Alejandro Escovedo

Real Animal

Back Porch/Manhattan Records

By John Morthland

With rare exceptions, Alejandro Escovedo's best albums are built around themes, even if those themes seem to be expressed subconsciously (as was the case with the 1992 Gravity) rather than consciously (2006's The Boxing Mirror), and even if most are not explicitly "concept" albums. But Real Animal, his second major label disc, couldn't be more upfront despite its often cryptic, dreamlike lyrics. Co-written with Chuck Prophet (formerly of Green on Red, and one of Americana's stars-of-the-moment), and produced by Tony Visconti (Bowie, Bolan and a glittery array of others), this blatantly autobiographical album employs his usual mix of tender ballads and crunching rockers to review the frustrations and ultimate redemptions of Escovedo's entire star-crossed career. Remarkably, his 10^th commercially-released solo album is arguably the most accomplished yet by America's best-known unknown singer-songwriter.

It's a look back fraught with ambivalence, which is not altogether surprising coming from a man who's always believed unequivocally in the redemptive powers of music, and who's also always done exceptional work, but has nonetheless come up empty-handed on his every grab at the brass ring. "And it makes no sense/and it makes perfect sense," he cries in "Chelsea Hotel '78," of life going bad at the Manhattan bohemian landmark. "Sensitive boys want all your love," he rues of the hard-luck True Believers, the three-guitar Austin band he had in the mid-Eighties with his brother Javier and Jon Dee Graham, "and they want no love at all." Meanwhile, "Golden Bear" finds him injecting memories of the late-Sixties heyday of the Southern California surf scene, including the Huntington Beach club of the song's title, into reflections on his recent battles with Hepatitis C (in effect, equating crucial high and low points of his life). Even the music sometimes bares conflicting emotions. "People (We're Only Gonna Live So Long)" bops along on a semi-bouncy rhythm that verges on upbeat, as befits a lyric honoring the human desire to enjoy each other while we can--but it's punctuated by jagged guitar outbursts that seem to want to draw blood.

Hey, that's life--or at least that's Alejandro's life and times as perceived by him. There are moments when he resolves the contradictions, as when "Golden Bear" becomes a song about keeping on keeping on in spite of everything (which is how many other songs on this album can likewise be read, for that matter). There are also moments when the contradictions provide the only effective way to describe the situation at hand, or when they reveal perhaps even more than they meant to: with minor rewriting, "Sensitive boys want all your love/and they want no love at all" could fit easily into "I Wish I Was Your Mother," Mott the Hoople's bassackwards anthem written by Ian Hunter, whose own deeply conflicted sensibility hovers over this album more than that of any of Escovedo's other influences.

But they're here, too, as always, from the shiny Visconti production touches recalling Marc Bolan especially, to string parts that Nico wishes could have graced her songs; from "Sister Lost Soul," a salute to fallen musician friends, to "Real As an Animal," the grinding homage to Iggy Pop. Elsewhere, Escovedo recalls the other bands in his own past. "Nuns Song" starts as a snot-nosed harangue in defense of his first group, San Francisco punk nihilists the Nuns, and morphs into a finely-drawn portrait of a lead singer; while "Chip n' Tony" anguishes over turbulence in the cowpunky Rank and File. If the former saw more success, in its way, than it probably should have, the latter represents a potential triumph that, somehow, never quite happened. Similarly "Swallows of San Juan" revels in the grandness of dreams, and "Hollywood Hills" in their mundaneity.

These are big and ambitious notions, and none would matter a whit, of course, if the music didn't back them up and then some. But it does. Working with several of the same players as usual (drummer Hector Munoz, violinist Susan Voelz, cellist Brian Standefer) plus guitarist Prophet and other newcomers, Escovedo and Visconti manage to give the rockers both blare and crispness, while the slow songs carry a weighty air of melancholy. The opening "Always a Friend," in another era, could have been a hit single; with its clipped, springing guitar intro, creamy vocal harmonies and multiple catch-phrases, the song is a succession of hooks with an understated, slyly humorous underbelly. The closing "Slow Down," which includes some of the album's few instances of outright nostalgia, takes things out on a haunting blend of strings and harmony voices. In between, "Sister Lost Soul" alludes, in its intro, to a Spectorian Wall of Sound, and in its string arrangement to Beatlesque psychedelic sorrow; "Chip n' Tony" rides a contemporary variation on the Bo Diddley beat head-on into a guitar maelstrom; "Smoke" is a savage riff-rocker with violin that can only be called raunchy.

Song for song, track for track, Real Animal sounds like nothing else out there-- not even Escovedo's previous efforts, devoid as this one is of twang. Mysteries, contradictions, hopes, reconciliations and all, it's real as a human being.