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SHAKE THE SHEETS
(Lookout!)
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This was the year that former DC hardcore star Ted Leo was supposed to release a lion’s roar in the form of a protest record. With its jaunty rock — better than what comes from most of his sugar-punk peers — Shake the Sheets does this in a non-specific whisper rather than an anti-Bush growl. Yeah, the album lacks the playful production of 2003’s Hearts of Oak (Lookout!), where meat hammers bang on kettle drums; here Leo is content to stay the course with straight-ahead rock. On "Walking To Do," the meandering hook and the call-and-response from the band are as free-for-all as a Dexy’s Midnight Runners karaoke night. And when Leo says, "I worry for my tired country" in "The One Who Got Us Out," it’s a familiar sentiment. There’s no xenophobic trip like Hearts’ "Ballad of a Sin Eater" — he’s as comfortable strafing through a tune about whiskey sweats and sawdust clubs ("Bleeding Powers") as he is musing on collapsing democracy. And if the music rather than the pin on his jacket lapel is the message, maybe the old punk is right.
