Jeff Black – Birmingham Road

It takes awhile, but if you stick with Jeff Black’s debut, Birmingham Road, the sweet and subtle melodies begin to pull you in, especially since their well-crafted arrangements feel so effortlessly seductive. The sound of Black’s record is its best feature, something that should come as no real surprise given that the backing band is three-fifths of Wilco — bassist John Stirratt, guitarist Jay Bennett, and drummer Ken Coomer. Behind Black (and with Iris DeMent singing along on two cuts, although, oddly, she offers but one barely audible line in each), the Wilco boys sound more polished than ever, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The record has something of a Dave Matthews vibe, but only because it’s interested in acoustic, faintly funky and jazzy grooves. The title track sounds like Bruce Hornsby or some 10,000 Maniacs song I can’t quite name; “Noah’s Ark” has a chorus that gets me thinking of Lyle Lovett; “King Of The World” reminds me of Wallflowers. But it always sounds like Black has borrowed these lightweight artists’ most charmingly atmospheric qualities, then — with Wilco’s assistance — beefed them up to fighting shape.

But while crafting this enticing sound is important to Black, it’s the words that seem to matter most to this former native of the Kansas City, Missouri, area. He’s a folkie at heart, and his interest in the words (lots of them) and their messages (almost all his songs have points to make) leave most of the tracks clocking in at five minutes or more. On the one hand, his insistence on writing about big themes, often in metaphor, is the most inviting part of his art; but on the other hand, it’s also the main obstacle to the admirable dreams and emotions of his work. His patronizing perspective — in the liner notes, Black says he’s on “a perpetual search for hidden truths,” but he almost always sounds like he already knows it all — finally turns me off, no matter how hypnotic the album sounds.