CARL Johns could have spent the Wisconsin winter cultivating his already extravagant handlebar moustache, when his alt.country hillbilly band, NoahJohn, took the season off after touring.

Instead, he wrote, played all the instruments, multi-tracked the doleful harmonies and produced this deceptively drifting solo project. Winter wishes for summer on the least weird, most relaxed, yet ever philosophical album from this wry observer of small-town ebb and flow. In his Madison home studio, with only his acoustic guitar, cranky drum machine and dusty old synthesisers for company, he has crafted a series of character vignettes, portraying love alive, dead and ravaged. Far from his Madison crowd, Charlemagne leads country rock slowly down a darkening lane, travelling from upbeat to beat-up.

New Yorker Jesse Malin rose from hardcore punk obscurity on the patronage of boy wonder Ryan Adams producing his 2002 debut album, The Fine Art Of Self Destruction. Since then, Adams' meteor has fallen, while Malin quietly has gone about his business of bruised, confessional songwriting in the epic yet personal vein of Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp. He has broadened his canvas too, adding road songs and post-9/11 gloom to his shadowland repertoire of pain and grief, failed love and constant struggle. When The Heat is on, as Malin says, this is a record "about surviving and ignoring the people who put you down, and finding a way to stick to your dream". The very essence of Seventies' American blue-collar rock.

Updated: 09:06 Thursday, June 17, 2004