Jack Logan”Bulk” Medium Cool - Twin/Tone* Times...

Jack Logan

“Bulk”

Medium Cool - Twin/Tone

* Times Line(tm): 808-8463. To hear an excerpt from “Bulk,” call TimesLine and press *5550

The year’s longest new rock release at well over two hours, the double-CD “Bulk” was also the year’s least pretentious, and the purest in adherence to rock’s populist traditions.

Logan lives in Georgia, works as a mechanic and, in his spare time between 1985 and 1993, wrote and recorded a bunch of rock ‘n’ roll songs with shifting lineups made up of his buddies. With its 42 songs, “Bulk” compiles the pick of eight years of prolific music-making completely removed from the music industry’s often-distorting gravitational pull. Logan and his mates draw freely and omnivorously upon most of the styles that inform thinking-person’s rock, using country, folk, Chicago and rural blues and Stones-inspired garage rock as their foundations.

Listeners who want their music to shine with polished brilliance should skip “Bulk”: These are definitely basement tapes, although the sound clarity is more than adequate for an appreciation of Logan’s wide-ranging art. The loose but intensely felt performances and the generally melancholy outlook of the material recall Neil Young’s memorable wake of an album, “Tonight’s the Night,” which also was made in a spirit of community between musicians, rather than as a project with commercial designs. Logan has a nice gift for black humor and skewed, deadpan wit, which adds a rich dimension to a vision that is ultimately chastened and brooding.

Comparisons to Elvis Costello and, especially, American Music Club are in order. But Logan’s husky singing is distinguished by a gentleness and stoicism that run counter to Costello’s lash-out bile or the anguished theatricality of AMC’s Mark Eitzel. Listening to the low-keyed Logan, one gets a sense that disappointment is inevitable, and that raging over it would be unseemly. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel intensely: Logan and his friends do assert themselves, but they never sound as if they’re straining for effect.

In keeping with that sense of restraint, Logan as lyricist is given to painting miniatures rather than going for the grand, abstract statement. His gift for detail comes across in such sketches as “15 Years in Indiana” and “Weatherman,” two portraits of characters driven toward madness--the first in a slow water-torture of flat, featureless existence, the second in an acute psychotic break.

It’s my guess that there are Jack Logans everywhere, discerning musicians who love rock, who think hard about life and who have the talent to channel that love and those thoughts into vivid songs. The requisite business connections elude them, or the drive for stardom just happens not to be part of their makeup. It’s nice when the music industry--in this case an independent label not known for star-making ambitions--brings one of them to light.

Medium Cool-Twin/Tone Records, 2217 Nicollet Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55404.

(Jack Logan is scheduled to perform Jan. 6 on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”)