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.

“Black Blade” is to my mind the least successful of the band’s three collaborations with author Michael Moorcock. I like the tongue-in-cheek presentation of Moorcock’s infamously melancholy protagonist, Elric (”I just wanna be a lover/not a red-eyed screaming ghoul”), but I can’t overlook the song’s lack of a chorus (”black” in one speaker and “blade, blade, blade” echoing away in the other does not a proper chorus make), or its lapses into the ridiculous (the “grow, grow, groooowww!” break; the song’s concluding section, with the vocoder voice of Elric’s evil sword boasting over a “Baba O’Riley”-ish keyboard bed).

“Monsters” is the track most emblematic of Cultösaurus Erectus’s identity crisis. With a lounge-jazz sax solo, a near-rip of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” and a section that sounds, well, kinda like Blue Öyster Cult, it’s got a few too many ideas for one song.

Most of the other tracks don’t gel for me in one way or another — “Divine Wind” is too straight a blues number; the instrument tones don’t blend pleasingly in “Deadline”; and “Hungry Boys” is tinny just where I think it needs to crunch. The nadir is “The Marshall Plan,” about which the less said the better.

Happily, the album improves dramatically at the end. Thanks in part to a rare, not-unDaltrey-esque lead vocal turn from one of the Bouchard brothers (I’m guessing), “Fallen Angel” sounds more than a bit like a late ’70s tune from The Who. “Lips in the Hills” has an almost punky energy level. As an adult, “Unknown Tongue”’s soft-core account of adolescent S&M-tinged sexual self-exploration/demonic ritual seems distinctly creepy, but I still remember the potent kick it gave me in my own adolescence, and the chorus harmonies are still sublime.

Star rating: 1.78

But the 7 songs in between are mostly pretty good, and a few are better. “The Great Sun Jester” is the median of sci-fi author Michael Moorcock’s collaborations with the band; not as good as “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” but better than “Black Blade.” Allen Lanier’s “In Thee” and Albert Bouchard’s “You’re Not the One (I Was Looking For)” are two of BÖC’s most straightforward love songs — no one in either tune seems to be any kind of supernatural entity — but they’re also both melodically sturdy and surprisingly unclichéd. Werman’s bag of production doodads does less damage to the title track and “Moon Crazy,” than to “Dr. Music,” maybe in part because their lyrics are better. “I Am The Storm” has some very silly lines (and weird scansion in the chorus) but it’s catchy and I like it. The pièce de résistance for me is “The Vigil.” It’s a lengthy epic about (I think) extraterrestial visitors that even Tom Werman can’t sabotage; if I assembled my own BÖC best-of, it’d be a shoe-in.

Star rating: 2.56

If you can get past its flaws, however, Imaginos represents a substantial recovery from the disastrous Club Ninja, and it’s arguably the strongest BÖC outing after the ouster of the original rhythm section. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Imaginos sessions allegedly began as a solo album for ex-drummer Albert Bouchard, and the song cycle (of which the released album is supposedly only a fraction) was cooked up with BÖC’s pleasantly-demented Svangali figure, Sandy Pearlman, starting in the early 70’s. (The wikipedia article on Imaginos has the bare bones of the album’s convoluted history, but currently omits to mention any of the epic mudslinging I’ve heard described.)

You can’t really follow the story by listening to the album, which is probably for the best. You can read a plot summary at the wikipedia entry referenced above, but I recommend against it. It’s all about secret mysterious forces, after all, and I think it benefits from being as murky and ill-defined as possible. Vaguely spooky mumbo-jumbo like, “seven years of labor for the instruments of time” is more evocative if you know less about what it specifically refers to.

Despite the strikes against it, Imaginos offers at least two bonafide classics of the BÖC canon, “In the Presence of Another World” and “Del Rio’s Song.” The former is almost reminiscent of occult goths Fields of the Nephilim, with its darkly swirling arpeggios and concluding, heavily-processed, horror movie vocals. The latter, by contrast, sounds of a piece with the band’s masterful first three records; the verse and chorus hooks are easily strong enough to stop the plot-advancing midsection from dragging it down. And if Imaginos offers only two real peaks, the lows aren’t so bad. Only the closing title track makes my skip finger itchy, partly because of the dumb chorus (”Ooh Imaginos, ooh Imaginos”) but mostly because of Jon Roger’s grating lead vocal. (It’s perhaps worth noting that neither Joey Cerisano’s stereotypical metal screech*, the overlong outro, nor the unwieldy title quite ruin “The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle at Weisseria” for me.)

Star rating: 2.11

*Cerisano’s vocal credits include BÖC, Korn, and Michael Bolton. Ye gods preserve us.

Novelist John Shirley titled his first book, Transmaniacon, after a BÖC tune; presumably working with the band as a guest lyricist must have been a dream come true for him. Unfortunately, it didn’t make for a good record. Heaven Forbid starts promisingly with “See You In Black,” which is creepy and vicious, yet simultaneously, oddly heartwarming — it’s basically an anti-domestic violence number, but sung from the decidedly un-PC perspective of wishing ill upon the abuser. “Harvest Moon” is primo Buck Dharma — sweetly melancholic and effortlessly melodic. I love the line “young people feeling restless, old people feeling old.”

But after that, the album sinks into a morass of plodding, sadly unimaginative rockers that are both stagy and stodgy. “Hammer Back” and “Power Underneath Despair” feel much more forced than, say, “Career of Evil” or “Cagey Cretins,” partly because their lyrics traverse well-traveled country, but also because they’re not very hooky. Buck Dharma’s sparkling, fluid solos almost redeem a few of these songs, but not quite. A spare live version of “In Thee” (originally from 1979’s Mirrors) closes the record; it’s no insult to the original version, but it’s no essential reinterpretation, either.

Star rating: 1.36