The Glimmer Twins are back. Easily their finest album since Exile On Main Street, Accelerator throbs to the grimy garage beat the band perfected in the early '70s and... uh, hey, wait a minute, this isn't The Stones. It's Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, the First Couple of Ultra Lo-Fi, known since 1988 as Royal Trux. Hey, it was an honest mistake. I mean, who else but these Rock History PHds could write the best Jagger/ Richards tunes of the past twenty years?

After a couple of uneven efforts, Accelerator finds the band generally eschewing the more experimental side of their identity to explore fun, loose, simple rock and roll. This is music played for the love of playing, with any given song featuring a half- dozen voices screaming the chorus gleefully off- key. It's a beautiful noise, one that grows on you like the scraggly hair on your indie rock head.

The fist- pumping "I'm Ready" kicks things off, exploding in your face like a heavily shaken can of warm Bud. Next is "Yellow Kid," a playfully bittersweet honkytonk tearjerker in the spirit of, well, The Stones' "Sweet Virginia." It's followed by "The Banana Question," the flat- out rockingest rocker on the album, a near- masterpiece of sing- along catchiness. Axl Rose would shave his head and have his tattoos removed to write a hook like this, and when Hagerty and Herrema come together for the chorus you can smell the sweat and see them back to back, screaming into the same microphone like the old school rock stars they are. Fuck irony, let's have some fun.

The rest of Accelerator is good, but doesn't quite live up to the high standard set by those first three tracks until the final moment, "Stevie." A trashy, gospel- tinged workout from another era, "Stevie" feels like the theme song to the "Good Times" spin- off that never was, a tasty slice of '70s nostalgia that manages to sound fresh.

Ten years on, Royal Trux continue to surprise. And if the world doesn't end at midnight on New Year's Day, 2000, I'll be putting my money on these kids in the next decade, too. Pull up a half- rack, won't you?

-Mark Richard-San