Picking up this CD and reading the notes, I admit I kind of dreaded having to listen to it. It's a poet doing the "spoken word" thing over music, see - and I was thinking about the last time I got way too drunk at the Y-Not and nearly tripped on some poseur's dangling participle. But that was just to avoid having to think of that dead guy in the bathtub rotting away in his leather trousers in a Paris gravesite. That reaction, though, was unfair. I'd forgotten about D. Boon and the Minutemen; I'd forgotten about Captain Beefheart; I'd even forgotten Bob Dylan. Robert Winson - the poet in this band, who died shortly after these songs were recorded - wasn't as passionately or trenchantly political as D. Boon was, nor as earthily and compellingly off-center as Don Van Vliet, nor as whimsically surreal and darkly humorous as Bob Dylan at his long-gone best. And Bichos, while taking inspiration from the Minutemen and the Magic Band, can't quite pull off the quicksilver agit-jazz of the first band nor the skronking churn of the second. But Winson as poet and Bichos as band at least take aim in those directions. No bongos within earshot (although "Mad Libs" does feature stand-up bass and trumpet - break out the berets and cappuccino), and Winson realizes we probably aren't interested in pathetic myth-bloated ramblings about his psycho-sexual obsessions. Winson's voice may take some getting used to: it's a hoarse, shouting croak, although thank god never reaching the hyperactive realm of HBO comedians who assume anything's funny if you yell it, especially the word "fuck." Its harsh unprettiness serves the galloping, angular momentum of Bichos' music; a more resonant or "musical" voice would distract and detract. Most poems-with-music fail because they focus first on the words, never letting the music take primacy. I'd argue that music should come first, as a vehicle for the words, which are then strengthened by the music - instead of the music trotting dispiritedly behind, like a teenager on a family outing to Chuck E. Cheese. Interestingly, two of the better pieces on this disc set poems written by Miriam Sagan, Winsom's wife. "Frida Kahlo" evokes the visionary Mexican painter, and "Death Wears an Overcoat" manages to remain funny yet thought-provoking - despite the macabre circumstances of its appearance on this disc: "Death says, 'the number you have called is not in working order.' Death refuses to accept your collect call.... Death eats diet pills and sushi. Death is a waiter." While Four Legs in the Morning may not yet make the world safe for poetry, it makes a strong argument that words in songs ought to do more than rhyme "fire" with "desire" or assert with maddening dullness that something or other "cuts like a knife."

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