*** Half Japanese

BONE HEAD

(Alternative Tentacles)

Jad Fair has been offering his savvy guilelessness in various contexts, both solo and with his mutating group Half Japanese, for two decades now (see our "Cult Heroes of Rock," on page 8). The current trio has Fair joined by John Sluggett, mainly on guitars, and Giles-V. Reider, mainly on drums, though both like to torture miscellaneous instruments.

Fair's subject matter remains monsters and girls, his philosophical touchstone the languid desire that someday, somehow, everybody will frolic on the shoals of niceness. And his vocal style remains a triumph of arrested development, its phrasing and tonal waver often reminiscent of a lighter version of Blue Mask-era Lou Reed -- though where Uncle Lou evokes the DTs at death's door, Fair's scattershot pitch just sounds like youthful uncertainty. It's likely that viewing intergalactic aliens as big bullies ("Never brought up right") comes naturally to Fair, but two songs about good and evil ("A Night like This" and "Sometimes") and a quartet of love songs toward the end of the disc suggest a worked-at simplicity. In any event, the adolescent savant thing, posed or actual, holds up enough to add 21 more zippy cuts to the canon.

-- Richard C. Walls