As a longtime member of the tireless Mekons, Sally Timms is pretty much bound by oath to mingle genres and confound expectations. It's a creed that has served her well both within the group and without it, leading to successes like the Mekons' pioneering alt-country album Fear and Whiskey and her well-received 1999 Bloodshot release Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos. But it also means she's been involved in her fair share of frustrating, undigested head-scratchers, and unfortunately, In the World of Him seems destined to join their ranks.
The gimmick this time around is that almost all of these nine songs are covers written by male songwriters and sung from a man's perspective. (The sole exception is the Timms original "Little Tommy Tucker", which is sung from the perspective of the now-grown nursery rhyme character.) Although gender-bending by now can no longer be considered a groundbreaking device, this approach on paper would nevertheless appear to be at least somewhat ripe with possibility.
Even from within these masculine parameters, however, Timms has made some perplexing choices in song selection. For one, she maintains the Mekons' regrettable tradition of endlessly re-recording songs from their own back catalog. The most baffling example is yet another version of the Mekons' "Corporal Chalkie", a fine, ironic anti-war dirge to be sure, but one that just appeared in a virtually identical arrangement on the group's Punk Rock album earlier this year. Timms takes on Jon Langford's "Sentimental Marching Song" and the Mekons' "Bomb" also risk sounding overly familiar to her attentive fanbase, and their inclusion can't help but make In the World of Him feel rather uninventive and skimpy.
Elsewhere on the album, Timms covers a tasteful but eccentric collection of songwriters that includes Mark Eitzel, Johnny Dowd, and Kevin Coyne. In the process, she abandons virtually all traces of either the Mekons' pub-punk or her previous C&W; leanings in favor of an icy minimalism rather reminiscent of Nico's The Marble Index (although Timms' crystalline vocal timbre couldn't be more different from Nico's guttural delivery). On Eitzel's "God's Eternal Love", Timms' angelic pipes are supported by little more than a smeary haze of electronic drone, while funhouse keyboards give Dowd's "139 Hernalser Gurtel" a woozy cabaret tilt. Perhaps her most effective performance, and the one where she most obviously improves upon the original, is a version of Ryan Adams' "Fools We Are as Men", which she sings in a beautiful, urgent hush accompanied only by acoustic guitar and accordion.
The adventurous cast of songwriters Timms has selected provide the album a wide depth of lyrical flavor. It's worth noting that none of these tracks specifically address love or sex, concentrating instead on spiritual self-doubt, vulnerability, and skewering lunkheaded militaristic machismo. Though several tracks here-- particularly her rendition of Coyne's "I'm Just a Man"-- do give the listener compelling, timely interpretations of the male psyche, one is unlikely to get a very broad or accurate view of contemporary manhood by studying the work of such iconoclastic lyricists. If In the World of Him is intended to be Timms' comprehensive portrait of modern men or what it's like to live among them, one can't help but wish she had taken a few more adventurous risks within the extensive male songbook.
