Multi-Reedman Scott Robinson Releases a Vividly Trippy Sun Ra Tribute

When booking a jazz group for a European tour, conventional wisdom is the weirder the better. Audiences there have had a voracious appetite for improvised music for decades. On this side of the pond, some of us forget that American crowds also have a history of being open to creative music: back in the 1960s, Charles Lloyd once sold out the immense New York Ethical Culture Society auditorium for an evening of free improvisation. So the Jazz Standard booking Scott Robinson’s sextet the Heliotones, with drummer Matt Wilson, trombonist Frank Lacy and Gary Versace on piano and organ, might actually be less brave than it is plain old good business sense. They’re there tonight playing the release show for their new Sun Ra-inspired album Heliosonic Toneways, Vol. 1, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM; cover is $25.

Whether you see Sun Ra’s 1965 album Heliocentric Worlds as paradigm-shifting creative jazz or  sixties stoner excess, it’s one psychedelic record. Robinson’s purpose in making the new album was not to replicate it but to use the same unorthodox instrumentation. The result is very entertaining: imagine Esquivel conducting the AACM. It says a lot about this band that they’d have the sense of fun to tackle this at all. The lineup is killer: Sun Ra Arkestra leader Marshall Allen opens it with a ghostly murmur on the original bass marimba that his Saturnine bandleader played on the original album. The rest of the band comprises his longtime Sun Ra bandmate Danny Thompson on tenor sax, with Lacy on trombone, Wilson on drums, trumpeter Philip Harper, bassist Pat O’Leary, saxophonist Yosvany Terry, bass trombonist Tim Newman, drummer Matt Wilson and bass clarinetist JD Parran. It’s hard to figure out what Robinson is playing: one of the world’s most sought-after multi-reedmen, the list of what he doesn’t play is probably a lot shorter than the list of what he does. For verisimilitude, he even brought in recording engineer Richard Alderson, who helmed the original Sun Ra session more than a half-century ago,

The music is best appreciated as a suite, with lots of high/low pairings, conversations that range from the droll to the frantic, and slowly massing, microtonal tectonic shifts. Wilson plays timpani for extra grandeur as the reeds chatter and scatter. There’s the rustle of a passing train and oscillations toward the top of the beanstalk, acid Lynchian swing. indignant squalls over subterranean rumble, a coy wolf whistle or two, innumerable echo effects and valves popping every which way. Warpiness exudes from Allen’s EWI (electronic wind instrument), or a vintage Clavioline synth. Dazed Frankenstein piano anchors reeds fluttering like a clothesline in the wind. It helps to understand this stuff – or try to, anyway – if you close your eyes.  And no going out with this in your earbuds unless you have shades on.

Electric Youth’s Movie Deal Falls Through, But They Get a Great Album Out of It

Today’s Halloween album is the utterly Lynchian soundtrack to a movie that never came out. At least Electric Youth – the duo of  keyboardist Austin Garrick and singer Bronwyn Griffin – got a great album out of it, if no residuals. The total of 23 brief interludes that comprise the score to Breathing – the working title of the film, maybe? – are streaming at Soundcloud. Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic Twin Peaks soundtracks are the obvious prototype: very simple, catchy riffs and artful, slowly developed variations awash in reverb, distant menace everywhere. The production is a lot more lo-fi, with warpy vintage Roland Juno patches substituting for the lush string synth in the Lynch film scores.

The score opens as a contentedly vamping piano nocturne with airy Julee Cruise-type vocals that goes dark suddenly, and an audio horror filim is underway. Where Did You Go nicks not only the vocal style but also a key lyric from the Lynch/Badalamenti playbook, although the music is a lot different: ominously looming faux organ and then dancingly techy new wave. Loopy variations introduce the title theme and then grow more ominous.

It’s Them is the closest approximation of a classic David Lynch theme here, in this case the iconic Twin Peaks title music. From there, cloudy synth echoes it, slowly; a red herring of a lullaby emerges; then Griffin returns with a spare, 80s-tinged goth-pop ballad punctuated by odd poltergeist effects.

A coldly menacing, Brad Fiedel-esque robo-walk, twinkly loops, a forlorn piano reprise of the opening theme and more slowly shifting Twin Peaks ambience lead to a surreal miniature that sounds like it was recorded on the same piano Sonic Youth used for the Daydream Nation album.

A slow, elegant fragment of a pavane, lingering stormcloud atmospherics, a hint of goth-pop, a hypnotic allusion to a Lou Reed classic, and a funhouse mirror return to the opening theme follow in turn. If the track titles reflect the plot, there’s at least one particularly tragic character, and the cast eventually end up somewhere between Britain and France in the Chunnel, where the dark truth finally comes out. Sure sounds like a great movie!

Epic Lynchian Jazz at Barbes Last Night

Covering music as iconic as the Twin Peaks soundtrack is playing with fire. Last night at Barbes, it was as if guitarist Tom Csatari said, “Fire walk with me!” and his nine-piece band Uncivilized could’t wait to follow him into the flames. It was less an inferno than the slowly gathering menace of a prairie burn – Angelo Badalementi’s David Lynch film scores are all about suspense and distant dread. And it was an awful lot of fun to find out just where this unpredictable crew would take those themes.

They opened with the Twin Peaks title theme. From the first few lingering notes of Csatari’s guitar, it was obvious that they weren’t going to play it completely straight-up, considering that he was already staking out territory around the famous, ominous, two-note opening riff. The genius of Badalaenti’s score is that he uses very simple ideas for his variations for all the femme fatales, wolves in sheeps’ clothing and resolute boy scout detectives. If only for a second, any of them could be pure evil. In that sense, the music perfectly matches Lynch’s esthetic.

Yet as much further out as Csatari and the band took this material, they also stuck pretty closely to the melody and the changes. This was hardly generic postbop jazz with halfhearted alllusions to the tunes and solos around the horn.

And Uncivilized are the least generic jazz group in New York. One of Csatari’s favorite devices is to swing and sway his way up to a big crescendo where the four-horn frontline can shiver and flurry, more or less – sometimes a lot less – in unison. They did that here a lot, as well as messing up the rhythm a little with a couple of what sounded like momentary free interludes over drummer Rachel Housle’s floating swing.

There are some great players in this band, but she was the biggest hit with the crowd, as dynamic as she was subtle – and she’s very subtle. Starting out with a suspenseful thud with her mallets, she muted her snare with a scarf, went to sticks and then brushes, using the trebliest parts of the kit for rat-a-tat riffs and hits in all the least expected places. Can anybody say “DownBeat Critics’ Poll Rising Star, 2017?”

Bassist Nick Jozwiak bobbed and bounced like a human slinky behind his upright, playing terse, rubbery rock riffs bolstered by the occasional looming chord. Guitarist Julian Cubillos shadowed Csatari with a subtlety to rival Housle, particularly when the bandleader was playing with a slide for a hint of extra deep-woods menace. Keyboardist Dominic Mekky sent starry electric piano wafting through the mist in lieu of Badalamenti’s big-sky string synth orchestration, while the horns – flutist Tristan Cooley, alto saxophonist Levon Henry, tenor saxophonist Kyle Wilson and bass clarinetist Casey Berman – built a fluttery, gauzy sheen.

They reached toward the macabre stripper tune inside The Bookhouse Boys, played a tantalizing, single haphazardly uneasy verse of Laura  Palmer’s theme and then found unexpected grit – and a Pink Panther – in Audrey Horne’s theme.

Singer Ivy Meissner joined the band to deliver Julee Cruise’s Nightingale as well as Questions in a World of Blue, opting for soul-infused plaintiveness rather than trying to be the girl at the very bottom of the well. Meissner also sang Shelby, a noir-tinged soul ballad from her excellent debut album from last year. In between, she suddenly disappeared: it turned out that she’d taken a seat on the floor amidst the band.

Additionally, Csatari led the group through a handful of his own enigmatically careening pastoral jazz numbers, including a couple of somewhat restrained “stomps.” Most of what this band plays sounds as if it’s completely improvised, but it’s likely that most of it is actually composed, testament to how fresh Csatari’s charts are. No voicing is ever in constant, traditional harmony with the rest of the group, which enhances the suspense as much as it it opens up the floor for more interesting conversations than most bands dream of starting.

Csatari’s next gig is with Meissner on Nov 13 at 7 PM at Footlight Bar in Ridgewood. And fans of Twin Peaks and deep noir should also check out Big Lazy, who play their monthly Friday night show at Barbes on Nov 3 at 10 PM.

The Darkest, Most Magical Hours of Last Weekend’s 24-Hour Raga Marathon

Arguably the most stunning moment at last weekend’s 24-hour raga marathon staged by the Brooklyn Raga Massive happened at about 6:30 in the morning. Sarod player Camila Celin was about halfway into a relatively rare late-night raga, choosing her spots with grace and restraint. Before her set, she’d told the audience – most of them sprawled out on the floor – that this wasn’t the first time she’d played a show after staying up all night. She marveled at the kind of life-changing “wedge of light” a performer can access when running on fumes and no sleep. Meanwhile, tabla player Hiren Chate provided kinetic, intricate contrast while Celin hung back, eyes closed, clearly in the place she’d wanted to find.

Then Chate responded to a couple of gently bending sarod riffs with a sudden, steady stream of emphatic eighth notes. Beyond simple contrast, tabla players simply don’t do that. Celin smiled but didn’t respond immediately – the crowd had to wait until she picked up the pace from a lingering poignancy to a tersely triumphant crescendo out.

That wasn’t the only deliciously unexpected moment during prime time. Because the Indian raga repertoire is associated with specific times of day, the marathon offered a rare opportunity to see material that’s seldom performed, especially here in the U.S. So the wee hours were especially enticing, even with the question of whether there would be trains to get the audience there (as it turned out, there basically weren’t). For those who might wonder what after-hours bar would stay open after daybreak to get the rest of this show in, all this happened at the downstairs auditorium at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea.

Through the rest of the night and into the morning, there was imaginative interplay, unorthodox instrumentation and innovative arrangements of centuries-old melodies, which makes sense considering that the Brooklyn Raga Massive’s agenda is to take Indian classical music to new places. The heavy hitters they’d brought in from India played during the day: this was the kids’ table, the place all the big paradigm shifts are going to come from.

Alto saxophonist Aakash Mittal’s Awaz Trio played the 4 AM set, which was all about camaraderie and calm, purposeful exploration. Guitarist Rez Abbasi – the marathon’s most marathon performer- took his time with lingering, frequently uneasy lines while Mittal wove flurries of postbop jazz, then the two would switch roles, giving each other plenty of space. Meanwhile, drummer Alex Ritz used the whole of the kit, slicing and dicing tabla riffs on his snare or his hardware. It was a prime example of how fertile terrain Indian music can be for great creative musicians.

Trumpeter Aaron Shragge was the first to get a wee-hours raga, often characterized by the biting, chromatic confluence of Indian music and the Middle East. He began his set with an uneasily modulated shakuhachi solo before Abbasi joined him, again alternating between similarly tremoloing, terse, moody phrases and more complex clusters. Switching to trumpet, Shragge hinted at a fanfare – or a call to arms – but never quite went there, leveraging the suspense with Amir ElSaffar-class intensity.

As the first rays of sun beamed gently on the horizon, bansuri flutist Eric Fraser and tabla player Ehren Hanson evoked friendly birdsong and then a warmly cantabile, legato greeting to the day. As the Sunday sun rose in the sky, santoor player Deepal Chodhari spun perfectly executed, endlessly circling phrases while tabla player Shiva Ghoshal chose his spots: it was the reverse image of what Celin and Chate had done a couple of hours earlier. There seemed to be more original composition in her hour onstage: cell-like Philip Glassine phrases and a long, Japanese-tinged interlude. There was still an hour to go after that, but these days, a New Yorker has to seize every moment available while the trains are actually running.

The Brooklyn Raga Massive, whose rotating cast of members includes most of these artists, play every Wednesday at Art Cafe, 884 Pacific St.(at Washington Ave) in Ft Greene; cover is $15, and the closest train is the 2 to Bergen St. This week’s show, on Nov 1 at 8:30 PM features singer Vignesh Ravichandran with violinist Bala Skandan and mridungam player Sriram Raman, followed by the Massive’s legendary jam session. You never know who’s going to turn up.

Phil Ochs – A Halloween Appreciation

What’s more Halloween than a guy who killed himself? Phil Ochs arguably left the planet as his era’s greatest English-language songwriter. But where his old pal and arch-rival Bob Dylan was still cranking out albums – at that moment, the uneven if imaginatively Romany-flavored Desire – Ochs’ career had stalled years before. He never got past a massive creative block and the damage to his vocal cords from a 1973 mugging in Tanzania, dead three years later at 36 after a long downward spiral.

But he left a body of work arguably greater than what Dylan had accumulated to that point. Where Dylan had invented psychedelic folk, Ochs’ mid-60s albums Tape From California and Pleasures of the Harbor took an extremely successful turn into 20th century classical music and art-song. His populist relevance, catchy tunesmithing, clever wordplay and innumerable levels of meaning were every bit as formidable as Dylan’s. And Ochs’ 1968 album Rehearsals For Retirement remains the most harrowingly detailed, metaphorically foreshadowed musical suicide note ever written.

So there’s no lack of irony that the opening track on the recently released Live in Montreal 10/22/66, streaming at Spotify, is Cross My Heart – as in, “Cross my heart, and I hope to live.”

As is the case with pretty much every artist these days, there are innumerable Ochs concert recordings bouncing around, most of them pretty dodgy. This lavish solo acoustic set from a part of the world where Ochs played some of his best shows is a soundboard recording, but a very good one. And the setlist is sublime – it’s as close to a definitive solo acoustic Ochs album as there is.

“You always come back, if only to yourself,” he muses between songs early in the show. Right off the bat, alienation and disillusion are front and center. “The answer is limbo and the harvest will be hard,” he sings in the otherwise much more optimistic, Britfolk-tinged Song of My Returning.

Serendipitously, it seems that most of Ochs’ between-song commentary was recorded as well, and he’s at the top of his surrealistic, sardonic game. He introduces a nimbly fingerpicked take of The Bells – his setting of the Edgar Allen Poe poem – with a joke about how Poe’s work has been banned from classrooms. “The word was tintinnabulation – they couldn’t find it in the dictionary, so they assumed it was LSD.” And his sly introduction to the metaphors of Cops of the World is pretty priceless.

All of Ochs’ richly worded lit-rock novelty hits are here: Outside of a Small Circle of Friends, Miranda, and The Party. As with a lot of the songs here, they actually rock a lot harder than in the albums’ far more ornate parlor-pop arrangements. As you would expect from a show from this point in time, the set is light on Ochs’ early, more prosaic, folkie material. We get the plainspoken ballad Joe Hill – a salute to the Utah labor leader executed for a crime he didn’t commit – as well as a defiant I Ain’t Marching Anymore, a low-key, knowing take of There But For Fortune, I’m Gonna Say It Now – the one number here that hasn’t aged well – and the encore, the cynically spot-on if rather obvious broadside Chaplain of the War.

Beyond the fact that the lyrics really jump out at you, what’s most striking is how strong a guitarist Ochs is. He toys with his strum, opening Flower Lady with a Like a Rolling Stone quote; as vivid ad verdant as Lincoln Mayorga’s piano is on the album version, this is might be even better. And his flatpicking in the more traditionally-oriented numbers is fast and fluid.

Yet as funny and insightful as Ochs is here, torment runs deep. “Portrait of the pain never answers back,” he sings nonchalantly in Flower Lady. A little later on, in an especially epic take of Crucifixion – his JFK assassination parable – it’s “Do you have a portrait of the pain?”

“The hour will be short for leisure on the land,” he reminds in Pleasures of the Harbor, the allusively grisly if elegant account of a sleazy seaside hookup and its aftermath. “The lonely in disguise are clinging to the crowd.” Shades are drawn at pivotal moments in three separate songs. On record, the sarcasm and angst in I’ve Had Her are muted: here, they practically scream.

The real revelation is an early version of Doesn’t Lenny Live Here Anymore, which would become the understatedly shattering centerpiece of Rehearsals For Retirement. Ochs introduces it as “A study in levels of depression.” It’s a work in progress, in straight-up 4/4 rather than the slinky 6/8 album version, its doomed narrative a little different this time out:

Fiddler takes a sniff and picks up the fiddle
As you race from wall to wall, stumble down in the middle
And you’re torn apart
No lower point to start
And you feel you’d like to steal a happy heart

And while this album is a period piece, student protestors around the world still get shot. People still go to jail for weed. And in the Silicon Valley slavers’ gig economy, mentions of plaques in union halls may be quaint – but also a painful reminder that eternal vigilance is no less the price of liberty than it was in 1966.

Revisiting a Heavy Psych Milestone by Electric Citizen

Today’s Halloween album is Higher Time by Electric Citizen, streaming at Bandcamp. One of the few female-fronted heavy psych bands, the Cincinnati group’s 2016 second album is the band’s best and heaviest so far.

It opens with the uneasy gallop of the gloomy, regret-infused opening track, Crux, Andrew Higley’a organ doubling Ross Dolan’s distorted guitar lines, up to a bluesy guitar solo on the way out. If Tony Iommi had stuck with Jethro Tull through Aqualung and had convinced Ian Anderson to take a backseat to a charismatic woman, Devil’s in the Passing Time might have been the result. Likewise, if Blondie and Sabbath had a bastard child, it would be Evil – the Electric Citizen song, that is.

Frontwoman Laura Dolan’s Ozzy-on-oxy vocals float over the galloping fuzztone blast in Ghost up to a a couple of fryolator organ breaks. Likewise, her achingly bluesy bends elevate Golden Mean above the legions of well-intentioned but derivatively riffing Sabbath imitators. The album’s title track blends swirl and crunch through a punishing attack that disintegrates to an echoey haze; a bittersweet guitar solo reignites everything.

Heavy blues riffage fuels Misery Keeper, which the band takes on a doublespeed sprint midway through before drummer Nate Wagner gets some bludgeoning tradeoffs going with the guitar. The band’s frontwoman gets philosophical over the crashing, slow hammering chords of Natural Law: everything is a dialectic, up to the careening chaos of the twin-tracked guitar solo out.

Social Phobia throws a savage riff or two back in the direction of a classic from Sabbath’s first album, anchored by Randy Proctor’s fat, distorted bass; it’s also the point where the guitar finally cuts loose with some supersonic blasts. The album’s final cut is Two Hearted Woman: imagine the early MC5 with a woman out front. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if metal bands would give up the cartoonish pigsnorting for the kind of vocals that Laura Dolan does here? Wouldn’t it be cool if other guitarists took a cue from this band, made their solos count for something and didn’t waste notes?

Heaters Swirl Through Deep Space to South Williamsburg

Heaters have been through a lot of changes over the last couple of years. Their 2015 debut, Holy Water Pool, was a reverb-iced, dark psychedelic rock treat. Baptistina, from last year, drifted toward a more hypnotic Brian Jonestown Massacre post-Velvets expanse.  The group’s latest album, Matterhorn – due up at Bandcamp at the end of the month –  completes the shift into spacerock, an extended suite in the same vein as what King Gizzard were doing before that band went Middle Eastern and microtonal.Heaters have a gig tomorrow night, Oct 29 at around 8:30 at Baby’s All Right. Careeningly intense “occult blues” bandleader Breanna Barbara opens the night at 7:30; cover is $12.

The new album opens with a twinkling, oceanically propulsive diptych. The rhythm goes almost motorik as the song goes on, frontman/guitarist Nolan Krebs’ vocals awash in echoey layers of guitar: the Church gone way over the Milky Way. There’s so much reverb that the chord-chopping intensity of the trick ending becomes deceptively muted – the band are working much harder than it seems.

Likewise, Black Bolt is assembled around a popular paperbound Beatles riff, echoing and pulsing over drummer Joshua Korf’s scampering beat. Bronze Behavior, with its long, droning intro and low, looming ambience, is practically a dub version,guitarist/bassist Andrew Tamlyn moving to the front. Then the band picks up the pace again with Kingsday, a more concise variation on the theme. This band get an awful lot of mileage out of what’s mostly a one-chord jam.

Finally a new theme appears in the glittering, quickly pulsing Hochelaga, repeaterbox guitar in perfect sync with the skittish drums, a cheerily warped sunshine pop guitar melody chiming and then reaching for an unexpected majesty. With its resonant clang and echo over Ticket to Ride syncopation, Pearls has the feel of an outtake from the Church’s Blurred Crusade album. The closing cut, Seance – a nod to another 1980s Church album, maybe? –  brings the record full circle with its vast sweep, express-track groove and unexpected dynamic shifts. Crank this and drift away to a better place.

Playful, Entertaining Solo Cello Improvisation and an Album Release Show in Queens by Daniel Levin

There are plenty of cellists who can jam, but Daniel Levin is as fearless and sometimes devastatingly intense as an improviser can get. He has an irresistibly fun new  album of solo improvisation, Living, streaming at Bandcamp and an album release show coming up this Saturday night, Oct 28 on a killer twinbill with guitarmeister Brandon Seabrook‘s pummeling two-drum Die Trommel Fatale at Holo, 1090 Wyckoff Ave. in Ridgewood. The show starts at 8, the club’s web page is dead and nobody is saying publicly who’s playing when, but it doesn’t really matter. Seabrook and Levin cap it off with what could be a seriously volcanic duo set. Cover is $10; take the L to Halsey St.

The album’ first track, Assemblage, is a lot of fun.  Shivers, pops, a monkey barking, a motorcycle revving, a tree being felled with a saw and a wolf whistle or two finally lead to steps to a door.

Generator is full of squiggles, furtive squirreliness. a few microtonal variations that bounce off a low pedal note and a droll interlude that could be breakfast in a coffee shop.

Baksy-buku goes from whispers to screams, then back, with an animated one-sided conversation. Levin can mimic pretty much everything on his four strings without any electronic effects.

The Dragon, an eleven-minute, amusingly detailed epic, focuses on what could be the prep work for fire-breathing devastation. These tracks are all close-miked with plenty of reverb, so every flick of the bow or tap of the fingers on the body of the cello is picked up. Levin uses this trope everywhere, especially in Symbiotic, which rises toward the kind of frenetic sawing he’s capable of generating before the piece fades to spacious warps and blips.

The album winds up with the whispery, rustling Mountain of Butterflies. Levin’s relentless dedication to evincing unexpected sounds out of his axe ought to be heard beyond the audience of cellists and bass players trying to figure out how he does it. And it makes a good soundtrack for a haunted house.

Incendiary, Siouxie-esque Dark Guitar Rock From Touched By Ghoul

Today’s Halloween album is Murder Circus, released by ferociously dark, punkish Chicago band Touched By Ghoul last year and streaming at Bandcamp.

From the first few stomping beats from Paige Sandlin’s kickdrum, Alex Shumard’s uneasily rising bass and the roaring chromatic chords of guitarists Angela Mullenhour and Andrea Bauer, the album’s opening track, B.A.C.M., could be a lost gem from Siouxsie’s first album. Mullenhour’s insistent, wounded vocals are more evocative of the goth-punk icon’s raw, early style, before she developed her signature microtonal style.

The rest of the album careens between eras. The second cut, Whores is a mashup of Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth and early Siouxsie – or the Grasping Straws in particularly assaultive mode. Western Child has a skittish downstroke guitar pulse and a wrathful vocal straight out of Hong Kong Garden.

Rapevan has the same kind of haphazard drive and dirty Bush Tetras guitars, with a tasty scream from Mullenhour. She really pulls out all the stops with her vocals in Immaculate Consumption, which unexpectedly veers from punk thrash to skronk and then back.

“I was lost in a graveyard,” Mullenhour muses as Nice Corpse, a blend of early Public Image Ltd. and classic-era SY gets underway. With its artfully cynical variations on a familiar circus theme, the album’s title track is a real gem. The final cut is the brief, stomping Adios!, awash in a deliciously toxic, swirling cloud of guitar reverb. This makes you wonder what other treats this group have up their collective sleeves. 

The Hooten Halllers Bring Their Funny, Edgy Southern Soul and Americana to Town This Weekend

Columbia, Missouri band the Hooten Hallers play purist southern soul and Americana with a sense of humor. On one hand, the growling baritone sax and grooves are totally retro. On the other hand, their songs are completely in the here and now. If there’s any group who can get the gaggles of tourists stuffing their faces at Hill Country to shut up and listen, it’s this crew. They’re there this Saturday night, Oct 28 at 10 PM and then at the restaurant’s much more listener-friendly upstairs room at the downtown Brooklyn branch on Monday the 30th at 9. Let’s hope the PA there is working because it’s been a mess lately.

The Hooten Hallers’ latest album  is streaming at Spotify. As the opening track, Charla, gets underway, frontman/guitarist John Randall rasping away over Kellie Everett’s ever-present, smoky bari sax, it could be the latest in a long line of Dr. John ripoffs. But as this twisted tale set in Lupus, Missouri (population 29) unwinds, it’s clear it’s not. Somebody rolls “The biggest smoke I’ve ever seen…I’ll pas out on the floor and sleep until the  morning light.” And it gets better from there.

The second track, Dig, is a biting minor-key blues that goes after the kind of money-grubbing smalltown boss we’ve all had to deal with at some point. Ryan Koenig, moonlighting from Pokey LaFarge’s brilliant pan-Americana band, bolsters the snarling guitar edge in Further From Shore, a tale of drifting a little too far out. Knew You’d Come Around is more optimistic, a wry stoner’s attempt at seducing a girl with soul food and booze.

Rhythm and Blues is a Texas boogie as the Sideshow Tragedy might do it, with the bari sax (of course), rippling minor-key blues harp and a little ghoulabillly. Drummer Andy Rehm’s leadfoot stomp propels Albatross, a noir blues stomp that wouldn’t be out of place in the Legendary Shack Shakers catalog, spiced with some creepily spiraling electric piano.

Everett’s devious sax takes centerstage in the go-go instrumental Garlic Dream. The band hint at doom metal in Gravity, a terrified stoner’s realization of the way objects with varying degrees of mass interact in the cosmos.

The album’s most epic track is Scrapper’s Lament, an amped-up oldschool country ballad, snide testament to the fact that one man’s trash could be something else completely. The album winds up with Staying Away From Joe, an unfashionably uncaffeinated country soul tune spiced with mandolin and fiddle. You’ve heard the tempest in a teaspoon about film and tv characters needing to be likable? It’s hard to imagine anybody not liking this band – anyone with a sense of humor, anyway. And they go well with waffles at two in the morning – it’s true!