Bobby Bare Jr.'s Young Criminal Starvation League

The Longest Meow

Bloodshot

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The opening moments of the cheekily-titled "Bionic Beginning," the first track on Bobby Bare Jr.'s third solo album, are appropriately sloppy: a few random plucks of a guitar, the stray crack of drums, a wheezing saxophone and Bare wobbly warming up his voice. Then someone counts off "1-2-3-4" and it all magically coheres into a seething Southern-rock stomp. So it goes with The Longest Meow, which bears all the rough-around-the-edges hallmarks of being bashed out with help from members of My Morning Jacket and Lambchop in one 11-hour session. There's an engaging randomness to these tunes that excessive contemplation or an overly nosy producer might have quashed. Noisy guitar squalls happily interrupt the haunted, Wilco-ish folk meditation, "Gun Show." "Back To Blue" opens with a stately mariachi horn line before settling into a loping country groove. "Snuggling World Championships" is acid-fried psychedelic rock that would make the Flaming Lips proud. Along the way, Bare's ever-potent wit never obscures the genuine emotion at the center of these songs. Things fall apart here as often as they come together but that, it seems, is the point.

-- David Peisner