Throughout most of his six previous albums, especially In the Dark With You and One More Goodnight Kiss, Greg Brown gave us wise, intimate, often humorous songs about the hard but good life in small-town America. He portrayed families and neighbors linked together in compassion and camaraderie. One Big Town presents a bleaker vision. From his perspective as an inveterate touring musician, Brown sees a treasured sense of community vanishing, destroyed by bland and greedy corporations and our own helpless addiction to consumerism. Drugs, violence and apathy are the byproducts as money values replace human ones.

To render these dark themes more powerfully, Brown has fashioned a hard, raw musical style. He assembled a studio band that included Bob Thompson on saxophone and coproducer Bob "Bo" Ramsey on electric guitar. The gritty rock sound of "The Way They Get Themselves Up," an apocalyptic song about the insubstantiality of modern ambitions, and the self-mocking "Lotsa Kindsa Money," about the artist himself on a shopping spree abroad, will surprise those who think of Brown only as a laid-back soloist from Iowa and a former regular on A Prairie Home Companion.

Anger fuels this music and permeates One Big Town. "Outside money burnt my hometown/Like a moth in a flame," Brown sings on the title track. "All you got to do is travel around/And you'll see that everywhere is the same." The chillingly satiric "America Will Eat You" shows we the people being first deadened, then devoured by corporate rapaciousness. Throughout all ten songs Brown conveys horror at the creeping spiritual emptiness of the present and an aching sense of loss. As he puts it in the beautiful "Things Go On," "Everything we know is leaving/Like a train or a plane or a bus/The old old people are dying/And the new old people are just like us."

From one who has previously manifested a sweet, good-natured optimism, these foreboding images have special impact. One Big Town is Greg Brown's unified, compelling effort to shake us from sedation.

One Big Town is available from Red House Records, P.O. Box 4044, St. Paul, MN 55104. (RS 570)

MARTHA BUSTIN