*** Billy Bragg & Wilco

MERMAID AVENUE, VOL. II

(Elektra)

Two years ago, Woody Guthrie's daughter Nora turned a bunch of her dad's previously unpublished lyrics over to British folk punk Billy Bragg and the alterna-roots Americana outfit Wilco, who set the words to music and collaborated on an album that could easily have been a lethal exercise in folk-hero worship. After all, Bragg and Wilco are the sort of well-meaning artists whose good intentions might have led them to smother the life out of the lyrics and the legacy -- which is exactly what Indigo Girls and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, among others, do on the new tribute disc 'til We Outnumber 'em: The Songs of Woody Guthrie (Righteous Babe). So it was a pleasant surprise when 1998's Mermaid Avenue (Elektra) turned out to be not just a tastefully done, well-crafted folk-rock affair but lively and, well, funny, too.

This time around, Bragg and Wilco have lost that element of surprise, but Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II -- another 15 of Guthrie's lyrics put to newly penned music -- isn't any less pleasant than the original. And to the extent that it features some nastier, grittier, almost punkish treatments of tough-talking tunes like "All You Fascists" ("I'm going into this battle and take my union gun/We'll end this world of slavery before this battle's won") and "Meanest Man" ("I'd turpentine cats and tin-can dogs/And I'd smother people to death inside of holler logs"), it's not just more of the same. Natalie Merchant guests on the frivolous "I Was Born," and that's as well, because her earnest delivery would have killed the poetically romantic "Secret of the Sea," a sweet lyric that suits Jeff Tweedy's unkempt rasp and the Byrdsy jangle of Wilco's folk-pop backdrop just as nicely as the rest of Mermaid Avenue, Vol. 2 fits its comfortably loose settings.

-- Matt Ashare