T Bone Burnett

A terrific songwriter but a terrible sermonizer, T Bone Burnett -- back in the days before he devoted himself to producing such rootsy soundtrack albums as O Brother, Where Are Thou? and Cold Mountain -- made albums that offer an intriguing, sometimes maddening mixture of roots-oriented rock and high-minded rant. His first album, Truth Decay, is a solidly melodic, rockabilly-based outing that gets a little ham-fisted with its message (as in his the-devil-is-an-adman number, "Madison Avenue") but keeps the music light and lithe. Amazingly, Trap Door uses the same band but offers a completely different sound, which at its best -- "Hold On Tight," say, or "I Wish You Could Have Seen Her Dance" -- has all the chiming effervescence of a latter-day Byrds album. The production values are even higher on Proof Through the Night, which brings in a passel of high-profile guest musicians (Ry Cooder, Mick Ronson, Richard Thompson, Pete Townshend), but the high-gloss sound doesn't much help the material, which ultimately collapses under the weight of its bitterly pedantic lyrics.

Burnett throws a curve ball with T Bone Burnett, a conventional country album that's wonderfully well-sung but a tad too low-key. The Talking Animals, on the other hand, not only finds him returning to rock & roll but also regaining the ground lost with Proof Through the Night through wickedly funny songs such as "Image," a tango in four languages, or the dementedly Pirandellian "The Strange Case of Frank Cash and the Morning Paper." But The Criminal Under My Own Hat found his writing again falling prey to cleverness and studio gloss, which may explain his subsequent focus on production work. (J.D. CONSIDINE)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide