The Rumour took their name--or so I've always supposed--from the final song on Stage Fright; they were assembled to play Robbie & Co. to Graham Parker's pugnacious Dylanism. Like the Band, thew were hard-knocks professionals who had assembled a roiling mixture of unfashionable earth-tone music--r&b, country, early rock-&-roll. Max, the Rumour's 1977 Mercury LP, fine-tuned the resemblance--the elbow-snapping cant of Stephen Goulding's drumming, for instance, recalled Levon Helm. There was a little extra punch to the backbeat, a joyous, yelping strain in the vocals; guitar accents zoomed up through Bob Andrews's rhythmic keyboards shapr as shrapnel. The tunes were catchy and a little stiff, like outtakes from Cahoots; the Rumour had assimilated the Band's tone and technique, but lacked the transforming sense of place that helped them mold earthy detail and American myth. To be the Band's true equivalent, they would have had to be as quintessentially British as the Band were American; that sort of insight just can't be imparted.

Instead, they have claimed all Europe as their bailiwick. The Rumour's new Arista album--a love-hate flirtation with the Continent--finds them day-tripping through musical postures like worldweary teenagers on a parentless spree. Frogs Sprouts (Brussels--get it?) Clogs & Krauts is a collection as diffuse as the Common Market; junk-food pop singles nudge up next to Brave New World marches. But as the Rumour self-consciously distinguish themselves from the host of other pub-rock graduates, they wind up just looking like musical tourists.

There's a certain braggadoccio in recording Martin Belmont and Nick Lowe's Leaders ("It ain't a good time fo the leaders/For the type at the top it ain't nothing like fun") on an album so conspicuously devoid of leadership; if the "leaderless" Rockpile is a nuclear family, the Rumour is a bunch of mutually indulgent siblings. Bob Andrews, pushed into the background on Squeezing Out Sparks by the increased emphasis on the guitars of Belmont and Brinsley Schwarz, is most conspicuously pampered; from its first few seconds, when an Autobahn-style synthesizer leads into Emotional Traffic, Frogs is glutted with keyboards.

That's more than random imbalance; it undercuts the real strengths of the band. With Parker, the Rumour's work is all about enforced control; it matches the frustration expressed in his lyrics. They build up tension, not exuberance. On Frogs, the synthesizer textures obscure subtle rhythms, dynamics, the sinews of the band; guitar lines appear from under the noise of such songs as Emotional Traffic like the muscles of an athlete gone to seed. Andrews is more successful when he's restrained; the bouncing-marble piano he used on I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass complements Leaders like pearls on basic black--familiar, but classically stylish.

The Rumour's mistake is in thinking that the sum of their individual quirks is a coherent personality for the band; it isn't. Such things don't necessarily emerge naturally--and one of the problems of a leaderless band is that it may require a lot of wrangling to hammer one out. In the Rumour, by contrast, there's the sort of complacent passivity that allows potentially good songs--like Loving You (Is Far Too Easy)--to get destroyed by their arrangements, and doesn't intrude when someone--no matter who--suggests a bush-league sound-effects ending for a (potentially good) songs like Euro. Similarly, there's a disturbing undercurrent of self-centered passivity in the Rumour's lyrics; they abnegate responsibility, urge action on others, publicize their desires and wait for attention (as in Frozen Years's odd twist on Heroes. "Maybe heroes, if they could win/We'd be free from the frozen years". In Emotional Traffic, they even advise avoiding, rather than compromising with, other people's hostilities.

Just one song on Frogs counters this lassitude--"This unhappiness does not have to be"--and it's also the only song on the album with musical muscle. The pumping, rough-edged cover of Rick Danki's Tired of Waiting doesn't quite redeem the album--but maybe it's a first step toward bringing it all back home.