Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he — Jesse Mank basically is Hussalonia, although he has some collaborators on some tracks) is strikingly diverse, encompassing minimalist folk, musique concrète, power pop, heavy metal — too many genres to list. Like the work of many of my favorite songwriters, Mank’s songs are frequently funny and serious simultaneously; they’re seldom straightforwardly jokey. (His track-by-track re-invention of Billy Joel’s 1980 new-wave cash-in album Glass Houses is no joke; it’s a revelation.**)

“For Those About to Rock, We Ignore You,” is one of those tunes that makes me smile and wince at the same time and it melds a couple of Mank’s aesthetic directions. It’s about how unpleasant it can sometimes be to make it through a local band’s set to hear the band you came to see (or are in). This is certainly familiar territory for me.*** Mank approaches it with delicate picked acoustic guitar and a hushed, appropriately world-weary vocal. But what lifts it into the realm of the extraordinary are the underlying layers of guitar feedback — noisy, but melodically smart, and at least partly belying the sentiment of the lyric. (Another of Mank’s projects, Satan Among the Sofa Cushions, is a heavy metal EP that is too successful as metal to be dismissed as parody, even if Mank’s tongue is clearly in his cheek.)

Jesse Mank is manifestly uninterested in participating in the industry part of the music industry; his recent catalogue is only distributed digitally, and he gives the vast bulk of it away free on the entertaining and informative Hussalonia website.

*Triple-threat good: he’s an outstanding songwriter, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, and displays much more solid recording chops than I expect from indie home-recordists.

**Glass Houses was one of the first three LPs I ever bought, but while I still like Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 74-78 and even some of Foreigner’s self-titled album, Glass Houses was the first record I disowned. I used an exacto to cut up the cover so it said “Mr. Shit” instead of “Billy Joel.” I hadn’t thought of that in years, and certainly never regretted it until Mank’s amazing renditions made me want to A-B against the original.

***For a couple years I’ve been trying to finish writing a song that starts “There’s not enough booze in this bar/To get me through another set by your band/And there’s not enough beer in my glass/To get me through one more song/But I’m too cheap to waste half a drink/So I guess I’ll buy another round.” Mank’s lyric is much better than mine; also, he finished his.

Hitchcock’s voice is holding up quite well. You can hear a bit more strain at the top of his register, but not much. Rock-solid timing has never been his strong suit, and the one-two punch of “no drummer” and “lots of frantic strumming” led to several noticable gaffes. Hitchcock, who seemed relaxed and in good humor throughout, joked that we were getting the “organic” version of the show, from which the mistakes would subsequently be excised by the professional film crew.

Since there was a professional film crew (one could imagine that there might be some sort of 25th-anniversary hoopla for I Often Dream of Trains in the works for next year…) quite a lot of attention was paid to visual presentation, with Robyn taking the stage as a backlit, top-hatted silhouette, and wearing a black-and-white polka-dotted shirt against which his black-and-white polka-dotted electric guitar almost disappeared.

Highlights for me included the haunting, weird, and beautiful “Flavour of Night,” and “I Used to Say I Love You,” one of Hitchcock’s most straightforward, sad, and incisive songs (I think its lines “But you were reluctant/Although I was so hot/Now I understand it/But back then I did not” is genius). The barbershop trio arrangement of “Uncorrected Personality Traits” was outstanding, as were the three-part harmonies on faux-country “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” (with lyrics updated from Cold War anxieties to Global Warmng anxieites). (Hitchcock also revised “This Could Be the Day” to make it slightly less un-PC, or perhaps he just mumbled. Either way, I can’t say I blame him.)

My favorite of Hitchcock’s trademark loopy anecdotes involved the recent colonization of Boston, and the construction of Logan airport after several hundred planes had landed there. The introduction to “This Could Be the Day,” was also memorable, casting the song’s narrator as one of the “Mojave Shrimp,” waking to fornicate (with a passel of synonyms) after the arrival of the once-in-several-decades deluge.

I try to avoid Neutral Milk Hotel as a point of comparison, not least because it sets a standard that’s insanely difficult to live up to. To say an album isn’t as good as In the Aeroplane over the Sea is criticism so faint as to be useless. Jeff Mangum used an intensely personal vocabulary of metaphor and symbolism to make a singular and complex album that retains emotional directness in spite of lyrical content that is sometimes willfully obscure (and sometimes seems to deflect personal connections through historical vehicle of Anne Frank).

Comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel also often strike me as fundamentally misguided. Colin Meloy of The Decemberists (for instance) is also an obviously literate songwriter with a similar vocal timbre who sometimes uses similar arrangements. I don’t think The Decemberists are much like Neutral Milk Hotel in terms of their artistic approach or goals (or, really, the level of artistic achievement). I don’t mean to slight Meloy’s outfit too much; “I Dreamt I Was an Architect” is clever, pretty, and despite an intrinsic preciousness it’s not emotionally unaffecting. But “Two-Headed Boy” is deeply weird — the lyric is weird, Mangum’s melody and phrasing are weird, the very sparseness of it is weird. But it’s also compelling, because Mangum inhabits the performance completely; there’s something almost scary about the way he sings and plays the song.

Like The Decemberists, Elvis Perkins’ Ash Wednesday shares many superficial qualities with Neutral Milk Hotel: a timbral vocal similarity, arrangements centered around an acoustic guitar that marches doggedly along through the songs, often picking up other instruments along the way, sometimes including a saw. But as unfair as the NMH comparison may be — Ash Wednesday was in the upper percentile of 2007 releases, but probably not of the decade — it also seems apt, both thematically and because one of Ash Wednesday’s hallmarks is the intensity of Perkins’ performances.

Ash Wednesday also evokes another classic album it can’t quite live up to. Like Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers, Ash Wednesday is a record that seems to be fueled by deep and nakedly evident pain. It wrestles with age-old questions like “why do bad things happen to good people?” and “what am I doing here, anyway?” (Given the details of Perkins’ biography this is scarcely surprising.) When Perkins sings “No one will survive Ash Wednesday alive,” he really sounds like he means it, and his intensity is compelling and maybe even a little scary.

Perkins’ artistic approach isn’t merely diaristic; the opening “While You Were Sleeping” piles a Dylan-esque torrent of fable-like events upon its sleeper over it’s 6-minute span:

The heavens fell/The earth quaked/I thought you must be/but you weren’t awake/You were dreaming/You ignored the sun/You grew your power garden/For your little ones/And you found brides for them/On Christmas Eve/They hung young Cain/From the Adam tree.

“Sleep Sandwich,” (which would’ve been my mix-pick) is full of oddball but evocative imagery, like, “Last night was the science fiction/Movie with you and me/You in your velvet space helmet/Me in my rainbow hat,” and the even better, “You write the Bible/And I’ll read it off my eyelids.” Even a pair of songs (”It’s a Sad World,” “Good Friday”) that skirt the “sleep with me ’cause I’m hurting so bad” cliché do so with unusual sublety and ample conviction. Thanks to some truly gorgeous harmonies, they’re also among the album’s strongest (Perkins’ stable of backup singers includes Shana Levy from Let’s Go Sailing and Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond).

Producer/arranger Ethan Gold makes an enormous contribution to the excellence of this record. Throughout, his choices support and enrich the songs without overwhelming them. Allmusic doesn’t list any prior production credits for him, but I just can’t believe this is a debut recording effort. Gold seems to have chosen not to use pitch correction software on Perkins’ vocals, a choice which I applaud. Perkins pushes his voice out of his range and beyond his technical chops, but it adds to the honesty and immediacy of his performances.