Metro Pulse/Platters/Chris Knight, Cake, The White Stripes

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This Week: Chris Knight's poetic losers, Cake's hook-y but familiar tunes, and The White Stripes' fresh garage rock

Chris Knight

A Pretty Good Guy (Dualtone)

Chris Knight, he's a caution. He goes and records an album of songs about shootin' and robbin' and fightin' and killin' and fleein', and then he names it after the one song that doesn't have any of that. Of course, even that one's got a whole lotta heartbreak (as in, "Since you've been gone/ I've realized/ That you were wrong/ I'm a pretty good guy"). But the title is as close to a joke you get on the whole dark record.

Knight is a straight-up, no-bullshit smalltown guy from Western Kentucky, the kind of guy John Mellencamp would be if he didn't secretly want to be a movie star. On this, his second album, he ups the bleakness quotient to a point that would be damn depressing if the songs weren't drawn in such sharp detail. Actually, it's depressing anyway, but in a way that pulls you in. The subject matter is familiar, and so is the twang-bang roots rock sound (courtesy of producer Dan Baird, who keeps the arrangements as sparse and stony as the words), but Knight's viewpoint is all his own. He sees things from the ground up and keeps it all so focused and specific that there's no room for anthems or grandeur. Maybe because he grew up down the street from the people he sings about, and has been one or two of them himself, he's got no use for romanticizing their plights. The kid who shoots a guy over a card game in "Becky's Bible" is just a young dumb-ass, and he's a completely convincing dumb-ass. Ditto the class-resentful beggar-turned-mugger in "If I Were You" and the vengeful killer in "Down the River."

It's hard to listen, sometimes, and harder not to. What Knight gives his characters is not sympathy or myth but something more direct—a voice.

—Jesse Fox Mayshark

Cake

Comfort Eagle (Columbia)

Cake's John McCrea (and, without him, there'd be no Cake) writes songs that suck you in with their clever, hook-y lyrics, like "The Distance" bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse/ assail him, impale him with monster-truck force. On paper, these lines don't look like much, but delivered by McCrea in his clipped, consonant-laden Lou Reed-esque spoken word manner, this couplet takes on nuance and sparkle. After the words snap your attention to them, you start to hear all of the other stripped-down instruments that decorate McCrea's words like Christmas tree ornaments, glittery and attention-getting while never distracting from the beauty of the tree as a whole.

Cake's newest, Comfort Eagle, is more of the same. It builds on the previous three albums ('94's Motorcade of Generosity, '96's Fashion Nugget, and '98's Prolonging the Magic), honing that unique Cake sound without ever really forcing it to evolve—which makes it both fun to listen to and a bit of a let-down. All of McCrea's usual touches are here—from clap-along bits to sharp horn bits to intriguing piano run bits—and they texture the disc's 36 minutes (what is it with short pop albums lately?) worth of songs with unexpectedly expected noises that ultimately support what the singer-speaker has to say. Some of the stand-out tracks, including the Mozart-inspired "Symphony in C," the '70s disco-inspired "Love You Madly," and the clever, crisp "Short Skirt/Long Jacket," stick in your brain like burrs in polar fleece. And while Comfort Eagle is great fun, finger-snappin', booty-shakin' music, one can't help but hope that McCrea will push himself harder on the next album.

—Adrienne Martini

The White Stripes

White Blood Cells (Sympathy for the Record Industry)

You get so used to being happy to find good music to listen to that when you hear great music, you instinctively mistrust it. After all, how is it possible that this upstart, Jack White, picks up the same old garage-rock that's been fondled and slavered over by every pudding-bowled pud since Johnson was president and comes back with something fresh and unique? But there it is, 16 songs' worth, on the new White Stripes album, White Blood Cells.

Guitarist/vocalist Jack and his drummer "sister" Meg White have nailed the neo-garage look (trademark red-and-white outfits) and sound (tough, melodic, and stripped-down, White Blood Cells sounds a bit like a lost Stones album that disappeared somewhere between Aftermath and Between the Buttons). But it's what Jack does with the emotional game of garage in his deceptively simple songwriting that puts the duo's third album way ahead of the pack and far beyond retro. Songs like "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground," "Fell in Love With A Girl," and "Now Mary" swagger musically, and how, but the lyrics fess up to a most un-garage-like romantic vulnerability. Meanwhile, tunes like the rambunctious acoustic romp "Hotel Yorba" and the near-perfect eyes-of-a-10-year-old ballad "We're Going to Be Friends" break up the stomp-heavy running order while showing off Jack's lyrical skills and his unabashed sweet side. The very fact that he has a sweet side explains a lot about White Blood Cells' appeal. At last, a true garage rocker you can take home to mom.

—Lee Gardner