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November 9 - 16, 2000

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*** John Wesley Harding

THE CONFESSIONS OF ST. ACE

(Mammoth)

Over his 12-year recording career, John Wesley Harding has subtly changed his song style (from urban folk to folk pop to trad folk) as often as he has record labels (his 1996 album was titled John Wesley Harding's New Deal as he took up with yet another). The US-based British singer/songwriter's eighth album, The Confessions of St. Ace, finds him on yet another label and moving gently in the direction of classic Beatlesque pop -- which puts him in the same school as the currently out-of-commercial-favor Michael Penn and leaves him in the shadow of the somewhat hipper singer/songwriter Elliott Smith. Recorded in Nashville with a crack crew of session players, St. Ace also offers a few nods to country music, with Steve Earle guesting on a sumptuous duet replete with picked banjo and pedal steel ("Our Lady of the Highways") and Jimmie Dale Gilmore pitching in with an eerie cameo as the ghostly voice in "Bad Dream Baby." As cutting and witty as ever on the ultimately humorous "Goth Girl" ("He looks like Pete Murphy to me/. . . I know he's appropriately frail/But I bet he can't afford to take you to Nine Inch Nails"), Harding is still dishing it out with the best of them.

-- Linda Laban
(John Wesley Harding performs this Tuesday, November 14, at the Middle East. Call 864-EAST.)

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