Consumer Guide Album

Dave Alvin: Public Domain [HighTone, 2000]
If Harry Smith is what some people love about folk music, this is what other people hate about it, summed up by a title that claims humility as it sneaks presumption in the stage door--a title worthy of a brilliant record and dishonored by this dull one. Alvin can be a deft lyricist in the colloquial-songpoet mode, pinning the kind of homely literary detail the folk regularly established or bypassed with commonplaces, absurdities, generalizations, and luck. But it took him years to learn to sing his own stuff, and interpreting the canon he's worse than hopeless. It's not that these songs are all obvious or overdone--this nonfolkie had never heard a few of them. It's that they're so soft they squish even when Alvin tries to rev one past you, which usually he doesn't. C+