Sometime in the late 1990s, shortly after going on a ten-album buying spree whose haul proved spectacularly unsatisfying, I temporarily gave up on the music industry. I resigned myself to the idea that I would never again buy an album that I actually loved.

Lately, something has changed for the better. Maybe the specter of internet piracy has scared the industry into thinking that it should actually try, rather than just focus on moving product. Maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe I’ve just gotten smarter about where I choose to go looking.

Mike Doughty’s Haughty Melodic, released at the beginning of May, was a good start. Recently I’ve gone on a bit of a spree again, and the results have been much more gratifying this time around. The biggest gem in this haul is Kathleen Edwards, a plucky Canadian singer-songwriter who’s apparently categorized as “Alternative Country”. Her sweet-revenge single, “Back to Me”, was punchy enough to sell me on the album of the same title, her sophomore effort, after I’d heard it just once on the radio.

She’s got a simultaneously spare and unsparing way with a pen, and a smoky voice with which to expertly deliver the payload she’s crafted. As for the things she can do with a steel guitar, well, let’s just say that I could listen to the bridges of some of her songs for hours, and have.

Do you think that I’ve changed
I swear I never tried
Memory is a terrible thing
When you use it right
— “Away”

Dirk took me to see The Unsane, with Made Out Of Babies and Blackfire Revelation opening, at The Blank Club tonight.

Had you recieved a prescription for 100-plus decibels of fat, crunchy noise, this would have been the place to get it filled. You could feel it thrumming across your chest, the palms of your hands, and the soles of your feet. There are times when that sort of sonic assault is exactly the cure for what ails you, and tonight was one of them. All in all, a damn fine show.

Hot on the heels of the Rockity Roll re-release comes Doughty’s new studio album, Haughty Melodic, which was released today, and which I’m listening to right now. Initial reaction: damn, this kicks ass. About half the album is material I’ve heard before, stuff that simmered and mellowed during the years that Doughty toured the country like an itinerant troubadour with a guitar slung across his back.

You might think that this would leave me feeling ripped off; if so, you’d be dead wrong. The arrangements on the new album are so damn rich, so simultaneously energetic and polished, that listening to them after having heard their acoustic forebears is like seeing the final lithograph after having reviewed a series of pencil sketches. The promise and vitality of the early versions carries through undimmed, but it’s bolstered by tasteful and restrained elaborations and enhancements.

Besides, now I finally know what the bridge to “Grey Ghost” sounds like when sung with real words. (And if you have no idea what that means, have someone lucky enough to own a copy of Smofe + Smang: Live in Mpls. play you that album’s “Grey Ghost”, which contains the amazing “fake-word bridge” that gave Smofe + Smang its title.)

Doughty will be in town on May 20th. Alas, advance tickets have sold out. We will have to try our luck at the will-call booth. Stand aside, puny humans! You place yourselves between me and a man who can use the word “decathecting” in a lyric at your own grave peril.

At some point, while I wasn’t looking, Mike Doughty reissued Rockity Roll, which I’d missed the first time around. Not one to make the same mistake twice, I snagged it before it could get away from me again.

Okay, so it was bundled with Skittish, which I already had, but the total price was still $15, so who cares? I’ve paid more for music and enjoyed it a hell of a lot less.

The solo albums are less dissociated than Doughty’s Soul Coughing work. The latter tended, while irresistibly catchy, toward word salad. This was entirely by design, and it was damn fine word salad, to be sure, but it was word salad all the same. You couldn’t stop singing along, but you weren’t always sure just what the things you were singing meant.

Skittish and Rockity Roll are more concrete. Doughty’s immense cleverness with words is still on display, but now it’s used in the service of revelation rather than obfuscation. The newer albums are about longing and loss, missed opportunities and lessons learned. They have about them the hardened, flinty optimism of a man who has been through the darkness and survived, but has not forgotten what he saw along the way.

The best I ever did with my life
Said just three honest words to you
Three droplets in pail of lies
Three gems among the alibis

Skittish is still as good as it ever was; Rockity Roll is a nice counterpoint. Where Skittish is almost austere in its acoustic arrangements, Rockity Roll adds a little more texture. Doughty himself says it most succinctly: “It’s my acoustic thing, plus some low-fi, fake new wave drum machine and synthesizer that I played/programmed.” While no one in their right mind would describe the result as overproduced, it feels lusher, acoustically, than Skittish did. (It also contains a live version of “The Only Answer”, a song that previously appeared both on Smofe + Smang: Live in Mpls. and Skittish. The new version features some delightful counterpoint courtesy of an anonymous keyboardist. The only thing marring it is what seems to be some nasty distortion in the live recording. I’d love to hear a cleaned-up studio production of that arrangement.)

It’s good, good stuff, and money well spent.

Oh. My. God.

Jon and Al Kaplan are very, very, very bad people. Perhaps I shall write them a strongly-worded letter — as soon as I’ve finished listening to their work and laughing myself helpless.