From Here to Eternity : Latest Local Releases Focus on Struggles Both Worldly and Spiritual

This week’s sampling of new local album releases runs the gamut from the worldly blues of Debbie Davies and the James Harman Band, to the spiritual inner struggling of Christian rockers the Prayer Chain, with Nick Pyzow’s morally attuned heartland folk-rock somewhere in between. The ratings scale runs from * (poor) to **** (excellent). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

*** Nick Pyzow “Torchlight” AsFab

This veteran of Orange County bars and coffeehouses emerges on his fourth and best album with an expanded sound and a focused, cohesive lyrical thrust.

Like John Mellencamp on “The Lonesome Jubilee,” Pyzow has opted for a new palette of folk and country instrumental accents to color his heartland rock. Unlike Mellencamp, who could afford to hire other people for that insta-folk effect, Pyzow took pains to learn how to play mandolin, dobro and lap steel guitar himself.

While he isn’t the second coming of David Lindley, Pyzow wields his new instruments skillfully enough to make this more than an exercise in unplugged trend-hopping. He’s able to color meaning with his diverse instrumentation--witness the evocative sighing dobro and teardrop mandolin strains in the lovely all-acoustic lament “If I Only Knew.”

Pyzow’s songs have plenty of meanings to color, and he gets them across with vivid singing that’s never less than fully felt (the album’s intelligent sequencing is alert to the internal resonance between songs).

His husky voice does veer a bit too close in a couple of songs to the son-of-Springsteen approach that has cropped up in his past work. But now, even at his Bossiest, there’s a personal spark that’s all his own--the intriguing ambiguities of the anguished anthem “Where Liars Go,” or the wry, frazzled wit of “A Little More Room.”

Throughout the album, Pyzow takes on big, morally freighted themes in songs that continually tally the high cost of failing to live up to ideals, honesty chief among them.

In “Torchlight,” a man flinches from intimacy, with doleful consequences. “I guess there was a death inside me” he says of his inability to follow through on a romantic promise--not exactly an explanation of his failure, but an acknowledgment of the stakes involved.

In such double-edged songs as “Where Liars Go” and “It’s a Crime,” characters who claim to stand on stable ground realize that their footing is actually treacherous and that the inner goodness or material blessings they cherish are continually jeopardized by their own fallibility and the inconstant nature of things.

At the album’s midpoint, Pyzow vows to hold firm on the moral high ground, delivering a defiant anthem, “I Can Stand the Rain.” But by the end, in “Have Mercy,” he admits that even those who strive for integrity can’t withstand the glare of a too-harsh judgment.

There are a few quibbles. Real percussion would have been better than the stiff, synthesized drums that turn up on some tracks. In “I Can Stand the Rain,” Pyzow momentarily soaks himself in cliche and mixed metaphor as he envisions falling drops that can “cut like a knife . . . and beat you numb.”

One imagines bloody rainwater swirling into storm drains in an outdoor re-enactment of the shower scene from “Psycho.” Maybe the image would have worked if the song was called “I Can Stand the Hail.”

In “I Agree,” an album-ending morality play that echoes early Dylan and (in its melody) the folk standard “The Long Black Veil,” Pyzow loses something in a final twist in which he veers from a third-person account to a first-person declaration of moral backbone.

But those criticisms don’t diminish the fact that Pyzow has delivered 12 well-played, melodically graceful songs that thoughtfully and feelingly engage some of the toughest questions we all have to face. “Torchlight” isn’t just about integrity; it exemplifies it.

(Pyzow plays every Friday in July at the Newport Landing restaurant in Balboa (714) 675-2373, and July 10 and July 31 at the Renaissance Cafe in Brea (714) 256-2233. His album is stocked locally by Tower Records.)

AsFab Music Co., P.O. Box 29826, Los Angeles, Calif. 90029--0826.

*** James Harman Band “Two Sides to Every Story” Black Top

Harman, the sturdy cornerstone of the Orange County blues scene for more than 20 years, continues to serve up tasty, ultra-traditional blues and R & B on an album steeped in the loose, easy-flowing feel that only expert, well-attuned players can achieve.

As always, he spices the collection (all original songs this time) with variety: We get straight Chicago shuffles; a cool, jazzy piano number; some honking R & B horn sections; a tune set to rumba rhythms, and a sparse all-acoustic number.

Only once on this mainly relaxed collection does Harman let his newly revamped band really cut loose. The result, “Drive-In Life,” is the album’s best song, a chugging rocker that, if highly derivative of the Fabulous Thunderbirds’ style, is derivative of the T-Birds at their best. Harman puts his own spin on the song with a hangdog vocal and lyrics full of wry disgust for the Southern California car culture.

“The Clown,” which recalls the jazz-tinged piano-blues of Charles Brown, is the album’s other lyrically distinctive song, a bizarre but sardonically humorous scenario in which Harman, fed up with a lover’s inconstancy, imagines himself turned into a mummified monument to her cheating ways:

If your love kills me, baby, please keep my body hangin’ ‘round.

Have me stuffed with cotton, dressed up like a clown.

Display me in your bedroom, in the corner on your chair,

So your brand new lover will always know I’m there.

Make him see my painted face when his love comes tumblin’ down,

So he realizes, baby, he ain’t your first lovin’ clown.

As always, Harman’s singing brims with personality--it’s a rich, animated voice fit for drawling, whooping, crying out a plea, conveying merriment, weariness or comic protest as the situation demands.

He applies his signature vibrant harmonica blowing more sparingly than you’d expect, dashing on some color, setting the tone for a song but seldom soloing at length. Throughout, the emphasis falls on the ensemble.

Harman’s new guitarist, Ted (Kid) Morgan, is a 21-year-old recruit from Minneapolis who has that authentic, circa-1950 sound that has marked the Harman band’s two previous studio releases, “Extra Napkins” and “Do Not Disturb.”

Morgan is a clean, fluid player with a biting tone, although he is more circumspect here than the fine guitar-slingers from past Harman Band lineups. Rounding out the band are new drummer Esten Cooke and holdover Jeff Turmes (an all-around contributor on bass, slide guitar and sax), plus Gene Taylor, a frequent Harman sideman who contributes a good deal of tasty piano.

Together, they sound as at-home and unforced as one of the groups you’d have expected to find at the mythic wrong-side-of-the-tracks blues joint Harman conjures in “Grindin’ Bump.”

Black Top Records, P.O. Box 56691, New Orleans, La. , 70156.

** 1/2 Debbie Davies “Picture This” Blind Pig

The Van Nuys-based Davies has been leading her own bands for years on the local blues-bar circuit (the funky old Sunset Pub was a regular stop), and she has gotten national exposure playing in Albert Collins’ band. “Picture This,” her first studio album, stakes Davies’ claim as a first-rank player of high-voltage electric blues guitar.

Davies probably won’t knock anybody out with her singing: Her voice is on the thin side for a blues front-woman. But the vocals don’t detract, because she has enough savvy and attitude to make the put-upon women she sings about believable, if not quite vivid.

A bit more variety in subject and emotion would have helped. The 12 tracks (four of them written by Davies) deal mainly with characters who have been or are about to be dumped, cheated on or otherwise disappointed in love. One good exception is the boisterous and catchy title track, a Davies original.

What this album is really about is Davies’ taking off on the guitar.

Each solo is a treat full of sinewy, limber and beautifully articulated playing. She isn’t an original stylist: You can hear a good deal of Eric Clapton’s influence, and when Collins, her ex-boss, turns up to lend his signature, needles-made-of-steel tone to one track, there is a marked contrast between the master’s standing as an utter original and his protege’s talent as an inspired assimilator.

But if Davies isn’t an original, she shows a marvelous zest for playing the blues with energy and flair, stringing together an appetizing assortment of licks to construct satisfying, cohesive solos.

Nimble, playful, tasteful and expressive, she comes up with parts that fit perfectly, whether the setting is bright and chunky, or dark and furtive. A sharp, crackling band lends support--but it’s Davies who is clearly the focus of attention.

Give her a bristling Freddie King instrumental showpiece to work out on (she covers King’s “Sidetracked” and “San-Ho-Zay”), and her Stratocaster fret board turns into a thoroughbred racetrack.

(Davies plays July 10 at Heritage Brewing Co. in Dana Point. (714) 240-2060.)

Blind Pig Records, P.O. Box 2344, San Francisco, Calif., 94126.

** The Prayer Chain “Shawl” Reunion

This dark and stormy Christian alternative band has expanded its stylistic reach on its second album. But, for all of singer Tim Taber’s anguished self-exhortations to “grow,” the band has not developed in terms of subject matter and emotional range.

Most of the songs here are snapshots of souls in turmoil, feeling torn and reaching for spiritual illumination. That’s more promising than the too-easy affirmation of faith to which some Christian rockers are prone.

But only in “Never Enough,” the sole song on the album with explicitly Christian imagery, does the Prayer Chain allow itself a sense of celebration (albeit celebration tempered by strain and struggle) that hints at what all that striving is for.

The lyrics are sketchy and oblique; only in “Fifty Eight,” about an abandoned boy’s yearning for his father, do you get a song founded on the ties between people, and a rudimentary kind of storytelling. Elsewhere, the lyrical musings are inward and abstract.

“So leave me alone until I have learned to grow,” goes one key line. One is tempted to oblige. For the Prayer Chain to grow, it has to learn to look outward (something it did better on its self-financed debut album, “Neverland Sessions”) as well as inward.

Still, there’s obvious talent here. Taber has a strong, unfettered voice, and he’s less a Bono replica on “Shawl” than on the first album.

The playing is invariably intense, and guitarist Andrew D. Prickett, drummer Wayne Everett and bassist-lyricist Eric Campuzano have branched out from the U2-like anthem rock of the first album to incorporate elements of grunge and screaming funk.

The Prayer Chain constructs its songs out of episodic links, which allow it to change textures, rhythms and dynamics frequently. But in showing off its considerable chops, it has neglected to come up with pithy, memorable melodies.

Reunion Records, P.O. Box 25330, Nashville, Tenn., 37202-5330.