Stan Ridgway - Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads & Fugitive Songs (2004)

Like that of many artists who came of age in the '80s, Stan Ridgway's career has often been unfairly haunted by an endless groove of MTV overexposure that's turned perceptions of his music into something akin to a skipping record. Indeed, the veteran L.A. singer-songwriter once groused he'd likely spend his twilight years onstage in a newly liberated Havana casino lounge, crooning "Mexican Radio" to blue-haired former new wavettes. But this savory trove of songs ranks with Black Diamond as one of the best albums Ridgway has recorded since his muscular reemergence as an indie artist in the mid-'90s. Mining the same electro-acoustic vein as Anatomy, Ridgway has refined his nervous balance of traditional folk-blues and ironic-modernist instincts even further here, shrewdly casting the material in a three-act dramatic structure that sharpens its dramatic focus. The usual suspects of Stan's compelling musique noir herein feature seedy, if oddly sympathetic miscreants (the wry toe-tapper "Wake Up Sally [The Cops Are Here]," "Running with the Carnival"), a familiar musician all too wise to both his past and future ("That Big 5-O," "Talkin' Wall of Voodoo Blues"), and a blue-collar warehouse worker moving mysterious cargo Middle Eastward (the dour "Afghan Forklift"). His balladeer instincts may draw him to personal interludes both bittersweet ("Our Manhattan Moment") and elegiac ("Into the Sun," "My Rose Marie"), but it's when Ridgway fuses his Johnny Cash/Ernie Ford/Mose Allison fetishes with his own compelling personal ethos (the haunting, harmonica-seasoned "God Sleeps in a Caboose," a headline-timely, appropriately creeped-out cover of Allison's "Monsters of the Id") that Ridgway again confirms his status as one of America's most consistently original songwriters and performers. --Jerry McCulley