Lonely Boy : CHECK LIST****<i> Great Balls of Fire</i> ***<i> Good Vibrations</i> **<i> Maybe Baby</i> *<i> Running on Empty </i>

***SMITHEREENS. “Green Thoughts.” Enigma. Morrissey has a strong competitor in the World’s Loneliest Boy sweepstakes: It’s Smithereens singer-songwriter Pat DiNizio, whose one-track mind focuses purely on girls and how he can’t find them, can’t get them or can’t get them back.

That sort of subject matter has been known to fuel a fun rock record or two over the years, but DiNizio shows no signs of finding fun or self-deprecating humor in his self-pity. Few mainstream rockers have been as consistently obsessive and dead-serious about the absence of females from one’s social life as DiNizio, a real romantic-manic depressive.

On the Smithereens’ 1986 major-label debut, “Especially for You,” DiNizio seemed to have as an agenda an album-length exploration of that loneliness and desperation. Here on the lesser “Green Thoughts,” though, the wall-to-wall repetition of the very same banal themes seems less like a conscious decision than an inescapable rut DiNizio couldn’t get out of if he wanted to.

But guess what. For the most part, it still works. If DiNizio’s scorned ramblings are simplistic and he seems a borderline bore, well, think of your friends and you can probably pick out at least one relationship-scarred neurotic who keeps repeating the same sort of endless loop.

Of course, your friends don’t rock out in the simultaneously modern and anachronistic way the Smithereens do, which is why you may invite them over for tea and sympathy a lot less than you play “Green Thoughts.”

It is too humorless by far, and there are many dumb lyrical couplets and even entire songs that clunk. When it clicks, though, you may find yourself pounding your foot on the floorboard and trying to stir yourself into as lonely a frenzy as his, if only for 3 1/2 minutes.