Sample lyric from "Woodrow Wilson," one of several slow, agonized processionals on Vic Chesnutt's The Salesman and Bernadette: "She said her mother act like a first lady/She'd been having those problems lately/She said she's going to the clinic on Wednesday." Nothing special, really; bits of waiting-for-the-bus conversation. But there's genius lurking in here: With the detachment of an insurance adjuster, Chesnutt somehow transforms idle chatter into telling poetry. He follows the mundane further than many of his peers and comes back with a scruffy kind of magic realism – the grotesque man dripping Vitalis in "Parade," the rueful drunk who confronts his bad choices during a morning-after midlife crisis in "Square Room." Many of this Georgia raconteur's best compositions are unhinged tours of a troubled internal landscape; the gorgeously blunt "Maiden" places Vic in a surreal Victorian court, while the astonishing "Replenished," the album's masterpiece, mourns the end of summer with a grandmotherly observation: "Last days of direct sunlight for this part of the house."

Chesnutt has grown since his last effort, 1996's About to Choke. Though his reedy voice remains an acquired taste, he's gotten good at suggesting a variety of moods with it: He renders "Square Room" and "Maiden" with a soulman's sweet understatement and languishes over the bitter phrases of "Arthur Murray" as though determined to make each contemplation mean something. Phrases like "One wicked brand from your tortuous hand/You laugh when I tell you you're gorgeous" wind up with disarming multiple meanings, and it's this gift – the ability to conjure fever-dream narratives from such seeming stream-of-consciousness babble – that makes Chesnutt such a rare treasure. (RS 801)

TOM MOON