Talk about rock-and-roll extravagance: double album? Lots of strings? Hah! Smashing Pumpkins ain't got nuthin' on Rocket from the Crypt. San Diego's premier garage-soul-punk-pop band (prolific bastards that they are) top Rolling Stone's cover kids by an EP and a couple of singles this year. In April they put out a 10-inch on Sympathy for the Record Industry. In August came the full-length, vinyl-only Hot Charity on their own Perfect Sound label. And Scream, Dracula, Scream! (Interscope), released eight weeks later, boasts a full 11-piece string complement, a handful of horns, tubular bells, and what at times sounds like punk rock's first full choral ensemble.

Although Hot Charity is the lo-fi garage record - grounded in hard-rocking Stonesy blooze, pumped full of peppy get-on-up staccato horn encouragement, and suffused with Mowtownish R&B pop flourishes - it's got its own adventuresome spirit. "Feathered Friends" is a sort of condensed, lo-fi Meat Loaf tune, full of melodramatic lulls and a backing vocal track you'd swear they recorded in the Sistine Chapel. A rhumba piano line and a smattering of Latin percussion turn the punkish "Shucks" into a swank, effervescent blast.

But Charity is ridiculously spare compared to Dracula, an ecstatic show-biz romp that's as far from the stripped-down settings of early RFTC singles as they could afford. It's miles closer to the aesthetics of Las Vegas (or maybe Broadway) than to California punk rock, but there's still plenty of prickly live-to-four-track thrashing, especially on a pressurized "Suit City," a Sabbathy "Fat Lip," and the opening minute-long, (mostly) one-chord "Middle." The best tracks build on the tricks RFTC honed on 1992's Circa: Now! (Headhunter/Interscope): tight, rhythmic coils that burst into expansive choruses, with rich undertones of baritone sax and late-breaking motifs sneaking in the back door. Even more than Circa: Now!, Dracula is an album you'll remember for its choruses. "Ball Lightning" cracks like Minneapolis power pop until the chorus billows and soars, complete with fey "doo-doo-do-whee-hoo" back-ups, and then lunges into a fuzz-plunged jolt of a bridge.

Lead songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Speedo (also of Drive Like Jehu) has a gravelly blue-collar growl that's incapable of insincerity even when he's just kidding. On "Used," the album's kinetic superproduction explodes in syrupy, faux Grand Ole Opry harmonies, slashes of vamping strings, and tinkling xylophone; and yet Speedo stands tall in the pocket with a doo-wop vocal and sentimental coming-of-age lyric.

If you're gonna write an anthem, you might as well go all the way. "Young Livers" opens with bells that could be tolling the end of school or Christmas or maybe a funeral; it peaks with a downward spiraling riff over rising multi-voice harmonies that's practically medieval. "Hey, we're all right," blurts Speedo. "We're just lazy/And outta sight/The young livers rule tonight." The suspension of disbelief that allows that kind of teen spirit has been pretty much off-limits since Nirvana made condescending to teenage angst seem like the flimsiest of façades.

But it's basically the same sentiment that RFTC share with garage-punk underground types like Blacktop, '68 Comeback, and the Ohio punk scene - a longing for simpler days (the mid '50s as opposed to the mid '70s) when all the kids were all right, when rock and roll was young, loud, and snotty - free from cliquish rules or noxious highbrow influences, rebellious just for being there, and dangerous for the thrill of it. RFTC's Misfits fetish has as much to do with that band's feel for punked-out '50s greaser rock as with the horror metaphors that Glenn Danzig used as the ultimate outlaw form. When Speedo croons the line "We ride," stretched out and repeated, it's as if the only place he'd ever be happy is at the head of Marlon Brando's pack of motorcycle toughs, and the only alternative were the one offered by the militant shout-along chorus behind him: "On a rope, on a rope, got me hangin' on a rope."

The Dracula opener, "Middle," repeats one question over and over: "Are you stuck in the middle?" For a band releasing one album independently and one on a major label, recording at both ends of the production spectrum, and bouncing back and forth between soul and punk, you might think Speedo's pointing the finger at himself. But after you've made it through Dracula . . . after Rocket from the Crypt stretch the meaning of rock and roll to include anything they can think up and fit on tape, from ELO-derived schmaltz to "Come See, Come Saw," which imagines the Temptations' "Get Ready" as rewritten for white-boy aggro frustration . . . it's clear the question is for us, and that he's offering us a solution. It means all bets are off.