***1/2 Firewater

THE PONZI SCHEME

(Jetset)

While most of the Lower East Side's '80s gutter hipsters were finding their '90s muse in the deconstructo blues, former Cop Shoot Cop crooner Todd Ashley has been combing the veldt of NYC's ethnic enclaves in search of the ultimate multicultural-noir party sound. In CSC, Ashley once narrated a wake from the perspective of a corpse ("Everybody Loves You When You're Dead"); in Firewater he's belting out cut-rate epiphanies from the bottom of a bottle, being shattered in the decadent, elegantly grizzled manner of all good cabaret mustafas.

Back on 1996's Get off the Cross . . . We Need the Wood for Fire (Jetset) Ashley, with help from an all-star cast (members of the Jesus Lizard, Foetus, and Soul Coughing), trampled through an array of Gypsy/klezmer/waltz signatures like an Eastern European Phil Spector. The Ponzi Scheme retains a less ornamental version of Get Off's ethnic brocades. There are a few miscegenated instrumentals (spaghetti-western and blaxploitation spy themes on the opening "Ponzi's Theme," Sousa-fied something-or-other on "El Borracho"). A sleazy strip-club sax does tangos around saloon-style ivory tickling on "Another Perfect Catastrophe," and "Knock 'Em Down" matches up against Elvis's '70s takes on "When the Saints Come Marching In." But Ashley's booze, buggery, and backstabbing generally take on more straightforward tones -- it's his knack for the broad, sweeping flourish and melodramatic gesture that makes this disc as intoxicating as the band's nom-de-moonshine.

-- Carly Carioli