Velo Deluxe

Over the years, John Strohm's musical career has taken an increasingly iconoclastic tangent, from his days with the Lemonheads (with Evan Dando) to the bracing indie pop of Blake Babies (with Juliana Hatfield) to two albums with Antenna, a more left-of-center outfit – and now to Velo-Deluxe, his latest trio. On Superelastic, Strohm expresses himself like an action painter, using his electric guitar's palette of effects for brush strokes. It's abstract at times, animated by a barrage of dissimilar elements competing for your ear, suggesting a dynamic fusion of contradictions: ugliness and beauty, hope and despair, lassítude and resolve, momentum and inertia. In his lyrics, Strohm admits confusion – and demonstrates an all-too-keen grasp of reality. Although its details are personal and guarded, Superelastic, in this sense, speaks to the experience of any twentysomething post-collegian whose future looks as bleak as the one the punks gobbed at back in the '70s. Strohm's world view is refracted through a hazy pop filter, with all the blurs and untidiness left intact as part of his statement. This is definitively rendered in the four-song fusillade that opens the album: the title track; a song whose title is a slightly modified version of the band's name ("Vello Deluxe"); the elegiac "Simple"; and the scarifying "Dirtass." On that last song, kind of a "Psychotic Reaction" for the '90s, Strohm screams: "I feel sick, and I feel dirty/Might be dead before I'm 30." On "Superelastic," Strohm rolls out a veritable panzer division of hot-wired guitars, ranging in tone from power tools to ironic, high-reverb surf licks. On "Simple," amid a symphony of siren wails and doomsday riffs, Strohm examines the unfathomable rigors of daily life as if he were exploring an alien planet whose physics make every step a challenge: "There's so much time/Not enough time/There's so much dark/Too much light." In the end he declares, with just a ray of optimism, "I'll find a simple way/A way to stay in the warmth of the sun." Further into the album, the tension abates a bit, and Strohm acquits himself as a fine, angular pop songwriter. "Desiree," with its paisley-pop atmosphere and circular chant of "All I know is all I know," is entrancing, while "Eleven" deftly illustrates its allusions to being "caught in a whirl, spinning in circles" with misty, evanescent textures. The album ends on an abstract note as the uptempo finale, "Miracle," winds down to a lengthy, unsettling psychedelic coda. Strohm has not saddled this album with specious visions of sunny vistas. Superelastic is better than that: an artfully smudged document of reluctant disaffection whose creator is looking for a way to rise above it all while maintaining a healthy – and well-founded – skepticism. Superelastic is available from Mammoth, 919-932-1882. (RS 697) PARKE PUTERBAUGH Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.