New York Dolls

Inventing punk must have been a dirty job. You had to make up new rules for the guitar, cram your hairy appendages into ladies' pumps and lingerie, get hooked on hard drugs and squeeze Howlin' Wolf and the Shangri-Las into the same three minutes. That routine shortened the lives of two New York Dolls and probably contributed to the death of a third, so you can't blame the remaining two members if they're no longer in an inventive mood. And even though it's been 32 years since their last album, David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain's latest is no nostalgia piece, either. While the new disc contains nothing as loud as the proto-hardcore splatof "Trash," Johansen has lost none of the pathos and individualism that lent "Human Being" its impact. He embraces the danger of love and art in "Dancing on the Lip of a Volcano," restates his perv-positive universality on "Rainbow Store," and teases fundamentalists in "Dance Like a Monkey." Younger bands will innovate, but they have a lot less to say than this aging thrift-shop romantic, and few recent rock releases have felt so purposeful or satisfying.