CD REVIEWS : Amid the Rabble, Fluf Stands Out While China White Blends In : *** Fluf, “The Classic Years”, <i> Headhunter/Cargo</i>

The pop-punk phenomenon is slouching toward tedium because too many practitioners think that all it takes to give birth to a song is the implantation of a hooky chorus into a mass of noisy, distorted guitar grunge.

The title of Fluf’s third CD--a collection of nine songs previously issued as vinyl singles or as tracks on multi-band compilations, plus three new numbers--is offered up tongue in cheek. But it’s the San Diego/Orange County trio’s appreciation for classical ways of injecting pop-rock songs with extra complexity and meaning that makes Fluf stand out from the rabble.

This is the best album yet from singer-guitarist O (for Otis Barthoulameu), bassist Jonny Donhowe and drummer Miles Gillett. Being a compilation, “The Classic Years” offers good variety, but the songwriter being O, the album coheres well around his long-established dominant themes--loyalty and integrity.

The plaintive note in O’s gruff bark has always served him well on songs about bonds of friendship or love that are starting to fray.

On “The Classic Years,” he stretches and shows a surprising aptitude as a crooner (“One Trick Pony” may throb with fuzzy, modern-rock distortion, but the gentle vocal delivery harks back to Arthur Lee & Love, circa 1967).

The spirit of vocal adventure also comes through as O strains beyond his range during a slamming cover of P.J. Harvey’s “Sheela Na Gig.”

There is room for Fluf to stretch in other directions.

Most of O’s lyrics are quick emotional snapshots, the simple ruminations of a first-person narrator addressing or thinking about a “you” with whom he has strong ties that may be in danger of coming unwound.

Missing are such helpful devices as scene-painting and characterization. We’re not asking for post-punk approximations of “Tangled Up In Blue,” but adding a few classical touches in the lyric writing would be a logical next step.

Even with its minimalist lyrics, Fluf has the stuff to achieve the emotional complexity that defines strong, classic pop-rock song craft.

On “Dumpling” (the non sequitur is the hallmark of Fluf’s song titles), O wonders whether a troubled relationship with a flawed partner is worth saving. The anthem-like lift of the chorus refrain, “Here I go again,” suggests he’s game to keep on trying.

But the band immediately weighs down the vocal melody’s determined rise with a ballast of grinding distortion that speaks of the extreme difficulty, and in this case, perhaps, the inadvisability, of bailing out a sinking relationship.

Conversely, the band’s surging energy on “Lobster Tree” brings a spark of hopefulness to another scenario of troubled romance.

Fluf’s ability to make songs spin in two emotional directions at once persists whether the subject is love, conformism versus independence (“Waffle”) or elitism (“All the [Expletives] Live in Newport Beach,” one Fluf title that is perfectly clear).

In “24-7 Years,” the band deliberately copies Nirvana’s tension-and-release techniques while O delivers a monologue in which he imagines how Kurt Cobain would explain his suicide if he could speak from beyond the grave.

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Fluf’s tone is non-judgmental as it focuses on Cobain’s disgust at having to act the star’s part for what he perceived as a too-demanding public. The song serves O’s own adamantly independent, anti-stardom agenda, but it shirks the much thornier issue of what Cobain’s ghost might have to say to his wife and child. The subject is ultimately too complex for the school of sketchy lyric writing that Cobain defined and that O continues.

But at a time when the music industry is cookie-cutting hundreds of undistinguished alternative-rock bands that could collectively be dubbed Chaf, we’re lucky to have this solid, substantial, savvy and still-developing one called Fluf.