Lemhouse transitions from solo blues-based songwriter to eclectic Americana explorer with his second album, sandwiching country, blues, bluegrass, and rock and roll into his intensely rhythmic electric/acoustic combo arrangements. It’s a shift that seems as natural for him as his 1997 relocation from his native Salem (Oregon) to Memphis, where his subtle drawl and equally easeful command of Delta-fueled slide guitar make him seem more of a resident than most natives. His lyrics are evocative of back-country terrain, full of stories of lost love and tortured souls — the kind of men who need to set a razor on the nightstand to keep the Devil at bay (to paraphrase “Scarlet”). But he’s got a great sense of humor, too. “You’re a Bastard” is a belligerent drunk’s manifesto; “The Unofficial Ballad of Story Musgrave” is a tongue-in-cheek interior dialogue about the 16-year wait the astronaut endures before flying his first space-shuttle mission, piqued by jealousy when he’s beaten into infinity and beyond by a chimp. Lemhouse does return to his solo roots with the banjo-and-voice hardscrabble tale “Never Me,” but it sounds more like a refugee from an Otis Taylor album than one of his own edgy stories, which, like his North Mississippi reworking of the traditional “Cluck Old Hen,” shake the house with juke-joint thunder, or blow gently as a hot breeze off the Mississippi.
