The opening guitar salvo on "Get Free," the first US single from the Vines' Highly Evolved (Capitol), is a single note bent sharply upward out of tune, a warbling rise followed by a headlong dive. The song is compact (a shade over two minutes) and the chord progression is vaguely familiar; the singer, an Australian by the name of Craig Nicholls, delivers his lyric in an unmistakably Cobainist clenched-teeth howl. There was a time not so long ago when there was such a profusion of groups who sounded like Nirvana that you were apt to be thoroughly sick and contemptuous of them. But 10 years after Nevermind, ripping off Nirvana has come to seem less like crass commercial opportunism and more like a wistful plea for a time when modern rock radio wasn't such a goon-metal bummer.

Exactly when that shift occurred is hard to pin down, but I'd place it sometime after Bush started toying with remixes (1997's Deconstructed), and certainly before 1999, a year that saw the release of Verbena's Into the Pink and Idlewild's 100 Broken Windows (both on Capitol, then still smarting from the defection of Dave Grohl to RCA). The ample critical acclaim and modest album sales achieved by those albums -- Cobainist treatises, both -- seemed to confirm the death of Nirvana-bes as cash-cow material. The Vines have been received warmly here, so it's far too soon to suggest that they won't be huge stars. Either way, when it comes to hearing them on the radio, I don't mind it a bit.

In rock and roll just now, it helps to have a distinctive posture, whether it be detached show-biz cynicism (the Hives), bemused boredom (the Strokes), or childlike naïveté (the White Stripes). The Vines have been the band voted most likely to join this unlikely triumvirate, but they are a sore match -- their unerringly earnestness is a blatant anachronism. Nicholls is a scrawny, disheveled specimen with an unruly perch of stringy brown hair who looks as if he were preparing a nest on his shoulders for an incoming coterie of snipes and sandpipers. When he performs, he makes a big show of sloppiness. A couple months ago, the Vines embarked on a brief promotional tour of small clubs, the kind of quickie jaunt designed to introduce a group to critics, record-store clerks, regional promoters, and other birds of prey. In the small front room of the Paradise, Nicholls was subdued and solemn during their brief set until near the end, when he must have realized, as the audience did, that the performance was missing something essential. In a valiant attempt to up the ante, he lunged across the tiny stage as if he had accidentally strummed his guitar too madly, narrowly but expertly avoided bowling over his bass player, and then collapsed dramatically in a heap. A World Cup referee, had one been in attendance, might have yellow-carded him for simulation.

Highly Evolved is a different kind of simulation -- rock-and-roll albums these days, even those by the Hives and the White Stripes and the Strokes, are as much creations of the recording studio as any late-model hip-hop hit. In Nirvana's day, the use of post-production tweakage to make Nevermind more palatable for radio was a minor scandal; these days, the studio is as likely to be used as a tool for making rock-and-roll recordings sound cruddier than they ought to. (A much nastier version of "Get Free" is currently making the rounds of MP3-trading sites; whether it's better than the album version depends less on your feelings about authenticity than on your taste in white noise.)

A few weeks ago, the Vines returned to the Paradise in Boston, this time playing a sold-out show in the big room. The concert seemed to amount to Nicholls's long, protracted attempt -- ultimately unsuccessful -- to lose his composure. He sings like Kurt Cobain, but he also sings a little bit like Iggy Pop -- a strange combination, because Kurt sang with his mouth clamped shut whereas Iggy sings with his tongue sticking out. When Nicholls sang with his tongue sticking out -- which, unfortunately, was on nearly every song -- he made a sound like the one a chicken makes when it feels a farmer's hands around its neck. He seemed to know only one guitar solo, and it was the one from the Bangles' version of "Hazy Shade of Winter." The band's set preserved the disc's bi-polar rhythm: a rigorous burst of raw power ("Outtatheway!", "Ain't No Room") followed inevitably by a tedious sub-Oasis Britpop ballad. They trotted out their trick Oasis-style cover of OutKast's "Ms. Jackson"; Nicholls didn't attempt anything more than the chorus, but the chorus went on and on. By the end, the problem the singer faces in "Get Free" -- he seeks release and finds none -- seemed all too real, but the song sounded just a bit too thin.

Issue Date: August 9 - 15, 2002