Bobby Bare Jr.: Young Criminals' Starvation League

Though his southern-rock band Bare Jr. has a reputation for laying on riffs with maximum distortion and twang, Bobby Bare Jr. is as inclined to relax with a stack of Smiths records as to party the night away to the sounds of Molly Hatchet. Bare's Morrissey fetish gets its boldest public airing with "The Monk At The Disco," from Young Criminals' Starvation League, the singer-songwriter's solo debut. Away from his regular bandmates, Bare goes anglophilic, launching into a jaunty rhythm carried by acoustic guitars and given atmosphere by a distant, whistling electric guitar. "The Monk At The Disco" lies halfway between homage to and parody of Britpop at its goofiest, and just when it seems that the whole thing might be a gag, Bare wraps the song with a drum solo swiped from The Who's "Happy Jack," making clear that above all, this project is about indulgence. Criminals maintains links to Bare's country-music heritage: Singing in a high, affected rasp, he can't shake his vocal drawl, and he ropes in his Nashville hitmaker father to sing backup. But for the most part, his background comes filtered through British rock bands who've been influenced by country, as on "Mehan," which sounds like an outtake from The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet. Bare adds calliope-like organ to the hick character study "Flat Chested Girl From Maynardville," and a mellow, humming brass section to the cheerful "I'll Be Around." The hey-why-not instrumentation jibes with Bare's lyrics, which, as on his Bare Jr. albums, have mostly to do with girls. But he usually writes about girls he's disappointed, while the songs on Criminals tend to be about girls to whom he's pledging his best. That includes his true mistress, rock 'n' roll, addressed in the daringly awkward rant "Dig Down"—basically a litany of the rock stars who've done their jobs so well that there's no real reason for a young rocker to keep trying. "Dig Down" sounds bitter, but it ends with a chorus of the singer and his pals aping the hooting from the Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil," and Bare follows the song with a bluesy cover of The Smiths' "What Difference Does It Make" Such are the ways of love.