In performance, mugging and clowning, Loudon Wainwright has the ability to transmute pathos and desperation into a Chaplinesque comedy of self-ridicule that is immediately funny and ultimately compassionate. Thankfully, the contradictory elements also come through on record.

Most of Attempted Mustache was recorded in Nashville with producer Bob Johnston, and though it may be Loudon's best album to date, it is hurt by the fact that his voice is mixed down and smoothed out. Though he shows himself to be at home in the country-rock idiom ("A.M. World" and "Nocturnal Stumblebutt"—fine songs with strong arrangements), the pure essence of Loudon is still to be found in simple acoustic settings.

Such a setting graces the album's six-minute highlight, "The Man Who Couldn't Cry," the absurdist, atheistic story of a contemporary Job: hilarious, heartbreaking and in the end profoundly cynical. Like most of Loudon's best material, "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" is more a monologue than a song. What little melody exists is there to accommodate the narrative and Loudon's intensely acted and sung rendition.

The song underscores a theme that is recurrent throughout the album and indeed through the whole Wainwright canon—the problem of expressing in a palatable and constructive way a fiercely exacerbated emotional life tethered by Yankee scruples. Interestingly, the album's one failure, "Clockwork Chartreuse," is a dramatic monologue with a rock setting in which the narrator espouses random violence as the way to catharsis.

On the other hand, Loudon's songs about the catharses of sports and alcohol are triumphs. "The Swimming Song," which has an ingratiating banjo-guitar backup, exalts the physical act of swimming as a necessary emotional release while also ridiculing it as therapy:

Salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes

I'm a self-destructive fool

.... This summer I might have drowned

But I held my breath and I kicked my feet

And I moved my arms around.

"Down Drinking at the Bar" is as terrifying as "Swimming Song" is engaging. As recorded here it is a slice of pain and resentment that leaves a lasting impression—like a revelation spewed by a Eugene O'Neill character. Other topics Loudon considers with characteristic irony are stardom ("A.M. World" and "Liza"), fashion ("Bell Bottom Pants") and religion ("I Am the Way").

Mercifully, the album's last cuts, both of which deal with fatherhood, balance tenderness and love against the preceding acerbity and nihilism. "Dilated to Meet You" is a gentle invocation to an unborn child. With his wife, Kate McGarrigle, whose lovely folk ballad, "Come a Long Way" is the album's one cut not written by Loudon, he sings: "We really think you'll like it here/We hope that you'll like us." "Lullaby," the finale, is sung to the same child, now born. In his finest vocal to date, Loudon evinces the extreme vulnerability and capacity to love that are the obvious concomitants to rage and cynicism.

In its totality, Attempted Mustache shows us that Loudon is now more the parent than the child of his extraordinary artistic-emotional impulse, though the child is still magically present. It is an excellent album with many flashes of literary genius. (RS 150)

STEPHEN HOLDEN