; sometimes, as in "The Trouble with Me," the songs actually add and subtract instruments that way too. Listening to Strumpet is a bit like taking a long bike ride through light rain-it's hardly spectacular, it feels a bit lonely, but you're likely to end up glad you did it.

GAME THEORY Distortion of Glory (CD: Alias) Last week we covered Alias' Tommy Keene reissue; what could that mid-sized record company do to top that? This: you can now get, on one CD, the first three records by the best American pop group of the 1980s. Get past the "new-wave" production--flat drums, brassy synths, quiet bass--and enjoy the startlingly syncopated, intricately intellectual pop craft of main guy Scott Miller, whose love of complication used to get in the way of lyrical clarity (and in the way of his collegiate love life, if you believe the lyrics he wrote) but never stopped him from writing a catchy song.

Miller was, and is, equally capable of astonished joy ("Sleeping through Heaven"), comic enthusiasm ("The Girls Are Ready to Go," unaccountably abbreviated on the new CD's label as "TGARTG"), Elvis Costello-ish self-mockery ("Bad Year at UCLA"), and honestly painful self-reproach ("The Red Baron"). Once you stop noticing how high his voice is, you'll probably start noticing its agility: "I want to go bang on every door/And say 'Wake up, you're sleeping through heaven'" has three contrasting riffs buried in it. Your average power-pop singer would give it one at most. Far from being lush or orchestral, Game Theory's sound is always crisp (there's barely any reverb or delay on this entire CD, and when there is, it's a special effect). No matter how thin you slice the songs--down to a single bass riff, or a single chord progression--almost every unit you come up with is not only something new, but something hummable. More of life gets into this music than could ever get into a simpler pop form.

1982's Blaze of Glory, the longest, oldest and most dated-sounding of the three records here, covers Miller's collegiate and post-collegiate life ("Bad Year at UCLA" would have been "Bad Year at U.C. Davis," but he couldn't find a rhyme for "Davis"). Pointed Accounts of People You Know (1983) and Distortion (1984) are shorter and easier to dig, with delights to be found not only in the multiple melodies and the self-conscious wit, but in the sheer breadth of brightly muddy synth sound in, say, "Metal and Glass Exact."

Hearing this band a few years ago changed the whole way I thought about pop music and what it could do; I'd try and say how, but words would fail me, as they seem never to fail Scott Miller. (His new band, by the way, is called the Loud Family: their album, Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things, came out early this year. If you liked that, you'll need this; if you get this, you'll find yourself wanting the Loud Family record, too.)