Let the Night Fall

The mighty Tris McCall. Straight out of Jersey (City). Track one clarifies (as in butter) the narrator's inability to portray himself in life as he feels with the ultimate college radio station (which eventually lost its college), then re-coalesces those disparate elements at room temperature. Track three follows a man who only wanted to better manage waste treatment, then allowed himself to admit to himself that he saw a superhero in the mirror -- before the world he let into his bedroom breaks that mirror for him.

Track five tries to equate theft and vandalism with the nobility of Gandhi (and the sound of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles), allowing defeat before its end through acknowledgment that an act can't be judged noble or not if no one notices or cares enough to settle in the judgment seat. Track seven, with more soul singing plus a piano-plinking intro, swerves into the reverse succession of fast-food restaurants on one site, jumping off script to speculate about the narrator's past lives, then back to plastic-sign archeology, invoking a small child having a bad day alongside an avowal: "It's all so deeply horrible, it's great to be alive."

Track nine presents 1:13 of Mozart or someone like him. Track eleven unfolds 1:54 of life in a small town or at least an ugly one, sorry you feel you have to go because I don't, but anyway we're all here for you even and especially if you fall on your face and/or especially your ass. Track thirteen celebrates a sunrise in the singer's beloved Jersey, contaminants and all.

I thought about mentioning the other five tracks but figured on a record this rich I'd leave some for you to plunder by your lonesome. You don't have to be from Jersey. You just have to have ears. And oxygen.

• Album: Let the Night Fall (2009)
• Artist: Tris McCall
• MP3s etc.: trismccall.net