Dim Stars, Bright Sky

Joe Public, meet John Doe. No, not John Doe the fiendishly literate serial killer played by Kevin Spacey in Se7en, although that guy might have been right at home in some of his earlier records. This JD is probably best known as Exxene Cervenka’s partner in crime with seminal LA punks X, and was chiefly responsible for that band’s latter-day departure into the shlockabilly swamp. Successive solo albums (this is his fourth) have seen the guitarist explore the kind of nu-country country mapped by acts like The Walkabouts. He’s also been carving out a tidy niche for himself as a bit part actor.

He’s got some great lines, like in the opening ‘Holes’, a hymn to love under the influence of the whirlies: “I never dared drink like you/I held back your hair/Like a girlfriend would do”. Then there’s ‘Forever For You’ with its recurring images of red and white and worried blues: wine on a table cloth, blood on a sheet, Old Glory: “You don’t understand/I’d cut off my hands/If they offend thee”. But leaving aside the wordplay, he and co-producers Joe Henry and Dave Way have an interesting way of layering distorted guitars between the acoustic and the rhythm track, like a sheet of metal in an ice-cream-wafer sandwich.

It also should be pointed out that there’s more pedigree on this record than at a shampoo poodle parade. The house band includes Beck touring alumni Smokey Hormel and drummer Joey Waronker, the latter lending the louder tunes a hearty middle-American thwack that suggests The Jayhawks or The Wallflowers. And who should surface on ‘Magic’ – only Jakob Dylan, queuing up beside Juliana Hatfield, Rhett Miller, Jane Wiedlin and Aimee Mann to lend understated harmony/ back-up vocals, sometimes mixed so unobtrusively you end up wondering who’s doing what.

Sparse stuff, but staunch.