Vic Chesnutt And Mr. & Mrs. Keneipp: Merriment

Vic Chesnutt will never have to worry about coming off as excessively upbeat. Since the late '80s, he's carved a particularly gloomy niche that doesn't leave a lot of room for laughs, sometimes skirting what sounds like severe depression even when the music is tempered by uneasy black humor. His great 1996 album About To Choke—released after the paraplegic neo-folkie was celebrated on a Sweet Relief tribute compilation—even came with the morbid caveat, "Some of this album may be a bit obsessed with the premise that through death, life is nourished." Chesnutt's 1998 collaboration with Lambchop, The Salesman & Bernadette, was a bit perkier than usual, and while the disc got him dropped from his label, the experience has led him to record another group effort. Kelly and Nikki Keneipp, the co-billed Mr. and Mrs., are associates of Jack Logan, and Backburner is their label. And while the pair contributed just about everything to Merriment except the lyrics and singing, it still sounds very much like a Chesnutt record. The title is, of course, an ironic red herring: The music is as dark and menacing as fans have come to expect. The title track, "Fissle (Vapor And Soot)," and "Sonny Pasture" are sobering, surreal little mysteries akin to the quieter moments of late-period Big Star, while Chesnutt's delivery continues to bear a slightly less graceful but no less poetic resemblance to that of art-rock pioneer Robert Wyatt. Merriment isn't as diverse as the Lambchop project, nor are Chesnutt's lyrics as conceptually linked. But the tone is consistently glum, with a somber piano connecting each song even as the elliptical lyrics take them in different directions. Merriment is a comparatively minor work, but its late-night lonely pleasures are many.