Bob Schneider’s gone through a few radically different incarnations since his early days in Austin, TX -- a raucous lead singer with Joe Rockhead, Ugly Americans, and the Scabs; an emo solo musician with just an acoustic guitar; a cocky bandleader with a set blatantly filled with songs about anal sex -- so it's hard to know what to expect on each new album he releases. His latest effort, a complete solo effort down to the cubist-like artwork, offers a bit of everything in his repertoire, but unfortunately suffers from a scattershot focus. Where the songs on 2006’s The Californian and 2004's I'm Good Now were thematically linked and well-produced, When the Sun... finds Schneider drifting wildly between ideas and styles of music. Songs run the gamut from the droning steel drums of "Slower Dear" to the messy, detuned shuffle of "Brown,” yet one of the common elements the songs have is an uneasy sense of time. Perhaps a consequence of the one man band concept, lyrics and music -- and even elements of the music itself -- often drift apart. A picked guitar figure in the title track (the vocal's main accompaniment) seems to set up a rhythm but then hiccups with odd variations, while a raspy vocal repeatedly tugs back the tempo. It’s as if the majority of the songs were quickly improvised and then just slapped onto a CD. It's an unsettling mish-mash, and a rare disappointment from Schneider, but maybe that's just what being inside his head is like this week.
-- Sander Wolf [July 12, 2008]
