Every song on Stan Ridgway's latest album is a carefully crafted vignette. In fact, listening to Snakebite, which is divided into three acts of sixteen songs, is more than a little akin to reading a good, solid collection of short stories. Ridgway does more than delight in the grotesque, he celebrates it. His characters are the scum of the earth, but they are to a one as endearing as they are disgusting.

The lead-off track, "Into The Sun," would end a more traditional album rather than begin it, with it's cowboy imagery and finality:

Some will be jealous of our home
But no friends we'll shun, as we fly off
Into a new day
Into the sun

By starting off the album with this song, Ridgway lets us know right from the get-go that he's leading us off into unexplored territory.

Ridgway's most successful songs are those that are character driven, as in "Wake Up Sally (The Cops Are Here)", in which a pair of Bonnie and Clyde wannabes narrowly escape a stakeout, or in the caustic criminal logic of "King For A Day," in which a car thief regales his mark with the systemic destruction of the vehicle. Perhaps the best example is "Throw It Away," in which the title line is repeated again and again as more of a certainty than an imperative. The hopelessness of the song is matched only by its refusal of any possibility of salvation:

Some people have gone missing
Some people end up dead
Chasin' near the shadows
I'm just tryin' to stay in the light

Though desert imagery pervades, several tracks take us into the city, most notably "Our Manhattan Moment," which turns Ridgway's jaded, disaffected voice toward the heartless urban sprawl.

Less enjoyable are the forays into the metaphysical. The essentially pointless "My Own Universe" is the best example of this; while the winsome accordion leads an essentially decent musical arrangement, the lyrics fall flat. Without a visceral grounding for the song, Ridgway rambles on like a junior high school poet.

The album ends on an uneven note, with "My Rose Marie (A Soldier's Tale)," in which a Confederate conscript rues the war and longs for his lover. The ballad is so disjointed and different from the rest of the album that one can't but help feel that it is a bit tacked on, which is a shame, because it's a decent enough track that it deserves better.

Snakebite's few gems just barely make up for its unevenness. It's a downer enough of an album that few listeners will attempt to make it straight through often, which is just as well. Ridgway's songs are best taken in small bites; the bitterness just goes down easier that way.

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