Pop Stars : **** Great Balls of Fire : *** Good Vibrations : ** Maybe Baby : * Running on Empty

VIOLENT FEMMES

“3.” Slash/Warner Bros. ***

In the sprightly song “Dating Days,” head Femme Gordon Gano delivers accounts of both the decline of modern courtin’ and biblical deliverance from demons. A non sequitur? Probably, but then, it’s easy to view the Violent Femmes’ entire oeuvre as one big non sequitur, as Gano continues to mix up sexual tension, violent thoughts, coarse language and (of course) heartfelt Christianity in ways rivalled in this century only by Flannery O’Connor and Prince.

On a relative scale, Gano comes off as a lot saner than the latter and a lot less lucid than the former, but his secular unease in songs like the agoraphobic anthem “World We’re Living In” (with its AIDS reference, “Did you notice a chill in the wind / People are dying just because they had a little”) tends to touch a popular nerve even if his sacred hope might not.

“3,” the Wisconsin trio’s fourth album (and first in three years), is a self-produced, largely acoustic affair--mostly acoustic guitar, bass and brushes on drums churning up a folkabilly storm underneath Gano’s thin, pleading voice. A la previous efforts, it’s funny, menacing and above all truthful--and three out of three ain’t bad.