Bob Schneider – Lonelyland

More than a year after it went on sale at Waterloo Records in Austin — where it eventually sold more than 10,000 copies, at a single store — Lonelyland finally received a nationwide release via Universal in March. The ultimate big-fish-in-a-small-pond story, Schneider has been king of the Austin music scene for the past couple years, while popping up in supermarket celebrity magazines as the beau of Sandra Bullock.

Schneider has actually been around Austin for years, first surfacing with the ghastly early-’90s funk ensemble Joe Rockhead before graduating to the merely mediocre jam band Ugly Americans in the mid-’90s. The latter group eventually devolved into the Scabs, a lounge-band with X-rated songs that drew capacity crowds to its Tuesday-night shows at Antone’s but underscored Schneider’s tendency to pander to the lowest common denominator.

The flip side was the scene at the Saxon Pub, where a loose aggregation called the Resentments (whose original lineup included Jon Dee Graham, Stephen Bruton and Hal Ketchum) began holding court in the late-’90s. Schneider found his way into that crowd and recruited some of its prime players for a side-project band called Lonelyland that revealed for the first time his considerable talent as a pop tunesmith. Raw hints appeared on his first solo disc, Songs Sung And Played On Guitar At The Same Time (basically just a CD pressing of solo acoustic demos).

Lonelyland opens with a pure three-minute pop ditty, “Metal And Steel”, that rivals anything issued by Freedy Johnston or Matthew Sweet in the past decade. The plainly rambling “2002”, a reminiscence from the future about a lost soul and how he got there, shows Schneider’s allure as a lyricist. The most effective cut overall is “Big Blue Sea”, which alternates between rhythmic, stream-of-consciousness verses and a drop-dead-hook of a chorus.

The rest of the record is the sound of an artist still trying to figure out who he is. It bounces from quirky funk (“Jingy”) to muscular rock (“Bullets”) to wandering pop (“Madeline”), but the songwriting isn’t strong enough to hold these diverse directions together. What remains to be seen is whether Schneider has a sharp enough instinct to recognize which of his songs are worth keeping — and whether he’s willing to cut out all the sideshow crap and focus on the heart of his music.