MR. LEWIS AND THE FUNERAL 5

Delirium Tremendous

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A pulp novel set to music, the second album by this Austin sextet is overrun with losers, boozers and other lowlifes. They’re all given voice by Gregory Lewis, a scenery-eating thespian of a frontman with Tom Waits’ taste for gallows humor and gutter poetics. Lewis opens the disc by singing, “There’s murder and cheap canned beer all around the highway,” and just like that, the band is off and running—sax honking seedily, circus piano mimicking the on-off blink of a trashy neon bar sign. “I don’t need no woman to save me,” Lewis sings on the woozy waltz “Villa Nocturne,” setting up one of his best punch lines. “I could be helped by three or four.”

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