*** 1/2 LOVE/HATE “Blackout in the Red Room” <i> Columbia</i> .<i> Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to five stars (a classic). </i>

If it were 1979, these guys would be wearing skinny ties and doing polite power-pop at Madame Wong’s. If it were 1984, they’d probably have eye shadow and some really catchy Tears for Fears-style synthesizer licks. But it’s 1990, they’re local boys, and the vein in which Love/Hate works is the currently fashionable L.A. “street” sound: the leather, Angst and loud pop hooks you might associate with, say, two out of three hard-rock bands with a video on MTV.

There’s nothing new at this point about a Motley Crue/Guns N’ Roses mix, “rebellious” hard rock by the numbers, sassy innuendo for Sassy teens. The real surprise is that Love/Hate pulls it off so well: Though it lacks the finesse of Junkyard and the snarl of L.A. Guns, “Blackout in the Red Room” might crank harder than any L.A. record of its type since “Appetite for Destruction.”

Why? Love/Hate has riffs: big, lumbering three-chord monsters of the sort that have been deafening teen-agers for decades, the kind that little Bobby tries to imitate on his first, $25 guitar. And the lyrics, when they’re not cryptic, are Ramones-style dumb, massed choruses--”Why do you think they call it dope?/Whoa-o-o, whoa-o-o”--as funny as they are catchy.