Sidemen Serve Up Their Own Main Courses

Really good musicians typically keep really good musical company. So it’s not really surprising that the key sidemen to two of Orange County’s very best singer-songwriters, Jann Browne and Mark Davis, have come up with strong records in their own right.

Matt Barnes has been writing songs with Browne and putting a rock edge into her country sound as lead guitarist since the early ‘90s. On his first solo disc, a five-song EP, he gets backing help from Browne and several other ace musicians who are part of her regular team.

Twin is essentially a one-man project by Matt Walin, Davis’ guitar-playing right-hand man. On his album-length debut, Walin makes virtually all of the elaborately arranged, electronically enhanced music by himself, with Davis chipping in as co-producer and, on two tracks, as co-lyricist.

As a front man, Barnes doesn’t step outside the groove Browne has established--and why should he? It’s a stylistically roomy one that allows for meaty rock riffs, winsome acoustic bluegrass music and every shade of rootsy twang in between.

Browne and Barnes are next-door neighbors in Laguna Hills (which is why Browne calls her band the Dangerous Neighbors), and they harmonize like brother and sister. Browne’s amazing sweetness-with-an-edge registers as strongly in her backup harmony role here as it does when she’s out front on her own recordings and shows.

Barnes emerges as a proudly ragged lead singer whose wide range and melodic gift call to mind a less scruffy Steve Earle or Jules Shear, a more pinched Levon Helm, or, on the local scene, a close cousin to Robbie Allen of the rootsy alternative-rock band Thermadore.

Left to his own devices as a songwriter, Barnes comes up with two supremely catchy bookends, “Give Me One More Chance” and “How Come the Good Times Never Last.” Both are simple, direct and zestful, even though they explore the potholes on the winding road of romance.

“One More Chance” must be one of the happiest down-on-bended-knee-and-pleading apology songs ever. Maybe Barnes’ errant protagonist realizes that with a tune this winsome to state his case, his estranged beloved can’t possibly resist.

Writing together, Barnes and Browne come up with two exceptional, thematically related songs that frame the EP and give it a social and moral dimension without even a whiff of hot air.

“The Lucky Few,” in which Nashville-based Tommy Lee James also shares writer’s credit, is a muscular, melodically irresistible anthem.

With his Earle-like whiskey-swigging husk in full effect, Barnes sings about watching from the wrong side of the economic divide while the elect blithely cavort. The flinty honesty that also elevates Browne’s work powers a lyric that slices and dices the Newport Beach trust-fund lifestyle with the skill and economy of a sushi chef:

I hang around this crazy town

I watch these people throw their money ‘round

The second coming wouldn’t slow them down,

Sweet Jesus blues.

It’s a great song--a deliciously bitter salvo in the class wars, yet ultimately an uplifting celebration of the inner grit and sturdy grounding it takes to live absent the breaks of “the lucky few.”

Set to sweet bluegrass strains well suited to its traditional-values moral-weaving, “Money Can’t Buy Love” is a tightly drawn character study that supplies motive and action, along with a moral. While taking a poke at lives lived for filthy lucre, the song is honest enough to admit that the hard-working poor often get shafted, while wily gold-digging can put you up there with the lucky few.

Owning this CD, along with Jann Browne’s Barnes-abetted album “Count Me In” is one way to get lucky on the cheap.

Unlike Barnes, Matt Walin’s solo emergence takes him into territory far-flung from his work as a sidekick. Mark Davis’ tremendous CD, “You Came Screaming,” is based in the Beatles, the Byrds and other classic ‘60s pop-rock sources. Walin’s sound is right up to date, with distinct echoes of such modern-rock faves as Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins.

Twin may take the noise-damaged, emotionally wrung-out approach that has appealed to legions of KROQ kids, but it is not just trend-hopping rehash.

Walin’s strong songwriting and lacerating, deeply personal tone draw a listener in, and the musical variety keeps one there for the ride. A hissing, crackling, spookily distorted ambience a la NIN’s Trent Reznor (by way of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”) surrounds much of the singing.

But Walin frequently will rise above the gloom with a well-wrought Beatle-esque refrain. From the industrial clank of “Liberation” to the tense rock onslaught of “Cut My Hair” and the wistful, gentle guitar bed for the concluding “I’m Bored of All of You,” Walin works with a more varied palette than Reznor or Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan.

The album is a cycle of related songs in which a protagonist filled with outward rage and inward self-reproach vents his feelings--but not aimlessly.

Rather than spiraling downward, Walin moves in frustrated circles as he tries to get beyond the anger and disappointment in his life. Along the way, he is as quick to lament his own lack of nerve as he is to blame the conformist pressures of the flimsy world around him.

There’s no pat ending: While Walin’s protagonist gains insight into what it will take to be his own man, he is left relying on anger as an energy, with greater understanding still eluding him.

It’s useful to compare the compassionate farewell of John Lennon’s “God,” a song rejecting society’s expectations, with the bitter kiss-off of Walin’s thematically comparable closer “I’m Bored of All of You.”

Instead of merely broadcasting his bleak states of mind with typically bland alt-rock declarations, Walin is lyrical craftsman enough to use storytelling well (“Cut My Hair”), or bolster meaning with resonant mythic references in “Pandora’s Lips” and “Stranger.”

In the latter song, whose surprise ending turns it into a kind of gloss on “The Last Temptation of Christ,” even Jesus is portrayed as down there with the rest of us, susceptible to a bad case of low self-esteem.

(Matt Barnes’ “Demos” is available by mail at 412 N. Coast Highway, P.O. Box 169, Laguna Beach, CA. 92651, by phone at [714] 472-0785, or E-mail at (buzsawbrns@aol.com.)

(Twin’s “Lostsoulsuckerpunch is available from Bitemark Records, P.O. Box 4229, Irvine, CA. 92616-4229, [714] 780-8409, https://www.bitemark.com.)

*

Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent), with *** denoting a solid recommendation.