Sliding Headfirst Into a Retro Home : CHARLEY “Slugger” eggBERT (***)

Here’s another record that’s unabashedly retro, and none the worse for it.

Charley consists of Fullerton singer-songwriter Rob Lohayza and a supporting crew that includes current and former members of other Orange County and L.A. bands--Room to Roam, Loaded, the Blue Bonnets and the John Easdale Group. Easdale, the Dramarama alum and retro-rocker extraordinaire, is cited as part of the “coaching staff” in a CD booklet that takes its motifs from Little League baseball and the back-to-scamp-childhood album cover concept of the Who’s “Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy” collection.

Lohayza’s way-back machine is set mainly on rock’s glam years--there’s a whole lot of 1972-73 going on here, and we’ve landed in the pop quadrant dominated by Lou Reed and David Bowie. I recently criticized a good local band, All the Madmen, for drawing too unimaginatively from that same well, but Lohayza pulls it off. The key, along with some thick, modern-rock guitar densities, is the surprising thematic twists that tie borrowed styles to the songwriter’s own imaginative world.

This eight-song, 25-minute album’s most slavish Reed homage--”Who Shot Flair Harper Down?”--takes a typical glam theme, the demise of a ‘60s starlet patterned after Edie Sedgwick, the femme fatale of Andy Warhol’s art clique. Beyond that, Lohayza veers far from the Reed and Bowie songbooks in a couple of hazy, dreamy, highly romantic ballads that could be taken as Christian odes.

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“All Under You” is a hymn of praise to the divine; the stringy-but-rangy-voiced Lohayza doesn’t identify the “you” except to say his object of worship is “way past my infinity.” It’s a strong tune, with “Revolver”-era, Ringo Starr-inspired drumming pushing and pulling like a churning tide under high, cottony skies. “Sun World” awaits an unspecified messiah, with wind-like whooshes of distorted guitars, more loose, Ringo-esque drumming and a lovely, yearning melody.

Charley applies its knack for opiated romanticism to a more earthbound but no less worshiped object of desire in “Sugar,” and “Shame” celebrates a sexy woman with tough, garage-like rock that sounds either like an early-Bowie cover of the Beatles’ “Polythene Pam” or a less snide and pretentious Oasis. “Hovercraft” is a zooming hipster trip that would have sounded at home on Reed’s “Transformer” album. “Frau Paulina” imagines a confrontation with a now-aged member of Hitler’s inner circle. The narrator is both indicting and incredulous (“It haunts you. It has to. Don’t it?”) as he tries to get her to admit the enormities she countenanced during the Third Reich.

The sound quality of “Slugger” fits the sludge-is-good ethic of the ‘90s “lo-fi” alternative-garage-rock movement. It’s frustrating to have some lyrics inaudible, but Charley gets in some pretty good licks and full-sounding arrangements on a piggy-bank budget.

(Available from eggBERT Records, P. O. Box 10022, Fullerton, CA 92635; [714] 990-5652; web site: https://www.eggbert.com/eggbert/eggbert.html;e-mail:[email protected].)

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Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent), with *** denoting a solid recommendation.

* Charley plays on a bill with the Delphines, Mad Daddys and Wank on Friday at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. 9 p.m. $5. (714) 533-1286.