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**1/2 Saliva

EVERY SIX SECONDS

(Island)

On their major-label debut, Memphis’s Saliva show an impressive knack for old-fashioned, unabashedly commercial pop metal. Singer Josey Scott heads out West to chase yesteryear’s rock-and-roll dreams on “Hollywood,” a strummy first-person update of Poison’s “Fallen Angel” minus the unhappy ending. Pretty electric-guitar squiggles and Enuff Z’Nuff vocal harmonies surface on harder-rocking tracks like “Musta Been Wrong” and the album’s first single, “Your Disease.”

But the disc also betrays a heavy rap-metal influence, and that doesn’t suit the band nearly as well. Like most of today’s rock-rappers, Scott sounds as if he’d learned how to rhyme directly from Fred Durst, without ever bothering to check out any actual üip-hop. He does fire off a couple of good shots on the one pure rap-metal track, “Click Click Boom” (“My mom and dad weren’t perfect/But still you don’t hear no cryin’-ass bitchin’ from me/Like there seems to be on everybody’s CD”), but the rap verses of “Your Disease,” in particular, sound forced next to its soaring, near-psychedelic chorus. Still, Saliva have a stronger sense of songcraft and less bad feeling than a lot of their contemporaries. They just need to pay more attention to their strengths and less to the charts.

— Sean Richardson