ALBUM REVIEW : *** 1/2 THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN “Honey’s Dead” <i> Def American</i>

There are bands that go about the routine business of making individual, personal music, and then there are bands that are called to channel an eternal spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.

The Jesus and Mary Chain is the conduit right now, and the stuff roars through the band and sounds as fresh as when it bled from the Velvet Underground in the ‘60s and when the Modern Lovers renewed it and the Ramones accelerated it during the ‘70s.

When it doesn’t quite work, it seems like formula, but more often it stands as pure rock archetype, a molecular bonding of Spector/Beach Boys buoyancy with the Velvets’ dark currents. “Automatic,” the 1990 detour into cleaner, lighter air, didn’t make the band a hit in America, so this time the brothers Reid go for the throat again: In addition to the soaring raptures that dominate the album, “Honey’s Dead” includes heavy doses of harsh, spiky noise that makes their early feedback fixation sound like wind chimes.

With dry, deadpan vocals set ironically against a grand sound, the Jesus and Mary Chain comes on like a like a bratty, grunge-encrusted offspring of the Pet Shop Boys. The album doesn’t have a “Head On”--the celestial anthem from “Automatic” that the Pixies couldn’t resist tackling--but it’s a more consistently compelling collection, and it still comes close a few times--as in “Tumbledown,” an exuberant cascade with the Zen-like couplet “All I wanted was too much/All I wanted was to touch.”

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).