After taking off to have a daughter six years ago, Merchant's back with Leave Your Sleep, a two-disc set of songs inspired by 18th- and 19th-century poems for children. It's stunning, both in its musical scope — more than 100 players help Merchant turn obscure old rhymes into lively jazz, folk and rock songs — and its depth of research, with the singer's notes filling a beautifully packaged book. Among the standouts are a bluegrass take on Ogden Nash's comic caper "Adventures of Isabel" and John Godfrey Saxe's political parable "The Blind Men and the Elephant," which brings together Hazmat Modine, the Fairfield Four and The Ditty Bops for an improbable mix of klezmer, gospel and swing.

But Merchant cribbed lyrics from Mother Goose long before she became a mom. "Eat for Two," from 1989's Blind Man's Zoo, draws on Humpty Dumpty to express regret and resentment over an unwanted pregnancy, and Merchant adds her own moral: "Pride is for men/ Young girls should run and hide instead." Factor in jangly and determined guitars, and you're left with the best thing she'll ever write.

Most of Zoo's other songs follow one of two bland formulas: Deceptively upbeat arrangements add little juice to Merchant's musings on imperialism ("P...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/04/08/jakob-dylan-the-wallflowers-women-and-country http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/04/08/jakob-dylan-the-wallflowers-women-and-country

No one has more ambivalence about The Wallflowers than The Wallflowers. Nearly five years after their last album, they've made no movement toward recording, and last year's tour to support a greatest-hits collection included singer-guitarist Jakob Dylan, longtime bassist Greg Richling and a few more recent recruits, but not mainstay Rami Jaffee, whose keyboards are as integral to the band's sound as Dylan's voice.

Dylan's got little reason to revive the group; with his second solo album, he proves he's more than capable of bearing the weight. Not that he's out on his own. Women + Country (Columbia) reunites him with producer T Bone Burnett for the first time since The Wallflowers' 1996 breakthrough, Bringing Down the Horse, and they're joined by sterling session players, including pedal steel master Greg Leisz and guitarist Marc Ribot. Best of all, Neko Case and Kelly Hogan's harmonies elevate melancholy material like "Everybody's Hurting" and "Down on Our Own Shield." These people know what they're doing, and they've done it well; though Dylan's as loquacious a songwriter as ever, you'll be able to sing along to the choruses by the second listen.

If history serves as a guide, you'll be able to sing along for quite some time. Fourteen years after its release, Bringing Down the Horse stands tall, with each hit propelling the next: "One Headlight" into "6th Avenue Heartache," "Three Marlenas" into "The Difference." Dylan's delivery — equal parts passion and reserve — sears the lyrics into your skull, and the guitar twang and organ whir have aged well. At the time, radio's wholehearted embrace was met by a backlash just as instant. Critics found it particularly galling that the upstart had as many top-10 hits on one disc as his dad had ha...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/03/11/bettie-serveert-pharmacy-of-love http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/03/11/bettie-serveert-pharmacy-of-love You probably haven't paid much mind to Amsterdam alt-rockers Bettie Serveert in more than a decade — if you ever paid them any mind at all — but they've never really stopped doing what they do. On Pharmacy of Love (Second Motion), their eighth studio album, there's a certain familiarity to the proceedings: fuzz where there should be fuzz, sharp angles where sharp angles belong, gentleness in its place. Opener "Deny All" sets the tone, with Carol van Dijk's snappy vocals cutting through rain-cloud guitar and rumbly drums. There's a good deal of variety, from "Love Lee," a ghostly waltz, to "Calling," a nearly 10-minute space jam, to "Change4Me," a pretty, healthy love song that's both straightforward and tentative in its optimism. But in reliability, there's also the risk of staleness: "Souls Travel" and "Mossie" emit a whiff of something that's been sitting in some damp corner for far too long.

Whether the same can be said of Bettie Serveert's critically hailed debut, gathering dust on tens of thousands of shelves, likely depends on whether you think the early '90s smell like a dorm room or Grandma's closet. With its girlish vocals, ambling pace and sudden tempo shifts, 1992's Palomine (Matador) works better as a revealing snapshot of its time than as an enduring piece of art, but there's nothing embarrassing about it. For those who like bruised love songs that end in a hail of feedback, guitarist Peter Visser pleases with a few key moves: squeals and buzzes in the Velvet Underground vein, ragged and glorious riffs cribbed from the Neil Young school of squawk. Such touches fuel tracks like "Brain-Tag" and "Balentine," which begin all quiet and unsettled and grow more aggressive in their longing, but it's the edge to van Dijk's voice that best undercuts her lyrics' sincerity. Mo...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/02/11/re-freshmen http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/02/11/re-freshmen In the wake of grunge, it was easier than ever for mainstream rock bands to win points for sensitivity without sacrificing aggression. For The Verve Pipe, that meant riding a song about a girlfriend's abortion and suicide to the top of the charts.

After a delicate guitar intro, "The Freshmen" opens on our guilt-stricken young hero, contemplating the sins of the headstrong girlfriend who won't have his baby and marry him. "Stop a baby's breath and a shoe full of rice," singer-guitarist Brian Vander Ark laments. He goes on to blame her for being sexy and in love, but he does it with a sneer, to clue you in that he's judging the cad. That's when he kills her off, letting her do the dirty work with a Valium overdose. His reaction: Oh, well, freshmen are young and dumb. Vander Ark's described "The Freshmen" as part fact, part poetic license. That is, his ex did have an abortion, but she didn't commit suicide. The sentiment's sick and the pronouns are confusing, but at least the music's appropriately pretty and grave.

Give "The Freshmen" credit for making 1996's Villains go platinum, because the disc's otherwise barren of memorable tunes. The title track describes the narrator's back pain while picking up a subscription card that fell out a magazine; "Cup of Tea" and "Photograph" are just generic grousing. And those were the hits. Among the misses are "Cattle," with its grim, grammar-challenged observation that "When the mouth is open grows a cancer everybody wins," and "Real," which recalls a boy's joy at pretending to kill Mother Goose and other nursery rhyme characters.

The Verve Pipe's first release in eight years is, of all things, music for children. A Family Album is packed with hyperactive arrangements, horns and harmonicas, and patro...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/01/07/little-wonder http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2010/01/07/little-wonder Vic Chesnutt's death on Christmas, at age 45, didn't come as a huge surprise to loyal listeners. Like so many other depressed artists, he'd been dropping hints in his songs throughout his career. A car accident when he was 18 put Chesnutt in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and subsequent ailments left him with hospital bills he thought he'd never be able to pay. Given his often bitter lyrics, it's not hard to read his intentional overdose on muscle relaxants as a final fuck-you to a broken health care system and a cruel world.

Which isn't to say he wasn't loved. Try to think of another singer-songwriter who's been covered by Madonna and Smashing Pumpkins (who both appeared on 1996's Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation, a benefit album to help musicians with medical bills), or one who's been backed by jam stars Widespread Panic, alt-country collective Lambchop and psych-pop stalwarts Elf Power.

At the Cut, one of three albums Chesnutt released in 2009, employs Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Fugazi's Guy Picciotto to eerie effect, and it's a fitting capstone to a rich catalog. With its tense strings and stark drums, "Coward" is a grand opener, heavy of hand and heart. Wistful piano turns "Chain" into an elegy, and sparse guitar gives "Granny" a respectful send-off. But it's "Flirted With You All My Life," Chesnutt's last stand against suicide, that carries the most weight. "Oh, death/ Oh, death/ Oh, death," he sings over a chilly organ and warm guitar. "Clearly I'm not ready." But he would be, soon enough.

For all the collaborations that would come later, 1990's Little is a cozy debut. On nine of its 10 songs, Chesnutt's accompanied only by producer Michael Stipe and Stipe's sister Lynda, who adds subtl...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/12/10/cut-above http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/12/10/cut-above Why would The Slits resurface now, 28 years after their last album was met with indifference? And, more to the point, what took them so long?

After testing the waters in 2006 with the three-song Revenge of the Killer Slits, the legendary lineup's Ari Up and Tessa Pollitt have teamed up with three women young enough to have first heard The Slits in utero. Fittingly, Trapped Animal (Narnack) sounds like it was born whole, rather than resurrected. Like Up's accent, which reflects her roots in Germany, her youth in London and her long sojourn in Jamaica, The Slits draw from a number of musical influences and sound like no one else. They're blissed-out one moment and angry the next; they're playful, edgy and erotic all at once. "Reggae Gypsy" bridges cultures with horns and hand claps; "Lazy Slam" bridges generations with '80s synths and '00s snark. On the deceptively mellow "Issues," one survivor of child abuse cajoles another to stop playing the victim card: "The difference between me and you/ I stand up to them, I confront/ While you choose to be a cunt." Elsewhere, Up calls out misogynists ("Ask Ma"), toxic lovers ("Partner from Hell") and garden-variety cads ("Cry Baby").

It's a worthy successor to 1979's Cut, The Slits' first fusion of punk spunk and reggae rhythms. Up addresses men unworthy of her attention on "Love und Romance," and zeroes in on consumer culture with "Shoplifting." If the album sounds a little thin three decades later, you can't fault Up's forceful trills and screeches, Pollitt's bouncy bass work, Viv Albertine's minimalist guitar l...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/11/12/phish-joy http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/11/12/phish-joy Pop quiz: Did it thrill or repulse you when you realized that Phish's recent single "Time Turns Elastic," off Joy, clocks in at 13.5 minutes? That's a trick question; if you're a Phish completist, you were already familiar with the half-hour orchestral version that Trey Anastasio released under his own name earlier this year. And if you're not, you don't have to worry about hearing Phish on the radio.

After a five-year breather, the phan-phriendly jam band has returned for studio album No. 14 — that's No. 48 if you count live discs — inspired by no-doubt deep insights into how time flies when you're having fun and paying for it. The sentiments are as bland as dry spaghetti, but the sound is all greasy noodling. "Got a blank space where my mind should be/ Got a Clif Bar and some cold green tea," Anastasio sings on "Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan." That's apparently not a recipe for clearer thinking, but rather fuel for the four repetitive guitar solos he packs into less than five minutes. On "Backwards Down the Number Line," he extols the virtues of remembering a friend's birthday; on "Twenty Years Later," he ticks off a litany of bad decisions. But at least Anastasio's numbers are more tolerable than bassist Mike Gordon's weedy "Sugar Shack."

Time hasn't been kind to Rift, a loose-limbed cycle of tunes about love and dread. In the moribund "Fast Enough for You," the narrator puts off a woman who wants more; by "Sparkle," he's falling into marriage because all his friends are doing it, but the forced jolliness isn't fooling anyone. Collaborator Tom Marshall isn't the most lucid lyricist, but even chemically altered listeners shouldn't have to stretch to understand a couplet like ...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/10/15/alice-in-chains-black-gives-way-to-blue http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/10/15/alice-in-chains-black-gives-way-to-blue If Neil Young's right, and every junkie's like a setting sun, then Layne Staley hovered just above the horizon for longer than anyone expected. Alice in Chains' original singer spent the last several years of his life popping up just often enough to surprise those who thought he'd died, whether to contribute a rare cameo vocal or to grant a paranoid interview about death's certainty. In the end, people stopped expecting even that; by the time anyone noticed he was missing — in April 2002 — he'd been dead for two weeks, in his own apartment, where no one else had any reason to go.

It'd been six years since Alice in Chains had released an album; it's taken the surviving members seven more to make Black Gives Way to Blue, with William DuVall taking the mic. Chalk up the relatively smooth transition to guitarist Jerry Cantrell, who takes solo songwriting credit for nine of the disc's 11 songs. "All Secrets Known" is a classy opener, acknowledging the obvious: "There's no going back to the place we started from." Another highlight, "Your Decision," is a subtle expression of survivors' pain with poignant interplay of acoustic and electric textures. That careful balance of vulnerability and aggression is key to the AIC sound and, accordingly, the set suffers only when things edge too far into metal, as on "Last of My Kind" and the second half of "Acid Bubble."

The band's biggest album, Dirt, perfectly embodies its time, place, genre and drug of choice. (Early '90s, Seattle, grunge and heroin, in case you snoozed through Singles.) Drugs aren't the subject of every last song, but they're certainly the subtext. Listening to the songs Staley had a hand in is a trip through emotional terrain that's rough bu...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/09/17/add-it-up http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/09/17/add-it-up At 19, Gordon Gano was the baby of the band and full of legitimate teen angst when the first Violent Femmes record came out in 1983. By the time it went platinum, he was in his late 20s and still fueled by frustration. Though drummer Victor DeLorenzo took a break for most of the '90s and the trio hadn't made a studio album since 2000, they might've kept touring indefinitely on the strength of their early work. And then bassist Brian Ritchie sued Gano in 2007, forcing the frontman to get a new gig.

Under the Sun (Yep Roc), the singer-guitarist's first collaboration with ex-Bogmen Bill and Brendan Ryan, displays some of the qualities that endeared Femmes fans and annoyed so many others. "Better than You Know" indulges Gano's nervous whine, often kept in check elsewhere on the album; the rollicking "Way That I Creep" and the Biblical taunt "Oholah Oholibah" share the twisted preoccupations we've come to expect from Gano, a terminally conflicted preacher's kid. Whether you're on board with his high-strung delivery or wish he'd tone it down, the clear highlights are "Wave and Water," a taut slice of funk, and the related "Judge to Widow," which lets Bill Ryan cast a spell with his guitar before spinning off into a spoken-word reprise. And if you're a patient sort, the title track grows compelling after four maudlin minutes.

How's this for patience? Violent Femmes took a decade to go platinum without cracking the Billboard 200. It's hard to fathom the mass indifference that greeted songs like "Add It Up" and "Kiss Off," which would become pop-culture staples. By synthesizing Jonathan Richman's naivety and Lou Reed's jadedness, Gano comes off as a true original, while the mostly acoustic arrangements set the band apa...]]> http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/08/20/sugar-ray-music-for-cougars http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/08/20/sugar-ray-music-for-cougars

Sugar Ray's gotten some grief for titling its latest effort Music for Cougars (Pulse), but someone's gotta show love for the ladies who were young enough not to know better during the group's late-'90s heyday. Give it up for Mark McGrath — he stirs the spring break spirit in bodies that haven't been on spring break in a decade. You can almost picture the singer, with fresh highlights and no shirt, consulting a statistician to find just the right ratio of Neil Diamond to Katy Perry for "Closer." (And a borrowed Nine Inch Nails title for extra credit.)

Collaborators and contributors seem to have been picked by the same method: "Girls Were Made to Love" crunches a corny old sample (written by the Everly Brothers and sung by the kid who played Huckleberry Finn) with a corny new drop-in (courtesy of white-boy reggae singer Collie Buddz); "Love Is the Answer" is a moldy Weezer track; and "Dance Like No One's Watchin'," featuring surf rocker Donavon Frankenreiter, embodies the ocean's unpredictability by not including "love" in the title phrase. (Never fear — it's the very next word.)

But "She's Got the (Woo-Hoo)" reserves the best moment for McGrath himself. "She's got the woo-hoo," he sings, "Do you know what I mean?" No? "She comes when she's ready/ She's sex and the city/ She'll bring you to your knees." Oh, that woo-hoo. Glad we're all adults here.

Of course, in this case, owning your maturity means admitting you're of the generation that pioneered the tramp stamp. If you were a Sugar Ray fan in 1997, you were definitely not mature, no matter what your driver's license claimed. More than 2 million people bought Floored, but only two songs made much of an impression: You might remember the island-inflected "Fly," which featured Super Cat, or the reprise which surgically excised the dancehall si...]]>