ROBYN HITCHCOCK AND THE EGYPTIANS -- Queen Elvis (A & M)

Robyn's new album is almost like what happens when you throw some dark jeans in with your washload and some of the dye runs all over your underwear. Sometimes you get a really fantastic pair of unique boxers.

The running dye on this LP comes from guitarist Peter Buck, who is trying to avoid being washed up as the guitarist of R.E.M., whose current road show opens with Hitchcock. Hmm.

The twang of old Reckoning days comes back on several of the songs, including Robyn's current single "Madonna of the Wasps," a curious play on words.

Buck takes the credit for "discovering" Hitchcock when he was a member of the Soft Boys in 1982, but Hitchcock, who refused to "cut hair, fake working class accents or devise an image," could pick up little momentum.

Discouraged with the rock scene, which he saw as being "in the grip of synthetic, technological image-conscious music," Hitchcock devised his own brand of busts against the typical arsty-fartsy music (like R.E.M.?) by composing titles like Wading Through A Ventilator and A Can of Bees.

His first effort with the Egyptians was Fegmania!, which led to Element of Light and, of course, the hit "My Wife and My Dead Wife."

In 1985, Hitchcock said he "collapsed in San Francisco after operation," and "limped on to Texas and gave up. Everybody wept. Failed to support R.E.M. as a consequence."

Last year, after Hitchcock saw his second dead chicken, he recorded Globe of Frogs which featured his hit "Balloon Man," and his new album now earned him the right to open for R.E.M.

His wit is ever-present on this album, especially in a story about the burial of a dog on the album's slipcover. It sounds like it should be read by a gypsy-hippie with hallucinogens in tow. His song lyrics are also bizarre, as in "The Devil's Coachman": "Yesterday, I saw the Devil in the nude, it was embarrassing -- I turned away."

Mind images get even more vivid, as in "Wax Doll:" "If I was man enough, I'd come on your stump." Buck strums on that one, as well.

"Swirling," another Buck track, is as light and airy as a Thomas' English Muffin, and serves to change the pace of the album.

The best song is clearly "One Long Pair of Eyes," which was recorded with live vocals, but the lyrics are too artsy to interpret.

The album also includes a soliloquy about the "Veins of the Queen," another slow epic. Hitchcock simply muses, "The Queen is someone no one really knows. People wonder 'Is Elvis really dead?' Well, is the Queen really alive? Has she ever had an orgasm? Does she write postcards to her friends, or has she ever spent any money in a shop? Does she have an opinion?"

Hitchcock refers to the Beatles quite often in his press releases, and even seems to mimic them in some songs like "Freeze." While not quite a Lennon-McCartney composition, the song has Beatlesque riffs and rhythm. And as the Beatles created Sexy Sadie, Polythene Pam and Lovely Rita Metermaid, Hitchcock brings us the mythology of "Elaine," who knows some kind of justice. And just in case you don't relate to her, he throws in Steve and Ray. You know them, don't you?

But after that song rips at your brain, Hitchcock provides the sometimes watery "Autumn Sea," which is a plain a love song as he ever wrote. "Somewhere in the autumn air, I can smell you everywhere beside me, though your face has disappeared, finally I know I cared for you."

And after the pleas are over, he falls into a cockney mumbling (memories of the Beatles' "Revolution 9") and then back into lyric, then into speech again.

"I like the fact that it goes out of time, which is very deliberate," he wrote in a news release, "Some people can't stand this track, and other people think it's the best. It's the most abrasive track on the record; if my music on the whole is becoming more serene, this is the opposite of that. Every so often, you realize what your tendencies are, and it's a good thing to reverse them."

Hitchcock needed but one more allusion to R.E.M., as he closes the LP out with "Superman," a Helenistic story of a "crunchy little superman" that appeared in a cornflakes box. The verse rhythm is a slow, almost-thrash, but the chorus transfers into the typical college-music melody tempo that Buck undoubtedly has heard a few times before.

The quality musicianship on this album is higher than Hitchcock had attempted before, and the songs are full of rich, esoteric, almost erotic passions and images from a musical Garden of Eden. The blend of tempo and twang are a good credit to the fact that Hitchcock didn't just pass the Buck.