Folks who got turned on to the upbeat roots-rock of the BoDeans when the producers of television melodrama Party of Five chose the band's "Closer to Free" as a theme song might like to know that co-frontman Sam Llanas has taken a temporary sabbatical to front a new band called Absinthe. |

But be forewarned: Newcomers ought not expect the same sort of starry-eyed heartland pop from Absinthe's debut, A Good Day to Die. The disc, which Llanas is releasing himself, makes for some pretty uneasy listening -- an appropriate atmosphere, given that it's more or less a concept disc about the 1976 suicide of the singer's older brother.

"I had to make this record no matter what, and I was willing to risk it all to do it," says Llanas of the album, which will be released on Halloween. "I feel like I can die happy now."

Llanas hasn't split entirely from his old partners in the BoDeans, who, he notes, were "fired" by the label bosses at Reprise a few months before he began A Good Day to Die. The album was recorded with a band that includes Guy Hoffman, the drummer who left the BoDeans to join the Violent Femmes -- a band that found itself similarly label-less when Interscope cut them loose this spring.

"When you're part of a band, you hardly ever get to do exactly what you want, and I wanted a chance to be judged on my own musical vision," says Llanas, whose high-lonesome voice is even more striking in Absinthe's context than in that of the BoDeans. "My favorite records are the kind that you listen to late at night with headphones. I wanted this record to be like that."

DAVID SPRAGUE(October 9, 1998)