Let's get this out of the way, right up front: I like this CD. A lot. Probably more than I like you, even, and I'm really happy that you're bothering to read this. So that should tell you something. Exactly what it should tell you I'm not 100% sure, but then I've been drinking a little today. Which, really, is neither here nor there, because whether you're completely dogfaced or stone cold sober, this is one hell of a disc. And that's not something I say lightly.

Devin Davis is a clever artist. He sings, plays just about all of the instruments involved here (guitar, bass, drums, sax, organ, piano, percussion, theremin, trumpet, trombone and "giant gong"), calling in ringers for one trumpet piece, some pedal steel and a French horn solo. He name-checks Everett Ruess in "When I Turn Ninety-Nine"; I don't know about you, but I had to look him up. And he's prone to writing lines like this one from "Giant Spiders" - "I won't sit still 'til I'm upside down in the back of your eye" - a convoluted way of saying "until you see me again". Maybe sometimes he's a little too clever.

I was wracking what's left of my brain trying to figure out what a good comparison for his sound would be, and then it struck me: Jules and the Polar Bears. The Jules in question is Jules Shear, but that's still not gonna ring any bells for a lot of people, I know. I think I was one of the five people who actually bought both Got No Breeding and Fenetics when they came out. (And if there is any sort of benevolent deity out there, someone will re-release them both of those albums on a two-fer CD, real soon.) If you know those albums, though, you know the sort of thing I'm talking about - very literate pop, with some fairly intricate rhyme schemes and ambitious arrangements. If I had to classify this album (and I'd really rather not, but people seem to insist on it), I'd call it "smart-guy pop".

Lonely People of the World, Unite! is ostensibly a concept album, dealing with various characters in various stages of loneliness. Being a recent transplant from somewhere in Florida to Chicago, Davis found it difficult to find other musicians to play with. Ergo, the concept. He pulls it off with varying amounts of success, and, y'know, kudos for attempting such a large endeavor in the first place.

What the album ends up becoming, in large part, is a quick trip through most of the better rock & roll styles available during that much-maligned decade we know as the seventies. For those of you who may not have been around to experience them firsthand, the seventies were the heyday for smart-guy pop. (Mention the phrase "70's music" to the average passer-by, and most likely they'll mention the ongoing national nightmare of disco. That's a sad thing, really, because there was so much more than that going on. Really. You can trust me on this; I was there, in long-haired pimply virginal form.) In "Moon Over Shark City", Davis sounds very much like Jules Shear fronting a "Suffragette City"-era Bowie tribute band, all compressed guitar and wailing sax. "Canons at the Courthouse" is vaguely Dylanesque, with vocals reminiscent of that dude from the Moody Blues, but in a good way.