Crooked Crooner

I'm angling my car to work on a frigid Tuesday morning under the haze of a heavy post-party hangover, thinking about life and unrecognized opportunities. Crooked Fingers is playing on the car stereo-not cranked, but at a mild, pensive volume perfectly suited to the melancholy of an ambivalent morning. Crooked Fingers is that kind of album, the kind that makes you want to sit back, reevaluate, take a nice, long drag on a menthol cigarette and let your mind wander where you probably don't want it to go.

As the latest solo project of ex-Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachmann, Crooked Fingers takes some of the Archers' most endearing qualities-like simple song structures, memorable songwriting and Bachmann's penetrating, nasal croak-and sits them down by the fireplace, slowing the pace and bringing the rock almost to a standstill. The album is not a total sleeper, but the slower, more melodic songs and lush arrangements give it a whimsical, dreamlike quality that doesn't resembel the Archers in the least. Crooked Fingers isn't a headbanger album, but it really shouldn't be. The slower, more demulcent pace is what makes it work.

Crooked Fingers is an album of mood songs, not singalongs. As solo outings often are, it's personal and direct, untethered by pesky expectations and alleviated from any obvious need for validation. It is merely a document, words over guitars, bass and drums lathered with bells and strings. Bachmann captures a moment in time here, a long night of icy weather and sentimentality. Crooked Fingers is free of egotistical flourishes; Bachmann isn't Mick Jagger, and he doesn't try to be. The album does what independent albums do best, distilling the small, complicated moments of life into a personal yet accessible album. This is music that inspires-and recalls-memories.

Crooked Fingers is a hangover album. A post-coital haze hangs over every dark-themed song, from the tough-morning meditation of "New Drink for the Old Drunk" to the sexual confusion of "She Spread Her Legs and Flew Away." Bachmann ruminates on such things as girls burning and evil lurking, like a drunk poet in a gutter-the disillusioned intellectual, the post-'90s rocker sifting through the left behind emotional and sonic rubble of the real "me" decade.

Though Bachmann's voice takes some getting used to (he sometimes sounds like he's got about a plantation's worth of cotton shoved in his sinuses), his voice on this album is the best that it has sounded. The Archers' sound took some focus away from Bachmann's whine, but the band's more rocking sound also demanded louder singing that clearly strained his pipes. Without all the heavy guitars, Bachmann's voice is softened and prettified; he almost recalls Elliott Smith at times. When you think of Crooked Fingers, think of Neil Young or Neutral Milk Hotel: sometimes, it's the ragged crooner that makes the most sense.

And these are the times, as the snow melts and the winter slowly wanes away, for an album like this to make its mark. It's an intimate album, with small moments and small aspirations. But when the air chills your heart and slush dampens your feet, it's a night indoors with the lights down, listening to an album like this, that makes those little moments special.