Bob Schneider
The Californian
Shockorama

If it was 1981 I might think this was acceptably conventional, if the last record I'd bought was something by George Thorogood, I'd think this was avant-garde and I might even be shocked by the occasional self-conscious "F-bomb"...But the fact is it's 2006 and I'm just not that guy. What I'm hearing is bar music for a bar I'd never go to. The cover art seems to be based on the distorted portraiture on Tom Waits's Alice but the tropes being exploited and the personality on display here do nothing to offset the derivation. And the funk / rap "workout" going under the name "Mudhouse" might fly as a live encore, but it's a tedious-as-hell penultimate album track. And the faux-scratched-78 rpm beer-barrel singalong that ends the disc musically justifies my Waits comparison from before. But sucks, too. Just sayin'.