Romance Propels Fullerton’s Joyride : Integrity drives O.C. rockers; Standing Hawthorn masters the studio; Hollywood Fats’ ‘Rock This House’ is reissued, and Tim Swenson and Candida howl dramatically.

Today’s column of local album reviews finds Joyride securing its status as one of Orange County’s best rock bands. Standing Hawthorn creates an alluring studio sound but fails to follow through with consistently strong melodies. Also reviewed are the debut single from Candida, a new Long Beach band fronted by a familiar face, and the posthumous reissue of a 1979 album by blues guitar ace Hollywood Fats. The ratings range from * (bad) to **** (beautiful). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

*** 1/2 Joyride “Another Month of Mondays”

Doctor Dream Joyride made a splendid debut last year with “Johnny Bravo,” an album-length meditation on the theme of integrity. It was full of characters clinging desperately but proudly to their ideals and their frayed sense of self.

“Another Month of Mondays” brings no change in approach and no dip in the quality or integrity of Joyride’s music.

This time around, the band’s two singer-songwriters, Steve Soto and Greg Antista, concern themselves a bit more closely with romantic upheaval than they did on the debut. But again, the album is about people living through tests of character: Can you hang on to yourself when you’ve been rejected? And when part of the blame may be yours?

Joyride meets one of the key tests of character confronting today’s young rock bands: At a time when it is tempting to cater to mass tastes with a gratuitous application of Seattle-inspired noise, the Fullerton band goes its own way.

Joyride is as hard-hitting as a punk-based band with good pop instincts can be. But it declines to mask the pop content with that fashionable curtain of noise. At its most resplendent, it openly embraces harmony and isn’t afraid to sound like such ‘70s pure-pop forbears as Badfinger and the Raspberries.

After warming up nicely with a bare-basics melodic punk number, “As I Fall,” and “Salvation Town,” a workout on a venerable Who riff, Joyride gets down to its real business: combining throbbing, thrusting guitar rock with soaring harmonies and a deft sense of pop song structure.

Joyride knows that in order to accelerate, you first have to slow down. Listening to the band shift gears with changes of speed, volume and sonic density is one of the album’s pleasures. So is singing along--which virtually every chorus invites the listener to do.

One key driver is Sandy Hansen, whose pummeling drumming remains honest and avoids trampling the rest of the players, because he is willing to do without studio effects calculated to make cymbals and snares sound like thunder claps. The other is guitarist Mike McKnight, who has a knack for making every slicing lead riff sound deliciously charged--somehow hefty and honed at the same time.

Bands with two members who separately write and sing their material risk sounding as if they have a split personality. That’s not a problem for Joyride, whose writers are in perfect sync when it comes to interests, values and stylistic approaches.

But the two are distinct personalities. Soto’s songs are simple and directly emotional, his higher-ranging voice often lending them a plaintive or poignant cast. Antista is gruff and chesty, and he spikes his lyrics with gallows humor, singing from the point of view of a guy who needs to laugh to keep from crying.

There isn’t a weak cut on the album. Soto comes up with such catchy, harmony-rich gems as “Heaven Sighed,” a sympathetic portrait of a teen-age wallflower, and “You Only Hurt the Ones You Want To,” in which he concocts a sweetly wistful brew from the pain and anger of a romantic betrayal.

Antista’s songs trace a relationship being held together with difficulty, then collapsing into divorce. With the marriage in ruins, he manages a bitter laugh over his unwanted bachelorhood in “Lonely Shepherd’s Club.”

Finally, on the road song “Month of Mondays,” he still feels dejected and adrift, yet at least he is moving ahead--not with any particular sense of direction, but with a refusal of stasis that holds out a chance for eventual recovery.

With its moderate tempo and chiming mandolin (courtesy of local rock veteran Robbie Allen), “Month of Mondays” could be a companion song to the Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait,” a gem with a similar feel.

Soto also avoids neatly tied-up, happy endings yet clings to a strand of hope. In his album-closing “Drive,” a barfly takes the first, tentative step toward sobriety after being shocked by his friend’s death in a drunken car wreck.

Joyride consists of four scruffy guys from Fullerton. It doesn’t have a charismatic hero like Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder to propel it through the marketplace. But in Hansen and Soto (an original member of both the Adolescents and Agent Orange), it has players who were making nationally hailed underground albums before anybody had heard of Seattle. And it now has two strong, honest albums that will hold up for years to come.

** 1/2 Standing Hawthorn “Itch”

I can’t think of a better-produced album by a young, unsigned band that had to finance a recording on its own.

A good deal of the credit here must go to E (as producer-engineer Eric O’Brien Garten likes to be known) and engineer Jim Monroe, his sidekick at For the Record studio in Orange.

The four members of Standing Hawthorn surely had a lot to do with it, too. The rhythm section--bassist Brent Loomis and drummer Doug Stoner Peterson--plays with clarity, punch and dexterity. And guitarist Chris Karns, the band’s MVP, stakes a strong claim as the Johnny Marr of Orange County.

Like the influential guitarist of the Smiths, Karns is an adept architect who deals in textured riffs, stacking and entwining multiple parts to create an enveloping sound. Karns’ execution and conception are enticing, whether the setting is hard-edged and rocking or lush and dreamlike.

But Standing Hawthorn fails to follow through with memorable vocal melodies. Each track holds interest while it is playing, and Paul Schulte’s grainy, fervent singing is strong. But most of the music fails to linger in the mind.

An exception is “Forgotten,” an exquisite, deeply felt ballad about the sorrow of growing up and growing apart from one’s first love. It packs some of the somber weight of a Joan Armatrading lover’s lament.

Too often, Schulte is undermined by diffuse melodies, prosaic lyrics and an emotional tenor that is steadfastly and unchangingly fervent. In song after song, he tears at his soul, straining against the loss of innocence and idealism that comes with the passage out of adolescence.

One wishes that Schulte would sometimes bring the irreverent, sardonic sensibility of a Holden Caulfield to those mixed-up, young-man blues. He mixed things up better on Standing Hawthorn’s 1991 debut album, which was occasionally playful and more pithy in some of its melodies.

The sustained mood and repeated themes of “Itch” could work for listeners who want to delve at album-length into its limited slice of experience. Others will at least be impressed by Standing Hawthorn’s mastery of studio craft.

(Available through Standing Room Only, P.O. Box 4470, Mission Viejo, Calif. 92690.)

*** Hollywood Fats “Rock This House”

Black Top Michael (Hollywood Fats) Mann was a gifted, tradition-steeped Los Angeles blues guitarist, probably most familiar to local fans as a mainstay of the James Harman Band during the early to mid-1980s.

Fats, who left the Huntington Beach-based Harman Band to join the Blasters before his death in 1986 at the age of 32, gets resurrected on this 17-song CD reissue of an out-of-print 1979 release that predates his other recorded performances on four releases by Harman and one by Rod Piazza.

“Rock This House” showcases a player who had the skills to dominate a session but who was too taken with the pleasures of interacting with other fine musicians to indulge his ego. The result is a band-oriented album of traditional blues not unlike “Extra Napkins,” an album of relaxed, down-home tracks Fats recorded as a member of the Harman band.

“Rock This House” features a solid lineup of Southern California blues veterans. Al Blake sings and plays harmonica, delivering blues standards and sawdust-coated originals in a bleary voice that has the ring of barroom authenticity.

Pianist Fred Kaplan, bassist Larry Taylor and drummer Richard Innes are also expert at reproducing a sound straight out of the Southside of Chicago, circa 1950.

The session moves for the most part at an ambling, unhurried gait, as if the players are more interested in savoring the moment than in pressing to make an impression on the marketplace.

But when things get lively on jumping numbers such as “Shake Your Boogie” and “Caldonia,” the fun is in hearing Fats fly in tandem with an answering harmonica or piano.

His playing is vibrant throughout, characterized by a rich, grainy tone and a knack for adding exploratory embellishments and wry commentary without swerving from the path the ensemble is taking.

Lots of hot guitarists, Fats included, can grab you with their solos. What ultimately is most impressive here is the way in which he gets you to listen to his rhythm playing and marvel at the care, alertness and pleasure that go into virtually every stroke of his guitar pick.

He refuses to sacrifice any musical moment to routine and finds a way to express his personality without stepping on his talented buddies or distorting their agreed-upon framework.

The liner notes, written by Al Blake, could have been a lot better. They cover some biographical basics, but Blake’s recollections of the recording itself are puffed full of pompous platitudes and generalizations about the band’s artistic aims and devoid of anecdotes or reflections that might illuminate Hollywood Fats’ personality and say something about his life and times.

** 1/2 Candida “Spring” (vinyl single)

Zion Records Candida is the latest vehicle for Tim Swenson, the veteran Long Beach rocker who previously fronted the bands Lunch Box and Drink Deep.

Swenson’s hallmarks, over-the-top passion and large musical gestures, define this 45 r.p.m. release. The A-side, “Spring,” is a noisy eruption addressed to a self-destructive lover. Candida works a good deal of drama into the song, starting fast and kicking into an even higher gear as Swenson’s howled vocal turns from anguished coaxing to just plain anguished. It’s a pretty good bit of psychodrama.

“Autumn,” the flip-side, is slower, more stately, with some Jesus & Mary Chain-like applications of guitar distortion. Swenson conveys a double-edged sense of anger and loving regret as he watches a love slip away.

(Available from Zion Records, 3644 E. 5th St., Long Beach, Calif. 90804.)