A rusty, banged-up sign with hand-painted words swings slowly over a porch in a light Georgia breeze, conveying its simple promise without need of neon. Parked beneath it in an old wheelchair, strumming a battered acoustic guitar, sits Vic Chesnutt, singing to his own wayward wind.

Over the course of five remarkable albums – including one under the name Brute with backing by the Athens, Ga., band Widespread Panic – Chesnutt has emerged as the smart mouth of the South, a cockeyed charmer with a rare gift for acute observation. Volunteering both sweetly offbeat yarns and soul-searing annals of self-defeat, Chesnutt has so far avoided mainstream radar while attracting a sizable cult of fans, some of whom paid him tribute on the recent celebrity-packed album Sweet Relief II – Gravity of the Situation.

Now Chesnutt joins the major-label fray with the gorgeous About to Choke. Perhaps fretting about the integrity police who inspect underground artists for evidence of commercial ambition, Chesnutt reverses the modest musical advances of his recent releases with minimal arrangements that make the elemental radiance of his songs (and his noticeably strengthened singing) more plain. The gently spiced "Tarragon," the weather report "Swelters" and the prescription-drug roster "Hot Seat" make do with spare acoustic guitar, while a piano proves a mellifluous foil for Chesnutt's syncopated elocution in "Myrtle." In the jazzy "Little Vacation," he uses keyboards to become his own small combo and adds a delightful mouth-trumpet solo to undercut the technology.

Elsewhere, Chesnutt gets into small-scale acoustic and electric rocking. A rhythm section bolsters the Soul Asylum-like chorus surge of "Giant Sands" and the strolling beauty of "New Town," a finely drawn cameo of a growing burg. Three additional guitarists bolster the emotional vehemence of the Dylanesque "See You Around," a compelling missive that describes a soured friendship with such finality that the mesmerizing titular refrain becomes more a warning than a pledge. But then a brief distant echo of "Myrtle" closes the record, softening the salutation into a restless farewell. (RS 749)

IRA ROBBINS