Should have known my weird state would come through. The Sounds of Weirdness is a great concept album, featuring genuinely talented musicians with some brains and usually more than a little sense of humor. It even features several cuts, each funnier than the one that preceded it, from The Bum Bar Bastards (the Bastards being the inspiration for the phony phone calls from The Simpsons' early episodes.) The Sounds of Weirdness is a well-balanced, eclectic collection that is good for the ears, the soul, and the digestion.

The album gets to a leaping start with "Anarchy in Midgetville"--Headwound crams a bunch of Jersey urban legends into one shot. The state's best-known legend, the Jersey Devil, gets a track by Primal Smell, but it's less than a royal treatment; the song sounds as if the band sat around and said "Fuck conventional songwriting. We're going to make a song that sounds like crap on purpose." And crappy it is, but catchier than I should feel comfortable admitting. Ong's Hat's "The Ballad of Fred (The Five-Legged Frog)" features a relaxed, almost folky kind of humor, and "Driving in New Jersey" is simply one of the funniest--and truest--songs ever to reach my ears. (And speaking of driving, The Accelerators' "Shades of Death Road" is a kickass driving song.) The Whirling Dervishes give us the album's darkest cut, "John's List," a true account of a 1971 mass-murder and a song that wouldn't sound out of place on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Murder Ballads. My picks for the album, however, would have to be David Kleiner's "Exit 135 (The Ballad of Clark Westfield)", an interesting, amusing song that made me want to hear more of what Kleiner had to say, and The Anthony Wayne Sounds' "The Larry Doby Highway," a song that moves along dreamily in a way similar to REM's "Nightswimming" and Sarah Harmer's "Lodestar." Highly recommended.