Emma Swift’s Blonde on the Tracks – Best Album Title Ever?

If you’re a woman putting out an album of Dylan covers, you can’t do any better than Emma Swift’s Blonde on the Tracks. It’s just as irresistible contentwise as it is titlewise, and it’s streaming at Bandcamp.

As Dylan cover albums go, the gold standard is Mary Lee’s Corvette’s live version of Blood on the Tracks. Until that record came out in 2002, The Byrds Play Dylan was the benchmark for smartly arranged rock versions of songs by the guy who would eventually give us Murder Most Foul. Swift’s record is a mix of both. Take the first track, Queen Jane Approximately. Swift gives the vocals both country twang and hash-oil mist, leaving no doubt what this song’s about. The mix of acoustic and twelve-string guitars behind her is a throwback to the Byrds but with more balanced, digital 21st century production.

The rest of the record is a mix of classics and obscurities. Swift really goes deep into the lyrics in a skeletal but wickedly nuanced take of I Contain Multitudes: recognizing how well this weatherbeaten late-period song is suited to a woman’s voice was a genius move.

It would have been just as brilliant if Swift had put a brass section on the big Frankenstein piano hook in Sooner or Later One of Us Must Know. She doesn’t – in fact, she takes it out completely, going for a spare, hazy atmosphere, which is a letdown, Mining iconic songs like this can be a minefield and in this case it blows up in her face – although the pedal steel is a welcome touch.

Likewise, the wide-angle tremolo guitar and organ really help Swift nail every ounce of angst in Simple Twist of Fate, one of those Blood on the Tracks songs that deserved production this intuitive. Her cover of Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is one of the great WTF moments in rock history, right up there with Carol Lipnik’s symphonic Spanish-language version of Freebird. For what it’s worth, this is an improvement on the original: Swift bails just short of the twelve minute mark and actually manages to give the lyrics some wistfulness.

She goes for counterintuitive again with The Man in Me, the closest thing to genuine Blonde on Blonde here. Lyrically, it’s a throwaway, but the band elevate it beyond the schlockiness of the original. With tasty acoustic/electric contrasts, they’re just as inspired in Going Going Gone, and Swift has fun with a couple of big Patsy Cline-style upward swoops.

She winds up the album with another Blood on the Tracks number, You’re a Big Girl Now: the vocals are an improvement but the flangey faux-70s guitars are not. Dylan fans are going to pick this to death far beyond anything on this page: and every single one of them’s going to want to hear it.

The Year’s Best Americana Triplebill at Hank’s This Thursday Night

The best Americana triplebill of the year so far is happening this March 8 at Hank’s.  Kasey Anderson, whose gritty populist narratives bring to mind a young Steve Earle, opens the night at 8. Eric Ambel, proprietor of the dearly missed Lakeside Lounge and an even more spectacular, surreal guitarist and songwriter – who played lead in Earle’s band back in the day – follows at 9. Cliff Westfall  – whose aphoristic songs and soulful C&W baritone will take you back to 1956 at warp speed – headlines at around 10. Cover is $10.

Westfall, whose album Baby You Win is streaming at his music page. is as strong and memorable a retro songwriter as Pokey LaFarge – no joke. It takes you back to an era of neon-lit jukeboxes, tailfins, beer cans that you could crush in one hand only if you were really strong…and ten-cent drafts. And Westfall matches the honkytonk ambience with innumerable clever musical and lyrical details that fill out the picture. The opening track, It Hurt Her to Hurt Me is sort of Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen with even more clever wordplay, done by Hank Williams with a sizzling electric band behind him. The shuffling title track gives the group a chance to show off everything they’ve got: Scott Metzger’s tasty reverbtoned vintage tube amp sonics, a wry surf riff when least expected, a little Merle Haggard to kick off the song and colorful period vernacular. This guy’s “giving back the Crackerjack box I got from a so-called friend.”

Westfall croons bittersweetly over Charlie Giordano’s rippling honkytonk piano in the sad barroom ballad Til the Right One Comes Along. Then the group channel Orbison over a luscious web of twanging, jangling, echoing guitars in the Lynchian anthem More and More (as in “I think I love you more and more less and less”). With Metzger’s morosely tremoloing guitar solo, it’s a standout among many here.

With its chugging layers of twelve-string guitars – that’s Metzger and Graham Norwood – Off the Wagon is the missing link between Johnny Burnette and the Byrds –  the 1967 psychedelic Byrds, and the 1969 country Byrds as well. “We go together like booze and pills!” Westfall announces; those stampeding, twangy Bakersfield guitar multitracks on the way out are a straight shot of adrenaline.

The worn-out, defeated ballad Hanging On paints a vividly grim picture of a guy who’s just about had it with being strung along. By contrast, the boisterous I’ll Play the Fool comes across as a mashup of Subterranean Homesick Blues Dylan and Buck Owens.

The gorgeously clanging The Man I Used to Be paints a picture of a guy with “a little less size and a lot less wear…dusty 8X10s out in the hall, but I don’t recognize that guy at all.”

“I live in your world since I left my own,” Westfall admits in the sad waltz A Lie If You Must, over Dan Iead’s pedal steel.  “A lie calculated to appease and disarm, tell me what’s self-deception compared to your charms?” Elvis Costello would be proud to have written this one.

The End of the Line, the album’s hardest-rocking track, wouldn’t be out of place on a Wayne Hancock album, right down to that searing Metzger guitar solo midway through. The retro 50s shuffle ballad Sweet Tooth gives Westfall a chance to have fun with food and drug metaphors. The album winds up with similarly sly swamp-rock of The Odds Were Good. You’re going to see this on the best albums of 2018 page at the end of the year.

Rebecca Turner Brings Her Richly Jangly, Anthemic Songcraft Back to the East Village

Songwriter Rebecca Turner earned a devoted following around the turn of the century for her catchy, anthemic blend of janglerock, Laurel Canyon folk-pop and the occasional detour into starker acoustic folk or more ornate psychedelia. In a lot of ways, she represents the vanguard of ex-Brooklynite musicians caught between the very tail end of the cds-and-college-radio era and the age of streaming and vinyl. She puts out albums at her own pace (she’s working on a new one, helmed in the studio by husband/bassist Scott Anthony, recently responsible for remastering the Feelies’ latest vinyl reissues). She also has an 8 PM gig coming up on May 7 at Hifi Bar, the scene of her most recent Manhattan gig.

That was last year, and it was killer. She had a five-piece backing unit for that one including Anthony on bass and Rich Feridun on six-string lead guitar; John Sharples, playing twelve-string, was the band’s not-so-secret weapon. They opened with a backbeat-driven anthem with torrents of lyrics and tantalizingly unresolved chord changes. The Cat That Can Be Alone, she explained, was inspired by an Anita O’Day quote relayed by Love Camp 7’s Dann Baker, something along the lines of “The cat that can be alone is better off than the cat that can’t.” It turned out to be a bouncy Beatlesque number, Turner soaring to the top of her range with a hint of country twang. She and the band wound it up with a tongue-in-cheek segue into the O’Day version of Tenderly.

Turner’s next number was period-perfect Lakeside Lounge rock from around 2000, a mashup of  swaying vintage 70s C&W-tinged with Blonde on Blonde era Dylan, The set hit a peak midway through with a rousingly jangling take of the Byrdsy anthem The Way She is Now, Sharples choosing his spots and leaving them out to glisten in the bar’s low lights.

Another backbeat anthem, That Did It, was part 60s electric Dylan, part Amy Rigby at her jangliest, with a delicious blend of six and twelve-string guitars meshing with Turner’s acoustic. She followed with Idiot, a similarly catchy, wryly propulsive number. A low-key, matter-of-factly fingerpicked take of the ballad Comfort You Up brought the lights down, Erica Smith joining to add lush low harmonies. Then they picked up the pace again with the lilting, bucolic My Morning.

The cover that had everyone in the crowd mystified was a BeeGees song from the 60s, Sun in My Morning, Sharples’ twelve-string filtering down into it as if in a Turner painting. Arguably the best song of the night was a new one, Tom Tom, shimmering in the twin-guitar jangle, up to a suspenseful turnaround on the chorus and a fiery, twangy Feridun solo. For the encore, Turner aired out what’s become her signature song, Brooklyn Is So Big. It was cute and wistful when it came out: it’s heartbreaking now, considering how many of Turner’s contemporaries have been priced out. It’s a good bet Turner and the band will bust out a lot of this material at the show this weekend.

The Molochs Bring Their Psychedelic Jangle and Clang to Williamsburg and the LES

The Molochs – whose core is guitarists Lucas Fitzsimons and Ryan Foster – fall on the side of the more tuneful, jangly retro psychedelic bands out there. Some of their material is more lo-fi third – or fourth, or fifth wave, which wave are we on now? – 60s British psych-pop. Other times, they fit in with the uneasy Laurel Canyon clang and twang of bands like the Allah-Las (who have a show coming up at Webster Hall on March 24). The Molochs are coming to Brooklyn at Union Pool on March 25 at 8, followed by the fuzzy drony Cosmonauts; cover is $10. Then on the 27th at 10 careeningly intense gutter blues bandleader Breanna Barbara and her excellent band open for that same twinblll at Berlin for the same price.

The Molochs’ debut album America’s Velvet Glory is streaming at Bandcamp. It kicks off with Ten Thousand, a scampering minor-key mosquito-jangle psych-pop smash with swirly organ: think Forever Changes-era Arthur Lee without the strings. No Control is sort of the Blues Magoos through the prism of retroish British garage rock like Babyshambles. Charlie’s Lips goes on and on, an over-the-top, sarcastic dis at a trust fund kid that’s part Beatles, part Kinks.

A Beggars Banquet-style web of slide guitars filters through That’s the Trouble with You. The One I Love channels the Byrds circa 1965 with a spot-on Mike Bloomfield lead break, followed by Little Stars, a slow, sad, vampy Jesus & Mary Chain style dirge. Then the duo mashes up 19th Nervous Breakdown Stones with Highway 61 Dylan in No More Cryin.

They build an organ-driven homoerotic Blonde on Blonde anthem with You and Me, then edge into early Velvets territory with New York, right down to the Run Run Run quote at the end. The album winds up with the swaying, minor-key I Don’t Love You and its doomed relationship imagery, and goes hack to BoB territory with You Never Learn. All of these styles have been mined for decades, often beyond the point of overkill, but these guys’ enthusiasm and catchy hooks make it all seem fresh again.

Keeping Tabs on Gringo Star

Gringo Star‘s previous album Floating Out to See put a wry, lo-fi newschool stamp on classic 60s psychedelia and garage rock. This time out, their new album The Sides and In Between – soon to be streaming at Bandcamp  – goes deeper into the past and has a welcome gravitas. While several of the songs are darker, the rest are funnier than the more upbeat stuff on the band’s previous effort, spiced with plenty of woozy 60s guitar and keyboard effects. They’ve got a couple of New York dates coming up; on August 19 at around 9, they’re at Shea Stadium for $12. The following night at 9 they’re at Cake Shop for two bucks less. Ever think you’d live to see the day when a Bushwick show was more expensive than one in Manhattan?

The new album’s opening track, Rotten blends tongue-in-cheek psychedelic soul in the same vein as Clear Plastic Masks or White Denim with tinny, organ-fueled Sergeant Pepper-era Beatles. It’s a dis at a spoiled rich brat. Track two, Magic is true to its name: imagine ELO covering a mid-60s Hollies hit that’s one part Byrds and one part doo-wop. That might sound misguided to the extreme, but somehow the band makes it work, seamlessly. .

Frontman/guitarist Nick Furgiuele’s sardonically exuberant vocals in Get Closer come across as a cross between White Hassle’s Marcellus Hall and that guy from NOFX, punctuated by a starry tremolo-picked guitar solo. Still Alive sounds like a skiffle band taking a stab at the Everly Brothers, with blippy organ tacked on for extra surrealism..

Going Home is a droll doo-wop pop number that if not for the annoying whistling would be a dead ringer for something from the Simon Chardiet catalog. Knee Deep uses acoustic country blues as a stepping-off point for a hypnotically uneasy, mellotron-infused sway, a study in hi/lo frequency contrasts. Likewise, the irrepressible oldtimey swing-flavored Heading South, which might well be a spoof.

Undone takes a turn into carnivalesquely waltzing territory (would somebody in the band please put a muzzle on that whistler?), pushed along by bassist Josh Longino and drummer Jonathan Bragg. It’s You is sort of a three-quarter-time rewrite of Runaway. The album winds up with The Last Trace, a strange mashup of downstroke indie pop and Tex-Mex rock. Two chances to get a dose of this Friday and Saturday night.

Heaters Bring Their Envelopingly Tuneful Psychedelia to South Williamsburg

Heaters‘ new album Baptistina – soon to be streaming at Bandcamp, and available on both green and black vinyl – further cements their reputation as one of the world’s most consistently excellent dark retro psychedelic bands. What’s most impressive about them is that a close listen reveals how seldom they change chords. They can vamp out on one for minutes on end and it never gets boring because there are so many interesting things going on, texturally and melodically: repeaterbox echoes flitting through the mist, shifting sheets of feedback and jagged twelve-string guitar incisions in contrast with an enveloping quality that seems to draw on Indian classical music as much as it does classic 60s psychedelia. The trio – guitarist Nolan Krebs, guitarist/bassist Andrew Tamlyn and drummer Joshua Korf – also shift tempos on a dime, making things all the more strange and compelling. They’re playing the album release show at Baby’s All Right on August 5 at 10 PM; cover is $10.

The obvious influence is the 13th Floor Elevators, but there’s also a little early Country Joe & the Fish as well as Brian Jonestown Massacre in the mix as well as a whole slew of other influences. The sonics are period-perfect: guitars awash in reverb with a clanging, slightly tinny vintage Vox amp attack, trebly melodic bass hanging back with the drums. The opening track, Centennial, begins with a Byrdsy jangle and ends with White Light/White Heat guitar freakout .The lushly crescendoing Ara Pacis puts Syd Barrett on a Magical Mystery Tour bus, while the expansive soundscape Orbis brings to mind early Nektar.

Elephant Turner pounces along on a tricky fuzz bass riff, sinuous guitar interweave overhead. Garden Eater sets a nimbly scampering bassline over a steady, swirly stomp and then floats off into spacerock. Another catchy fuzztone bassline fuels Dali, which then sinks in a morass of trippy waves. Then the band picks things up again with Mango, referencing both the Kinks as well as early 70s proto-metal.

The resonant spacerock ambience returns as the band sets the controls for the heart of the sun in Voyager. The album winds up with the teasingly loopy instrumental Turkish Gold and then the catchy, propulsively tumbling Seafoam, Del Shannon on brown acid, winidng up with the longest, most searing guitar solo here. This is music for people who won’t settle for merely being stoned: it’s a soundtrack for getting high as a kite.

Their excellent, somewhat more kinetic previous album Holy Water Pool is also streaming at Bandcamp, for the most part. Kamikaze, a slowly simmering, echo-drenched minor-key neo-Elevators number, opens it, bass rising as the chorus winds up, twelve-string guitar piercing the reverb cloud. There’s also the loping and then frantic spaghetti western blues of Master Splinter; the careenng Highway 61 vamp Sanctuary Blues; Propane, with its spiky/drony neo-Velvets sway and artfully menacing rhythmic shifts. the jangly, catchy Hawaiian Holiday and its playful tv theme references; the uneasy Bakersfield twang-influenced Detonator Eyes; Bad Beat, a mashup of early Pretty Things, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Radio Birdman; the starlit stoner soul of Gum Drop; Honey, a Blues Magoos/Count Five hybrid; Cap Gun, which very cleverly nicks the chords from a new wave-era cheeseball hit; and Dune Ripper, part BJM, part Byrds. The band takes their time with each of these, although they don’t go on nearly as long as that previous sentence.

Dada Paradox Pick Up Where the Wickedly Catchy, Lyrically Brilliant Larch Left Off

In recent years at least, it’s hard to imagine a more productive rock music couple than Ian and Liza Roure. As the brain trust of both the Larch and Liza & the WonderWheels, they made a mark as purveyors of hook-driven, lyrically sharp Elvis Costello-ish tunesmithing and acerbically catchy psychedelia, respectively. When both bands imploded, the Wheels morphed into Tracy Island – fronted by Liza, on guitar – and the Larch became Dada Paradox, fronted by Ian on a multitude of guitars, bass and percussion, with Liza on keys. Dada Paradox picks right up where the Larch left off with 2014’s In Transit without missing a beat. The new album, Mobile Flight – streaming at the band’s webpage – has some of the most memorable songwriting released this year, and the duo will bring it to the stage at the release show on May 25 at 8 PM at Bowery Electric. Low-key psychedelic crew Psychic Lines open the night at 7; cover is $10.

The anthemically crescendoing opening track, Find Ways to Matter traces an uneasily metaphorical space travel narrative over a tasty bed of judiciously multitracked guitar textures: the interweave between the acoustic, the electrics and the twelve-string is intricate and Byrdsy to the point where it’s hard to tell which is playing what. Light hand percussion rather than a full drumkit has the paradoxical effect of directing attention to Roure’s lattice of fretwork, adding a low-key bedroom pop charm.

The twelve-string also takes centerstage over twinkling electric piano on the first of a handful of miniatures here, the wistful, gently nocturnally-tinged Here Comes Another Day. From there the duo segue into the album’s catchiest and also most nonchalantly ominous track, the tropically-tinged Another Day in Paradise. It’s Squeeze’s Pulling Mussels without the one-note guitar solo, updated for the teens with a backdrop of global warming.

The resolute, propulsive Happy Families, another track from the late Larch days, looks back to vintage, offhandedly savage Armed Forces-era Costello with its sardonic portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Executive doing a number on each other while trying to keep up appearances. Spooky Action surrealistically explores an eerie sci-fi action-at-a-distance scenario over a stately Britfolk waltz, Ian’s recorder and Liza’s ghost-girl vocal harmonies ramping up the mysterioso ambience.

A gentle baroque keyboard interlude leads into the wryly sarcastic character study Inflexible Flyer, Ray Davies channeled through the prism of peak-era, mid-90s Blur. For those who don’t get the joke, the Flexible Flyer was a popular kids’ snow sled back in the 60s and 70s. There are a couple of folk-flavored tracks here –  The Far Side of the Fray has a deadpan savagery in the same vein as Roger Waters’ The Bravery of Being Out of Range, while The Apocalypse Cheering Committee is as cynically funny as you would expect from this crew.

There’s also Solar Birds, aloft on a keening slide guitar line with an early 70s pastoral Pink Floyd feel, and the album’s majestically jangly closing escape anthem, Sorrows of Stephen: “The sorrow suffocates, to draw a free breath seems like it’s worth the risk that you take,” Ian encourages. A good fifteen-plus years since the Larch started ripping it up in scruffy dives all over Brooklyn, it’s good to see the Roures arguably at the peak of their career as players and songwriters. Count this among the half-dozen best releases to come out of New York this year.

Tom Shaner Brings His Darkly Purist, Eclectically Expert Tunesmithing to Bowery Electric Tonight

Tom Shaner personifies the veteran New York cult artist. With his cool, inscrutable vocal delivery, he’s fluent in all sorts of styles, from dusky southwestern gothic, to rockabilly, to psychedelia and brooding Tom Waits-ish saloon blues. His late 90s-early zeros band Industrial Tepee wowed the critics, blew the Dave Matthews band off the stage while opening for them and held down a Manhattan residency at Manitoba’s for awhile. After that, Shaner went solo and had a monthly Saturday night residency at Lakeside Lounge for several years. Since then, his hometown live shows have been more infrequent, although he continues to make great albums and funny videos. He’s got an epic new one, I Hate to See Your Spirit Fade – streaming at Spotify -and a show at 8 PM tonight, March 5 at Bowery Electric. Cover is $10.

The production and arrangements are intricate and purist. Shaner weaves layers of electric and acoustic guitars, piano and organ, accordion, upright and electric bass, and subtle drums into an imaginative, purist mesh, vocals up front, drums in the back, oldschool style. The album opens with the vividly desolate, desperate border-rock anthem Viva Las Nowhere, adrift in tinkly saloon piano, mariachi guitar and accordion:

We can’t stay here, riding the wild rapids of our tears…
It’s the wrong kind of silence here
Like everybody wants to disappear

“If you like your honey on the edge of knife,” Shaner asserts, New York City Is Paradise Number 2, a soberingly edgy minor-key strut that doesn’t shy away from the fact that most of this town is in crushing poverty. By contrast, the warmly catchy ballad Tide of Love reminds of Richard Thompson, with its delicate web of fingerpicked guitars.

Much as a lot of Shaner’s music is pretty dark, he can also be hilarious. Case in point: Vanessa the Vegan Murderess, a cruelly tongue-in-cheek, vaudevillian tale of a real killjoy of a killer. Likewise, When the Machine Tells You No takes a random computer crisis and makes galloping, full-throttle southwestern gothic rock out of it.

The album’s longest and most haunting track is the swaying, trippily nocturnal Lake 48, tracing a pilgrimage to a paradise which might turn out to be something else entirely. The title track brings to mind the Grateful Dead or Asylum Street Spankers in briskly shuffling mode, livened with terse pedal steel. Shaner edges toward aphoristically bluesy Waits territory with the haphazardly swinging, bitingly minor-key When the Devil Comes Calling, then revisits that rakish vibe with the wry Soldier of Sin and then Rock and Roll Is a Natural Thing.

True Love Is Hard Work, featuring Emmy Bean on harmony vocals, is part Orbison, part Byrds and part Buddy Holly. Wandering Heart also looks back to that era, but with more of a sadly glimmering Lynchian C&W edge. New Rebel Girl takes an unexpectedly harrowing detour into dub reggae, a portrait of womens’ struggle to survive under repressive Asian regimes.

There’s also the hazy, Meddle-era Pink Floyd-tinged psych-folk waltz Last Summer, the similarly laid-back Lazy Man and;the jaunty I Can’t Be the One. Seventeen tracks and no filler, one of the best albums to come over the transom here in the past year. And Shaner’s even more acerbic onstage than he is on record.

A Long Overdue Appreciation of a Great Defunct Powerpop Band

In a career that spanned the better part of three decades, Skooshny played a grand total of one live gig. It was an Arthur Lee benefit.

That pretty much sums up what this band was all about. But a lack of gigs didn’t stop them from making great albums. Frontman/guitarist Mark Breyer, guitarist/bassist Bruce Wagner and drummer David Winogrond started right around the time punk was getting off the ground, finally packing it in sometime in the late zeros. Undeterred, Breyer continues as Son of Skooshny, releasing both new material and somewhat more lush versions of old Skooshny favorites. For a taste of where this cleverly lyrical, purist tunesmith is these days, check his Bandcamp page.

Although their substantial catalog is still in print, probably the best introduction to the band is their lavish 2004 best-of collection streaming at Spotify, coyly titled Zoloto, Russian for “gold” (the band name means “boring”). As you might expect, they have a cult following in Russia, and for many years were popular with the Bucketfull of Brains crowd. The songs span the band’s career, beginning in 1978, although the tracks don’t follow any kind of chronological sequence.

As a singer, Breyer pushes his airy voice to the limit without breaking: craft is one of this band’s defining qualities. Wagner is the rare guitarist who knows that less is more, and Winogrond’s stadium-riser drums are integral to the group’s often majestic sound. Lyrically, Breyer writes in the same vein as Elvis Costello or Steve Kilbey: he can’t resist a double entendre or a wry pun. And like those two, he’s a psychopathologist, dissecting relationships with a finely honed scalpel.

Alcohol is a frequent prop in Breyer’s bitter tableaux, right from the first few lines of the wickedly catchy Even My Eyes, which borrows an old Alice Cooper riff and reinvents it as vintage Cheap Trick-style powerpop. Flawed depicts a romance that was doomed from the start, over a tune that would be perfectly at home in the Marty Willson-Piper catalog.

Beautiful Bruise has a tasty blend of twelve-string and electric guitars, a ponderous waltz beat and a painterly (pun intended) Breyer lyric. The band bring in wistful Britfolk ambience with Sad Summer Spring and follow that with the even more gorgeously melancholy Holy Land, a vividly metaphorical passenger’s tale. Private Jokes nicks a classic Elvis Costello riff and beefs it up: it’s the hardest-rocking track here other than Masking the Moon, which finally goes over the edge into raw rage.

Science Changes Everyone has one of Breyer’s more clever lyrics…and a trick ending that totally blindsides you. The Water Song is the saddest number in the collection: it’s something of a more low-key update on the Stones’ Paint It Black. I See You Now maintains a jangly, Churchlike melancholy edge, while Ceiling to the Lies is the closest thing to 70s radio rock here.

Wagner takes over vocals on No Life Story, which could be a Stiv Bators ballad, and the epically aching, intense, Kevin Ayers-ish  Lullabye. And Michael Penn makes a guest appearance, playing jaunty chamberlain – which sounds like the flute setting on a mellotron, appropriately enough – as well as bass on the low-key Dessert for Two, which he also produced. It makes a good segue with Mike Thompson’s organ intro on the otherwise much more roughhewn It Hides More Than It Tells, the first of the 1978 tracks.

I Never Change My Mind sounds like the Church circa 1984 covering a catchy psych-pop hit from 1967 or so, while You Paint My World evokes that band’s jangly originals from the 80s, particularly when Wagner’s solo kicks in. And the guitarist also wails on the snarling post-Byrds anthem Crossing Double Lines. The last of the 25 tracks here is Clicking My Fingers: “Sterno in a paper cup, drink up, we’re having a party,” Breyer sardonically orders over a backdrop that’s part Byrds, part Magical Mystery Tour. Including an unexpectedly elegant cover of Davie Allan & the Arrows’ psychedelic pop classic Angel with a Devil’s Heart makes sense especially considering Wagner and Winogrond’s longtime membership in Allan’s band. What’s most striking about these songs is how consistent they are: clearly, the three had a vision and stuck with it throughout a career that deserves more than cult status.

Tom Shaner’s Long-Overdue Solo Debut: Worth the Wait

For those who’ve followed Tom Shaner’s career since his days in the early zeros fronting Industrial Tepee – the great southwestern gothic rock band that should have been as famous as Calexico or Giant Sand but never was – his new album Ghost Songs, Waltzes and Rock n Roll is long overdue. Ironically, though billed to Shaner solo, it’s far more lush and richly arranged than anything he did with that band, in fact, the best thing he’s ever done. The music blends layers of jangly, twangy, spiky, occasionally searing electric and acoustic guitars over a nimble rhythm section, ornamented with deviously flickering keyboards, mandolin, banjo and the occasional wry electronic effect. Songwise, there are echoes of Steve Wynn, the Byrds, Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave in its most pensive moments.

Shaner’s nonchalant, laid-back vocals are sort of a cross between Lou Reed and the Wallflowers’ Jakob Dylan. The songs’ lyrics are terse, cynical and clever: they’ll resonate especially with anyone who’s weathered the same storms as Shaner has during these past few years as the New York he came up in slid closer and closer to New Jersey. Although many of the songs have a dusky desert feel, a familiar urban milieu recurs throughout the album. That factors in heavily on the funniest song here, the deadpan, early Elvis Costello-ish Unstoppable Hipster, as well as the considerably more spare, haunting Downtown Has Done Damage, which reminds of the Church around 1986 or so.

Sinner’s Highway sets a surreal, sordidly Lynchian scene to snarling minor-key rock: a late-period Industrial Tepee tune, it reminds a lot of Steve Wynn, with a wry quote in the solo guitar outro. Another one from that era, Sister Satellite manages to be dreamy yet bracing as its layers of guitar mingle and then surge.Then Shaner evokes another well-known late 90s/early zeros band, White Hassle, with Forever Drug, spiced with tongue-in-cheek samples and hip-hop turntablism.

She Will Shine is crushingly caustic: over punchy, syncopated, Jayhawks-flavored rock, Shaner relates how a girl who couldn’t hack it in the big city is ostensibly leaving for better things in the country, but “when the lid is lifted, everything is shifted…her time is complete, the future is a one-way street.” Rosa Lee, a big concert favorite, works a more pensive, regretful vein.

Shaner pairs Foreverland, a creepy reggae song, with the nebulous, only slightly less creepy psych-folk anthem Silent Parade. Where Grief Becomes Grace, an echoey desert rock dirge, is as broodingly evocative as anything Giant Sand ever did. A cover of Tom Waits’ Cold Water picks up the pace with a gospel-fueled menace, black humor in full effect.

Only slightly less dark colors close the album. Everything Is Silver returns to a romping Elvis Costello vibe: it’s the opposite of what it seems. And My House is Green builds a moody acoustic Velvets ambience. But not everything here is as dark: there’s Sun Girl #2, with its lushly gentle Sunday Morning sway, and Streets of Galway, a lively Irish tune. One of the best albums of 2012, no question. Shaner plays the release show – assuming the subways are back up and running – at the Knitting Factory on Nov 7 at 8:30 PM.