Perfectly Good Guitar

IT TAKES a heck of a thick neck to blithely ignore all that's happened musically over the last five years. Either that or a cast-iron identity that surpasses fleeting trends and passing fads. Randy Newman has always managed to pull it off with panache. So has Loudon Wainwright - but then they're both privy to an enviable well of wordplay that penetrates pop's psychobabble like a laser to a melanoma.

John Hiatt's another story though. Long installed in the (seemingly impenetrable) pantheon of American singer/songwriters-who-can-do-no wrong, he's garnered a significant band of party faithful who nod and sigh meaningfully at the very mention of his name. 1992's 'Stolen Moments' and the earlier 'Bring The Family' had the hacks searching for suitably impressive adjectives to colour in the picture for the uninitiated. A sojourn with Little Village did no harm to his reputation either.

Listening to Perfectly Good Guitar the temptation is to meddle with this pristine reputation - just a tad. It transports me back to the heady days when Barry Lang's American Music Show was my bible, when lead guitar and a pounding percussion were all I wanted in a decent record. Thing is, though, my ears have evolved in the interim (they're now slim, slender and point north-east like Leonard Nimoy's) and, troublesome things that they are, they demand more than just a loud drum sound in order to prick up.

Hiatt's voice is undoubtedly a fine instrument - vulnerable, mischievous and refreshingly bare with no pretensions towards the high jinx that many a producer might hanker after. But what of the songs?

The man's been in and out (the wrong side) of love more times than he deserves - but what's new in that? Lyrically he's tongue-tied when it comes to matters of the heart, managing only a breathless thrash amid the adjectives and nouns of romance - over and over again. The opener, 'Something Wild' is something else: "It's not as if we could think that things were one way? And they would all just be that way right now." Figure that.

To give him his due, he does manage to find his feet on songs with a more global identity. 'Old Habits', an insightful tale of abuse and why people tolerate it (old habits?), starts out like a J.J. Cale growl into an empty toilet roll and unravels into a fine subdued study of the highs and lows of bizarre love entanglements.

But ultimately it's Newman without the bile, Wainwright without the bite and Bruce without the cadillac. If you can take the leftovers, Perfectly Good Guitar is an adequate filler. I'll hold out for the main course though. Maybe next year?

• Siobhán Long