** L.A. GUNS “Hollywood Vampires” <i> PolyGram</i>

The Hollywood street thing was always a difficult move to pull off, glamorous hard-rock excess being basically incompatible with the necessary tincture of hard-livin’, mean-streets despair. But L.A. Guns has always been believable in a way that, say, Little Caesar never was. When the band performed in front of mock facades of Hollywood strip clubs and tattoo parlors, it never felt hokey. L.A. Guns’ first album was as appealingly rough as anything this side of a Thursday-night band at Raji’s.

But its second album, “Cocked & Loaded,” though it included the hard-rock classic “Rip’n Tear,” was plumped out with a ton of bathetic commercial rock--including one Top 30 prom ballad. And on its latest, the very professional-sounding “Hollywood Vampires,” it’s hard to find the rock for the dross.

On some of the tracks, L.A. Guns manages that extra touch of shimmy in the riff, that last inch of sheen that always separated the band from its cross-town rivals Guns N’ Roses, but there’s also plenty of Whitesnakian neo-exoticism, Van Halenesque unison choruses, painfully banal love lyrics and whooshing keyboards. Tracii Guns’ thrashy guitar sound has been muted to tasteful squeals. Even the band’s famous raunch is toned down. And the streets seem very far away.