Consumer Guide Album

Hamell on Trial: Rant and Roll [Righteous Babe, 2008]
Though the man aka Hamell on Trial wields a loud acoustic guitar, this document of his award-winning 2007 performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is basically a comedy record. Sinking old, new, and previously unrecorded songs into monologues about pizza-faced pizza bosses and his kid's chance of getting hit by a car, he harangues, jokes around, and rocks out about "the terrorism of everyday life"--a theme epitomized for Hamell by the recent finding that oral sex increases the practitioner's susceptibility to cancer by 250 percent. He rarely bothers scoring political points because he figures his audience doesn't need them. Instead he expands on power's existential ramifications. The concert lasts 63 minutes; a truncated version pumped with sharp interviews and low-budget visual interpolations occupies a one-hour DVD. Comedy records wear out, and unless friends come over, you may not play this one much even if you love it the first time. But if my description makes you think you might love it, you will. A-