Hamell On Trial – Songs For Parents Who Enjoy Drugs

Sporting the year’s best album title, the latest from the anti-folk agitator suggests that fatherhood has left Ed Hamell funnier and angrier than ever. Funnier because after a few years of bedtime stories, he’s now setting his streetwiseguy sensibility to nursery-rhyme cadences. Angrier because the political world’s duplicities, inequities and absurdities threaten his son’s future. Little wonder, then, that a loving father might have an assassination fantasy about Rush Limbaugh (“Hey Boss”), take the culture wars to the gutter (“Coulter’s Snatch”), or be tempted to storm the barricades (“Civil Disobedience”). With production and backing by Ani DiFranco, some of the slighter material works better as comedy than music, and some of the bad-boy fantasizing seems to lean too heavily on shock-value titillation. But the closer the material hits to home — on “Inquiring Minds”, “Values”, “Mommy’s Not Talking Today”, “Father’s Advice”, “Wheels” (with guest vocals from Detroit Hamell) — the more powerfully it reaffirms the family values of an unrepentant rocker.