The liner notes to Harlan T. Bobo's third album, Sucker, explain that these new songs were "mostly written while courting an adventurous woman" and following her around the world. "The courtship was a success." It's a great story with a happy ending, but it raises a crucial question: How will happiness, marriage, and fatherhood affect this boho Memphian's songs, which have historically veered toward the gloriously unhappy and unsettled? In documenting the ups and mostly the downs of romance, the eccentric singer-songwriter, who contributed string arrangements to Cat Power's The Greatest and has been known to wear painter's stilts onstage, typically picks himself as its favorite target and has never adhered to any one particular style for more than a song or two. Will contentment extinguish the spark from his music?
Not likely. It's a bumpy road to contentment, and Bobo chronicles it with insight and humor on Sucker, which may be short (just 29 minutes) but suggests a fully realized story that traces our sadsack narrator from the pits of despair to the heights of something like happiness. Opener "Sweet Life" refers not to what Bobo has, but what he aspires to: "If I could be with you when you're down, if I could be more to you than a clown," he sings over trembling strings, "you'd know life is sweet." Indie pop rarely sounds so effortlessly stately. Things get worse before they get better, as Bobo drunk-dials a suicide note on the garage-raucous "Crazy With Loneliness" and bemoans his own advancing years on the folksily austere "Old Man" and the manic "Hamster in a Cage".
Even at his lowest, Bobo is never really a downer, perhaps because he views loneliness as some sort of cosmic joke or perhaps because musically he's all over the place. Sucker rambles between the manic swagger of "Oh Boy" and the sophisticated folk-pop of "Errand Girl", between the jaunty rag of "Perfect Day" and the spry double-entendres of "Mlle. Chatte" (which is only ostensibly about a housecat). At first that sprawling range comes across as an extension of his own eccentricities, as if he's being willfully unpredictable, but to his credit, a song's subject never dictates its style. There is no noticeable musical change when his lyrics stop evoking pain and start depicting desire and devotion. "Energy" and "Bad Boyfriends" chug with no less abandon, and "Drank" proves to be Bobo's most eloquent arrangement, meandering melodically as he recounts diving off a boat and nearly drowning in the ocean with that "challenging woman"-- you don't need that soaring coda to know it's a love song. Sucker is an album about settling in but not settling down or, god forbid, simply settling, and Bobo's music reveals all the wanderlust left in him.
