Full disclosure: Jesse Smith has served me a lot of beer. A few years ago he was a waiter at my favorite Atlanta bar, a cavernous place with a beer list the size of a small-town phonebook. I scrawled out an uncountable number of debit-card-receipt tips to Server Name: Gentleman Jesse before realizing he played guitar in the Carbonas, one of the nastier local power-punk bands, and that he had his own act. In 2008, when his first record came out, it suddenly required an embarrassing amount of effort to not reply to his waiterly banter with his own song lyrics. Like the time he brought me a drink but not the one I'd ordered-- it was a rare flub and I was just trying to roll with it, but he was contrite, offering to trade it out. "No, it's cool," I said, taking an overlarge first gulp just to keep myself from adding, "You Don't Have To (If You Don't Want To)".
That song-- one of the best from that first album, Gentleman Jesse & His Men, which was almost all bests-- highlights some of Smith's main tendencies as a lyricist. He favors longish song titles, often involving some sort of sly parenthetical and almost always derived from the chorus, which in turn is usually built around some kind of ordinary phrase-- not an out-and-out cliché, exactly, but something you'd say, something you've heard before. He's like a garage-rock William Eggleston, shining a flickering backroom bulb on the most mundane feelings (regret, inertia, annoyance, wanting-to-have-sex), rendering them, if not particularly fresh or transcendent, then at least really really fun to have. You can sing along to his hooks. You can sing along to his words, too, but it's the hooks that'll glom on and hang around for days.
On the new record, Leaving Atlanta, Gentleman Jesse has dropped His Men, but in name only. It's almost impossible, actually, to imagine this guy as a solo act; so much depends upon the barrage-- the guitars chasing each other around like kids in a dirty parking lot, the teetering organ and, here, even harmonica provided by third-wave garage-rock O.G. King Louie Bankston on the frantic opener "Eat Me Alive". The band's debut was kind of a crumpled, nicotine-smudged affair, but Atlanta feels brighter, less muddled, not polished but certainly tidier around the edges. Smith's voice remains a friendly, mid-range yawp-- emotionally precise if not always entirely on-key. "Careful What You Wish For", with its sparkly-clean guitar riff, spunky little drums and backing harmonies occasionally cresting into "aahh's," sounds enough like a lost Help! track to warrant an earnest Beatles comparison in the year 2012 (though a more appropriate corollary may be that occasionally-- and, one assumes, inadvertently-- Gentleman Jesse seems most explicable as a boozier, hornier, later-model version of the Oneders, that band of skinny-tied goofballs from the Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do!).
Recorded three years ago in Smith's basement, Atlanta's accompanying press release hints at some reasons for the delayed release; for one, dude was apparently clobbered across the face with a table leg while trying to help some guys change a car tire, which understandably dampened his enthusiasm for music and the city and life in general for a while. Then five friends died in weirdly quick succession, most way too young. The album is dedicated to them, their names in small print in the liner notes; on the flip side of the CD insert, there's a black-and-white photo collage of Smith and the band playing shows, lipping cigarettes, spraying champagne. The cheery vibe is battle armor, a shield raised against the unknown darkness. Each track plows straight ahead into itself-- head down, guard up-- like a good-natured drunk mainlining tallboys to flush out the pain.
Smith can't even seem to catch a break romance-wise: he's swaddled in self-loathing and indecision, "I'm Only Lonely (When I'm Around You)" and "I'm a Mess (Without You)" bookending his misery. But the sadsack-lover look seems a bit too easy. It's a fun exercise, and maybe even the intended approach, to take every song here that seems to be about woman troubles and imagine Smith is singing instead about his hometown, about everything he's done here and everything it's done for-- and to-- him: "Take it easy on me, my pretty baby/ Don't be cruel, that's not the way that I treat you." (This may be the only way to make palatable "Kind of Uptight", otherwise basically the song equivalent of a "C'mon, gimme a smile, baby!" catcall.)
On the cover of Leaving Atlanta, Smith and his Rickenbacker pose, along with a couple of suitcases and a rifle and what appears to be a golden bust of Elvis Presley, by the big wooden "Leaving Atlanta" sign that gives the record its name. Locals will know exactly where he's standing: just barely northeast of Little Five Points, facing west, the mess of Ponce de Leon Avenue zooming past him on his right. The sign marks one of the eastern edges of Atlanta proper and maybe it once signaled you were truly on your way out of town, but if you live here you know this, too: that the city doesn't really end there, or anywhere-- that it just keeps going, unfolding into deeper and deeper pockets of neighborhoods, then out into suburbs, then the suburbs of the suburbs. Atlanta is a city where you can spend more time leaving than actually staying. But, like Smith sings, "It's as good a place as any to try and survive."
