THE CD: “Bastardos!” (Vanguard Records)
PERFORMER: Blues Traveler

Blues Traveler claims that its eighth album, “Bastardos!” is only for them. We’re welcome to listen to it, of course, but the point was to satisfy the band’s innermost musical urges. For the most part, their selfishness is fruitful.

“Bastardos!” (excuse us, we can’t get the computer to reproduce the upside-down exclamation point that goes in front of the Spanish epithet) is indeed a departure from the controlled-chaos pop the band progessively embraced following 1994’s breakthrough album, “Four.” In songs like “Amber Awaits,” the band successfully revisits its jam-band origins with a hollow, bootleg-like sound and scale-climbing riffs.

They also explore an R&B side that suits them well. The funky ballad “She and I” is a trumpet and rock organ-fueled infusion of Otis Redding and Sly and the Family Stone. “That Which Doesn’t Kill You” is clearly underpinned by the Isley Brothers, from the springy slap bass to singer John Popper’s semi-breathy crooning.

But this song is also indicative of the album’s shortcomings. Popper’s drawn out and random harmonica solo, while illustrative of his superb talent, is a standard — and thus worn — feature of Blues Traveler songs. Moreover, Popper’s lyrics are the same cliche and obscure rhyme-laden tales of love and woe they’ve always been, often to his detriment. I adore the name “Nefertiti,” but it lacks the aural appeal to build a song around. Popper disagrees.

In fact, instrumental and stylistic exploration aside, the songs are largely built on the band’s classic musical structure: snappy verses followed by a driving chorus, all centered around Popper’s singing. Although enjoyable, “Bastardos!” is only slightly different from the band’s other albums, leading one to wonder if they haven’t been doing what they wanted to all along.

– By Morgan Kelly

THE CD: “Bob Dylan — The Bootleg Series Vol. 7″
PERFORMER: Bob Dylan

This double CD accompanies the Martin Scorcese film, “Bob Dylan No Direction Home: The Soundtrack.” The first disc starts with home recordings made in 1959 and 1960, followed by songs that track his growth as a songwriter who merged folk music with a poet’s sensibility. Included is a live version of the classic “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

All very interesting, but I keep coming back to the second CD. It opens with “Maggie’s Farm,” from the famed Newport electric appearance where Dylan (and most of Paul Butterfield’s blues band) blew the folkies away. Mike Bloomfield’s blistering guitar plays call-and-response with Dylan’s biting lyrics. Dylan junkies have no doubt listened to these obscurities for years. Among the gems are alternate takes of “Tombstone Blues,” “Desolation Row,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and live versions of “Ballad of a Thin Man and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Again, on “It takes a Lot to Laugh, it Takes a Train to Cry,” Bloomfield’s guitar is timeless, bearing not a trace of nascent psychedelia or white-boy blues. He learned from Chicago’s best bluesmen, and it shows. “I come from B.B. King, man,” he once said. (Bloomfield died of a drug overdose in 1981.) Dylan cracks up at Bloomfield’s simply amazing, smoking, imaginative guitar leads, on “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” which also features The Chambers Brothers on backup.

These recordings lead me to recall one of my earlist encounters with Dylan’s music. I was 13 years old and my older brother was working midnights at an aluminum fabrication factory in Girard, Ohio. He would come home around 6 a.m. every morning and immediately play “Highway 61 Revisited,” which was brand new back then. It made no sense to my sleepy young mind, yet 10 years later I was growing sweet potatoes in Lincoln County — so who knows?

For the truly obsessed, there are lyric variants here. For example, Dylan’s “They’re spoon-feeding Casanova to get him to feel more self-assured” becomes “They’re spoon-feeding Casanova the boiled guts of birds.”

On the one hand, any of the original albums would do just fine — Dylan is definitely required listening. But on the third hand, on songs like “Desolation Row” he sure does go on and on, which is why I never became a Dylan fan in the first place. Sure loved his backup bands, though.

THE CD: “100 Years of Jazz Guitar’ (Columbia/Legacy)

This four-CD set is a superb collection of recordings that spans the years 1906-1998, starting with the legendary Vess Ossman, and “St. Louis Tickle.” To dispense with my obligatory Kanawha Valley fiddling content, Ossman was a favorite of fiddler Clark Kessinger. One listen to Oscar Aleman’s “Whispering’ and you will be hooked.

“Clowin’ the Frets” (from Eddie Bush and The Los Angeles Biltmore Trio) could have come from a Dan Hicks recording, and answers something I have always wondered – just where did he get those hot licks?

All the giants are here to enjoy: Carl Kress, Charlie Christian, Freddie Green, Oscar Moore, Barney Kessell, Wes Montgomery, Herb Ellis, John McLaughlin, Lee Ritenour, John Scofield Larry Coryell, John Abercrombie, James Blood Ulmer (just featured at the Sternwheel Regatta “Mountain Stage” show ni Charleston) and many more.

Even Jimi Hendrix. Which surprises me. I never thought of his playing — as great and imrovisitional as it was — as jazz. Whatever. This is a great collection.

– By Paul Gartner

The CD:“During the before and after”
Performer: Will Hoge
Note: Only available at www.willhoge.com

While grunge, however briefly, was king there was also a collection of bands that mixed a soulful, bluesy sound with intelligent pop sensibilities. Bands like the Black Crows, Counting Crows and the Gin Blossoms played a brand of straightforward American music that seemed to have been retired to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Like grunge, they had their season, then they were just gone… put away on a shelf somewhere and forgotten about.

Will Hoge brings it all back with a driving rock sound and a voice that is somewhere between Chris Robinson and Van Morrison. Recorded in concert at the Workplay Theatre in Birmingham, Alabama, ‘During the before and after’, is an impressive live album. Hoge and company run through a string of catchy songs about love and love lost. They rock from the start with “better off now (that you’re gone)” and “secondhand heart,” but by the end, they tread gingerly into the briar patch of national politics. Through “bible vs gun” and “america,” Hoge tries to return humanity to the people serving in the conflict without glamor or flag worship.

“During the Before and After” is straightforward American music with heart, brains and a genuine soul.

–By Bill Lynch

THE CD: “Fata Floral Phonograph”
PERFORMER: The Slow Poisoner
ON THE WEB: www.slowpoisoner.com

The Slow Poisoner, a one-man band from the distant galaxy of California, has been described as a collision between Johnny Cash and David Bowie, according to himself. I’m sad to report there were no survivors of that crash.

TSP’s music, as featured on his one-song EP, “Fatal Floral Phonograph,” is little more than a man beating on a bass drum while playing over-distorted blues riffs and shreiking into a microphone. Also known as Andrew Goldfarb, he is a self-titled “one-man surrealistic rock and roll band.” Just in case you didn’t believe him, he has plenty of artificially weird lyrics to hammer home the point. Lyrics such as “I am connected to the great cancer in the sky/In the fields next door there grew an eye” are so contrived one can almost see Goldfarb sitting in some West Coast café dutifully erasing and rewriting his lyrics until he felt they were bizarre enough to raise eyebrows and perhaps be confused with poetry.

Then there’s that voice. It is a high-pitched demon whine completely incongruous with his faux-psychedelic style. You would at least expect a phony Lou Reed, but instead we get a genuine dental drill.

It is strange, then, that Goldfarb has such an odd appeal. Perhaps there is something subconsciously impressive about a man who defies the usual demands of talent and decides to have fun acting strange. A really weird person can be creepy; what Goldfarb offers is just a pretty damn good time, even if it is garrish and hollow. Besides the album — it’s a sampler, really — is about 10 minutes long, so it’s all over pretty quickly.

TSP will be playing Oct. 4 at 9 p.m. at Marley’s Doghouse (2050 3rd Avenue) in Huntington. The cover is five bucks, but if you’re in the area, it might be worth seeing such a self-conciously surrealistic fellow.

– By Morgan Kelly

THE CD: “One Night in America” (Oglio Records)
PERFORMER: The Plimsouls

This Los Angeles-based quartet had its relatively modest peak during the post-disco, pre-New Wave era that lasted from 1978 to 1983. In this period, artists like the Violent Femmes and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts espoused the anti-social ethos of punk, but incorporated (for the most part) the more refined musical stylings of late-70s rock and metal.

While rejecting disco’s superficiality, bands of this time, like the Police, retained more insightful themes (again, for the most part) while also moving music in a lighter direction.

Despite their somewhat obscure status in music history, the Plimsouls — as far as the music on this album goes — display those transitional themes in their music like a musical evolutionary map. (It’s fitting that 1978 and 1983 mark precisely the Plimsouls formation and dissolution.)

Recorded live in 1981, “One Night in America” includes unobtrusive, yet simplistic punk-pop fusions like “Hush Hush” and “Now.” (For a modern equivalent, think Blink 182.) The more morose “I Want What You Got” features sound manipulation that is almost like a prelude to the angst-ridden syth-ballads of “Flock of Seagulls” and Cory Hart. Tunes like “One More Heartache” and “Help Yourself” are distorted, bluesy throwbacks to the early and mid-1970s.

–By Morgan Kelly