Brian Dewan
Tells the Story (Bar/None A-HAON 033-2)

Known to They Might Be Giants fans as a slightly-more-than-peripheral figure in the TMBG musical universe (he sings a couple of the "Fingertips" snippets, and he designed the cover art for Lincoln), Brian Dewan could easily be written off as a novelty artist if his music weren't so strangely haunting.

Dewan writes music in a very formal neo-Appalachian folk ballad style and plays it primarily on a self-made electric zither, which already probably sounds weird or quirky to most who haven't heard him, then throw in titles like "Feel the Brain," "Obedience School," and "99 Cops" and you get the impression this is going to be a "funny" album. And it is, um, sort of.

Tells the Story opens with "99 Cops," Dewan's biggest crowd-pleaser but the weakest song on the album. It does have its appeal – "99 cops sitting in a tree/K-I-S-S-I-N-G/I shot one, he fell dead/Teach 'em a lesson for sittin' in a tree" – but compared with the other songs it's child's play.

Dewan is at his best with the ancient-yet-modern sounding New Englandy ballads like "The Cowboy Outlaw," "The Record," "The Day the Day Stood Still," and the incredible "Feel the Brain." These songs defy comparison to anything else – funny, spooky, fun, serious – just good, is all that matters.

His comedic tendencies come out in stuff like "The Letter" (detailing the catastrophic things that happen to various people who break a chain letter, hilariously), "Wastepaper-Basket Fire" (about an office wastepaper basket fire, retold as an epic poem), and "My Eye" ("Oh let me tell you the dreadful story/of how I poked out my eye").

Great stuff. Sort of like good ghost stories (and many of these songs essentially are ghost stories), these songs offer suspense, humorous relief, and irony, all delivered in a totally deadpan Puritan preacher style, like Jonathan Edwards reincarnated as a rock star (not the rock star Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan Jonathan Edwards. Could someone hand me a better reference, please?).

Most of the songs are narrative, blending anachronistic language with stern moralizing to present a musical world entirely unlike anyone else's.

The arrangements are very sparse, mainly zither and voice, with occasional augmentation with accordion, bass, or percussion. It's a great album, one of those where you wonder why the artist doesn't get more press. He's precisely the sort of musician NPR should be featuring when they're wasting time on the likes of David Gray.

But then, I picture Dewan being interviewed on NPR and the interviewer just not getting it whatsoever, telling him his lyrics are "fun" and "cute." They are, but they're much further left-of-center than the typical NPR fare. Great paragraph there, P.P., you set up an argument and then argue with your own point, fully negating the momentum by the end. There goes the Pulitzer for Internet Writing.

Dewan is so 100% original I'd love to give this album the highest rating purely on principle. But a couple tracks just blend in ("The Creatures" and "Drinking Bird") and some of the outright comedy ("Cut Your Hair," "99 Cops") don't stand up to repeated listens as well as some of the other tracks, which are almost all otherwise very deep and beautiful. This is an album and an artist greatly deserving greater attention.

He's not for everyone, certainly, but in a perfect world he'd be bigger than the Spice Girls. Apparently he devotes as much time to his art as to his music, if not more, so he's not terribly prolific – yet you wouldn't really want twenty Brian Dewan albums to choose from.

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Pennsylvania Pete