Tex-Mex Flavor Spices Up a Delectable Pop Album : *** 1/2 CHRIS GAFFNEY, “Mi Vida Loca”. <i> HighTone</i>

It’s hard to say whether “Mi Vida Loca” is better than “Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts,” one of the best pop albums ever to come out of Orange County. But that album from 1990 is almost impossible to find, and this new release is both available and delectable. Gaffney and band show a glorious range, not only stylistically but emotionally.

A strong Tex-Mex current runs through the album, along with a good deal of traditional country music alloyed with rock and blues. But the title instrumental, composed by Dave Alvin, reveals that Gaffney and company’s affection for rootsy styles is matched by a welcome irreverence. While fiddle, accordion and saxophone sound a sweet Mexican folk theme, Danny Ott’s revving guitar tries to launch the song toward the raunch-rock stratosphere, somewhere in the orbital path of the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way.” It works perfectly, and serves as a metaphor for the crazy-like-a-fox musical life of a band that would attempt such an overlay.

Ott comes off as a guitar hero of the first degree, able to serve up everything from flashing acoustic runs to notes that fall like teardrops on a honky-tonk floor. In “I Never Grew Up,” Gaffney and Ott demonstrate how instrumental solos can heighten a song’s meaning. The song simultaneously mocks and celebrates a life given over to musical frolic as an alternative to acting like a dour grown-up. Gaffney’s dizzy descending accordion runs, and Ott’s wobbly meander through near-psychedelic inner space, suggest a life of freedom and free-fall, an existence that’s alluring but also risky.

With Gary Brandin’s inventive, cliche-free steel guitar serving as a third solo voice, plus some nice keyboard textures and fills from Wyman Reese, the album achieves both instrumental individuality and band cohesiveness. As a singer, Gaffney is a capable, tuneful Everyman who is able to inject a lyric with lots of personality and emotional inflection without indulging in overt dramatics.

For all that, “Mi Vida Loca” is more a songwriter’s album than a players’ showcase. Gaffney has an uncommonly well-tuned ear for melody, making virtually everything here eminently hummable. He also has the ability to make short, simple songs resonate with narrative implications and a complexity of emotion.

“ ‘68,” one of two songs Gaffney wrote with Dave Alvin, is like a fine short story in miniature, telling you in four minutes a great deal about friendship, tragedy, responsibility, and the paralyzing consequences of guilt. Besides all that, it packs a terrific rockin’-country clout. The elegiac “Artesia” lyrically evokes the smell of cow manure in its refrain--and, in an unlikely feat, enables us to associate that scent with a poetic sense of loss.

The album’s balance of the serious and meditative with the wry and sprightly is just about perfect.

In “I Never Grew Up,” Gaffney dubs himself “a dancing cretin with the faraway eyes.” We can only say that when he wants his music to dance, it dances delightfully, that he conveys vividly what those faraway eyes see or imagine, and that we wish the enterprise of making pop music could be handed over entirely to cretins like him.

Albums are rated on a scale from one star (poor) to five stars (a classic).