Mr. T Experience needs fine-tuning to make A-Team

          The Mr. T Experience is a band from Northern California, but its members don't have a fetish for huge gold chains, mohawks and bad 1980s television.

          ''I pity da fool,'' isn't even a lyric in one of its songs.

          On its latest recording, Revenge Is Sweet, And So Are You, the band is preoccupied with love relationships, whether they're over, about to be over or never, ever going to happen. This band falls right in with other acts in the pop-punk genre with all the typical trademarks: loud, repetitive guitar chords, self-effacing lyrics and some deep troubles with girls. It's a good album, but bands like Blink-182 can pull it off a lot better.

          Songs like The Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful, or With My Looks and Your Brains, make some sharp jokes at the expense of the band. At its best, The Experience, or MTX or MTX Starship as it is also known, jangles along integrating the pop feels of the early 1980s with the energy of punk rock. At its worst, like Hell of Dumb, a poor effort at interjecting slide guitar into punk, the band crumbles.

          This poppy record has 16 tracks, the punk equivalent to a double album. It would work well if the band could establish some sort of balance between its punk and pop directions.

Whether the band is singing about a bad relationship or a good one, it all begins to sound the same. Overall, The Mr. T Experience is like 1980s television. You try to keep an interest in what's going on, but you just really can't.

          Final Grade: C