Alejandro Escovedo: Bourbonitis Blues EP

These days, EPs are usually packed with useless filler tacked onto some familiar single. Yet the short format can still be a great way for an artist to offer fans a glimpse of things to come or an unfamiliar facet of his or her music. Alejandro Escovedo has had such a long and varied career—he's played in The Nuns, Rank & File, and True Believers—that his disparate tastes inevitably manifest themselves when he performs live: Escovedo is notorious for playing a raucous rendition of The Stooges "I Wanna Be Your Dog" right after an elegiac ballad. Now that he records for the epicenter of alt-country, Bloodshot Records, he's free to do just about anything he wants. Escovedo is one of the few performers who can release a vital live album, as he did with last year's gorgeous More Miles Than Money, and he similarly does more with the stop-gap EP than most musicians do with their full-lengths. Bourbonitis Blues is a nine-song collection of covers and originals that not only reveals just how wide-ranging Escovedo's tastes are, but does a nice job recreating the unpredictable atmosphere of his concerts. Beginning with the epic, string-augmented "I Was Drunk" and continuing through songs from Ian Hunter ("Irene Wild"), Jimmy Rodgers ("California Blues," sung with Jon Langford), John Cale ("Amsterdam"), the Velvet Underground ("Pale Blue Eyes," with Kelly Hogan), and The Gun Club ("Sex Beat"), Bourbonitis Blues is yet another remarkable release from one of America's best songwriters. Along with "I Was Drunk," "Guilty," "Sacramento & Polk," and the swamp-rock of "Everybody Loves Me" are three great new additions to Escovedo's catalog of crowd-pleasing rock songs, each of which easily holds its own against the classics Escovedo covers.