Whisperado's "I'm Not the Road": rootsy, countrified album with a lot of humor and a little pathos

"I'm Not the Road" is the second album from NYC-based indie band Whisperado. I've been listening to it pretty steadily since it came out a couple weeks ago, with immense and ever-growing pleasure. Whisperado have a kind of rootsy, country feel, and the lyrics and vocals are somewhere in the sweet spot between Ry Cooder and Jimmy Buffet, with a lot of humor and a little pathos. As ever, I'm most fond of the uptempo numbers, like the Bo-Diddley-beat "Insatiable Sally," a kind of hymn to bad TV; and "Teenage Popstar Girl," which reminds me of the more countrified Violent Femmes tunes. But the whole album's a treat, and it's available from CDBaby as a disc or an MP3 download.

I'm Not the Road