Album: Evan Dando

Baby I'm Bored, Setanta

Evan Dando is one of rock's most fondly regarded flame-outs, a bumbling, floppy-haired naïf, whose downfall resulted from his quaintly idealistic notion of proper rock'n'roll behaviour – the drug habits that brought him close to rock-casualty status due not so much to untameable inner demons as to a conviction that, well, isn't that what rock stars should do?

Seven long years after the Lemonheads hit the wall, Dando, even though he has been clean and sober for a while now, still believes that young rock types should be taking as many illegal drugs as they can get their body around – a change from the usual "Kids, don't do what I did" cant trotted out by dried-out rock stars seeking public absolution for earlier hedonistic misdemeanours. By his own principles, he's right: such hypocrisy would be a bigger betrayal of rock'n'roll than any of his transgressions.

Which doesn't mean that he has not grown wiser as well as older. How could he not? Baby I'm Bored features several songs reflecting on his earlier fecklessness, from the grunge-pop cut "Repeat", which opens the album ("Things go wrong/ Admit defeat/ Things go wrong/ Repeat"), to the self-explanatory "Why Do You Do This to Yourself?", a lovely country-style mea culpa sung to a simple backing of acoustic guitar and the dulcimer-like tinklings of the Marxophone: "You stayed awake for 14 days, and then you slept a week./ Why do you do this to yourself?" Oddly, the most revealing commentaries on his failings here are written by Dando's young Australian acolyte Ben Lee, whose "All My Life" contains the lines: "I'm so impatient/ For a new sensation/ God knows what I thought I'd do/ I bit my own sweet heart in two." Elsewhere, Lee's "Hard Drive" offers a vivid impression of a new life being embarked upon, through a list of overturned old values and the hopeful hook, "Have you ever felt yourself in motion?"

Recorded with various American indie stalwarts from bands such as Come, Spacehog, Calexico and Giant Sand, the music on Baby I'm Bored isn't that far removed from Dando's previous recordings, its loose, grungy country-rock recalling the likes of Crazy Horse and, on the more composed "It Looks Like You", The Byrds. The latter is one of a handful of tracks produced by the currently hot Jon Brion, whose fancy for outré instrumentation adds welcome spice to Dando's basic sound. The result is probably the best album of the dissolute songwriter's career, a collection of songs that bears out his claim, in "Shots Is Fired", that "whatever part of you that's been calling the shots is fired."