Good News and Old News

Disappointment Incorporated is the first band Time Bomb has signed on the advice of Linda Jemison, the Doll Hut owner who serves as a talent scout for the Laguna Beach-based label. This four-song calling card, recorded live at Linda’s Doll Hut, showcases an ambitious, high-intensity band that’s trying to find a space of its own in the tightly woven fabric of modern rock.

The EP’s unwieldy, religiously punning title is more ironically detached than the impassioned music it banners. “Tell Mother,” a nearly nine-minute epic, is in part a familiar lapsed-Catholic’s broadside against the guilt-inducing strictures that came with his parochial school education. But singer Brian Burns gives it character by interjecting glimpses of the broken idealist, now a “sodden social cripple in a cheap hotel,” who is sifting his past for clues about his downfall.

The past also haunts “Bleeding Boy,” a perhaps too pat, but musically exciting, portrait of the sociopath as a young lad (Mom’s a prostitute, boy grows up fascinated with guns as a link to his dad, who died fighting in Vietnam).

Burns, a Long Beach rocker, doesn’t have a dossier like most of his mates, who incorporated their music-biz disappointments playing in failed L.A.- or O.C.-based major label bands like the Jane’s Addiction/Nine Inch Nails amalgam, Engines of Aggression, pop-rockers Star 69 and the Big F, a metallic, Zep-like offshoot of Berlin. He brings a storyteller’s touch to the lyrics and a distinctive, alarmed yelp to the singing--he recalls the Cure’s Robert Smith, but with Smith’s languid, breathlessly theatrical mannerisms turned urgent.

While playing with punk rock impact, Dis. Inc. is more rooted in bands that foreshadowed or developed alongside punk. “Forget” cranks like a less sloppily executed New York Dolls number and features some ignited lead guitar work that’s a progression of needle-sting notes, tonally colored white noise effects that imply melody and raw, charging riff-rock.

“Tell Mother” offers an alluring tapestry of Cure-like trebly, rounded bass lines, a chilly, liquid flow in the rhythm guitar, and a fiery lead a la Richard Lloyd, guitarist for Television and Matthew Sweet. In “Don’t Think the Sun,” the half-spoken narrative nods toward John Cale or Patti Smith, and there are echoes of the Stranglers in the band’s suppler variations on punk rock.

Disappointment Incorporated formed less than a year ago. This live introduction shows it’s armed with lots of vocal and instrumental firepower aimed at producing something a little different. It raises expectations for a full-length studio album planned for early 1999.

* Disappointment Incorporated, Los Infernos, U.S. Crush and Funhole play tonight at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. $6. (714) 533-1286.

Albums are rated on a scale of * (poor) to **** (excellent), with *** denoting a solid recommendation.