critics, then each new Airplane album is an exercise in manic depression, hamstrung between the fire of the Kaukonen-Casady combination (one of the great lead/bass juxtapositions of all time, in the context of the Airplane) and the bombastic excesses of the Slick-Kantner axis, who, after all, write most of the songs and have increasingly stamped the group's identity with their own sensibilities, as Marty Balin receded, finally to hightail it for good.

Bark, the first post-Balin album and first really new release in two years, has gotten some bad press and provoked yawns even among some Airplane cognoscenti. Maybe it's just that people built their hopes up so high that Bark could only prove anticlimactic. In fact, it's a fine album that may lack somewhat the musical vehemence of earlier works, but largely checks as well the Kantner-Slick compulsion toward adrenaline filibusters.

As usual, the actual music is delivered wrapped in some of the most dunder-headed drool that ever served as a hip flack-pak. But once you've hacked your way through the thickets of excelsior, the music stands out both from most recent releases and the Airplane's previous work. A cartoon trailer named "War Movie" is Kantner's only real indulgence in the celebrated wheeze against the Big E, although similar themes appear in terms more mature and both musically and lyrically restrained in the quietly powerful "When the Earth Moves Again," and Grace wanks away at her own Righteous Indignariff with "Law Man," wherein a hapless flatfoot has barged in just moments after Grace and Paul or whoever have finished balling and finds this hippie broad Wagnerianly bawling those classically intimidating lines: "My old man's gun has never been fired but there's a first time!" Say one for me, Grace!

The rest of the music mostly finds some graceful detour around such heavyhandedness, although "Pretty As You Feel," by Joey Covington, Casady and Kaukonen, is a banal bit right out of 16 magazine enjoining their own and ladies everywhere against polluting their pores with plastic goo. Some will call it sexist; I just call it mawkish, which is all right because so is much of the best pop music from grooves immemorial, and besides the purely musical part of it is just about as lovely as "Feel So Good" with its lyrics of perfect simplicity and fine falsetto breaks at the ends of the lines.

Th