TEARS (Backstreet/MCA):: Anybody out there recall Charlie and the Pep Boys’ bicentennialyear debut LP, Daddy’s Girl, that Nils Lofgrenproduced A&M set with Charles Woods Pearson’s neo-Jagger lip moves, and one of the most bizarre cover photos ever? A classic LP, to be sure,,but regrettably not classic enough to lift the group out of their Washington,, D.C., barband grind, where they’ve had to continue changing with the times just to hold their own. So with a few personnel and wardrobe substitutions (Pearson looks decades younger in his shorter hair, and ultra-1979 red violet & blue green threads), C. & the P.B.$ are back as “Tears,” a self-defined new wave-cum-white R&B outfit. Crypto-punks of a lost era become half-hearted punks of an already-fading moment. The new songs are too long for real power-pop punch, but the stubborn R&B intrusions also suggest discopop, crossover potential. Does Un,ca Mick know about this?

INTERVIEW—Big Oceans (Virgin)::And the English now wave beat goes on. You got your Bram T. and your Records and your Yachts all committed to heart by now? Okay, get ready for another ellpee’s worth of thoughtful pop, from Interview, pop-pulsatingly packaged in a nifty, brightedge-abstract jacket like F/ag(but no J.T. inside). Interview seem to have matriculated in the Britops’ eternal art school just last week, per their intriguingly intellectual songs: e.g., “hart crfane in mexic'o”'and “academies to anger”. Interview sing and play lower-case, too, typesetting their pre-snotty lyrics with the low-key drive of an E. Costello before and after science class. As the I’s have it: “fire island’s a warning” (of direr straits than the Village Peeps found there, anyhoo). R.R.