Probably it's my age, but I can still trace the two main components of my musical taste back to the Beatles. On the one hand, guitar-pop: song structure, melody, catchy chord progressions; on the other, an interest in sound-texture in its own right, leading into psychedelia, up through the German electronicists, My Bloody Valentine, 4.A.D., Projekt, into the more ambient/illbient/trance-oriented purveyors of electronica. In both cases, it helps if, as in the best of Lennon's work, both the head and heart are fully engaged. So even though I also like a lot of jazz and blues, I don't tend to like aimless blowing or empty virtuosity: I'll take Thelonious Monk's elegantly asymmetrical Cubist melodies, Hubert Sumlin's shredded speaker cone howls, or Robert Johnson's hound-lost, indwelt blues shrivings. But your Al DiMeolas and Steve Vais can get run over by a bus. What we have here is a collection of blues/soul/jazz tunes, mostly covers, all instrumental. So if it's going to work for me, the band had best either choose their tunes wisely, come up with some new coats of paint for them, or burn the old layers of paint right off the walls. While Bill Barrett adds texture by working his harmonica like a second sax rather than playing only solos, for the most part Brother Weasel is only competent. Part of the problem is sonic: in "The Preacher," for example, electric guitar and harmonica occupy their own neat little sound-cubicles, when they ought to be shouting to each other through opened windows across a crowded, noisy city street. But part is the playing: while the melody of "Twisted" is a slinking, angular creature whose movements turn an expectation of ungainliness into subtle grace, the band's solos on the same chords hew to the straight and narrow like a well-worn cliché. And Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" is simply irredeemable: Frank Zappa nailed its unpleasantly dank aura for all time in quoting its office-shoe boogie bassline as signifier for "rapidly aging, very hip young people" in his "Gregory Peccary." More moments like the dueling saxes in "Blues Walk" would help remove the general air of politeness that holds back a set of tunes better fit for a late-night backyard party than mannered encapsulation on a shiny silver high-fidelity disc.

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