Ass Ponys:
Some Stupid with a Flare Gun (Checkered Past)

Given their walking papers by a muddle-headed major that barely nudged '94's excellent Electric Rock Music into the light and let its follow-up ( The Known Universe) die on the vine, Ohio's Ass Ponys celebrate their exile in indieville with the hardest - and best - album of their increasingly impressive career. Americana only in the sense that Chuck Cleaver's Flannery O'Connor-esque vignettes will never be mistaken for Brit-Pop, the band's angular but melodic brand of rock and roll IDs them more clearly than ever as Pere Ubu's long-lost country cousins - the ones who kept Dub Housing in the cassette deck and George Jones on the radio. If that's not achievement enough, Cleaver puts his fun-house falsetto to work trotting out his most memorable collection of characters yet: the suicide in the neighbor's barn, the lost soul in love with an astronaut she never met, the robot fighter, the exhibitionist crowing about his third nipple. Call it Midwestern Gothic if you will; anyone who has experienced life in small, claustrophobic places will get the drift immediately. Everyone else will have fun figuring it out.

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