Pop & Jazz Reviews : Rodney Crowell Eager But Schizoid

Now that the very public, very volatile Rodney Crowell-Rosanne Cash marriage is history, cerebral country-rock fans have been anxiously awaiting Crowell’s new album, “Life Is Messy,” as if it would be an answer to Cash’s revelatory “Interiors,” sort of matching his ‘n’ hers confessionals. By that standard, the album (due in mid-May) seems a bit anticlimactic, an incongruous mixture of sad, half-regretful musings and almost defiantly glib rockers.

Crowell premiered the new album during an equally schizoid show on Tuesday at the Variety. Five songs into the set he announced his intention to launch into the first seven tracks from the recording, but by no means does “Life Is Messy” constitute any kind of song cycle that would demand sequential reproduction.

And having a willfully shallow, ‘50s-style lust song like “Better Than This” succeed a balladic portrait of devastation like “I Hardly Know How to Be Myself” (co-written by Cash) sounded as strange in concert as it does on record, as if Crowell always were determined to immediately undercut any honest sympathy he might engender with a breezy piece of upbeat denial.

All psychoanalysis aside, Crowell was as focused in his eagerness to entertain as he wasn’t in his personal vision, and the 100-minute show rarely sagged. The new material has less of a traditionalist bent than his “Diamonds and Dirt” hits, but isn’t so far afield that it couldn’t fare just as well with country audiences. Swaggering loosely during the rockers, offering big, emotional gestures during the ballads, Crowell had an easy charm to go with his solid craftsmanship. Just don’t expect too terribly revealing a peek behind the veil.