Dean Wareham

★★★★

I Have Nothing To Say To The Mayor Of LA

DOUBLE FEATURE. CD/DL/LP

Galaxie 500, Luna and Dean & Britta singer-guitarist’s second solo album.

Dean Wareham once described “writer’s block” as merely a euphemism for having nothing to say – hence perhaps his leisurely output during the past 10 years. But this first album of (mostly) original material since 2014 vindicates waiting until you’ve written something worth hearing. “Tonight I am playing my three-thirty-five/While gazing at your photograph,” avers opener The Past Is Our Plaything, Wareham evoking Leonard Cohen and The Velvet Underground, a benchmark example of his literate reverberant guitar constructs. Covers of Scott Walker’s Duchess and obscure ’60s psych Bostonians Lazy Smoke fit perfectly alongside droll vignettes like Robin & Richard and The Last Word (an elegy for Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor), while vaporous closer Why Are We In Vietnam has Wareham’s longlost falsetto despairing of the humble artist’s lot in the face of geo-political madness. For erudite wit and dream tuneage, you won’t find better. Keith Cameron