Crass, as Scroobius Pip put it in "Thou Shalt Always Kill", were just a band, but they tried as hard as any band ever has to be more. Between 1978 and 1984, they made some extraordinary records-- explicitly political, full of raging wit and anarchist-utopian harangues-- and wrote some great songs in response to the headlines of their moment. But even their best songs depended on their cultural context. What mattered with Crass was the entire package: not just the music, as explosive as it sometimes was, but the way it was a part of their organization, their ideas about politics and economics, their design sense, and the autonomous way they lived their lives. Covering their songs makes about as much sense as covering "The Ballad of John and Yoko".

So jokey NYC singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis making an album of a dozen re-arranged Crass songs is an audacious idea, but it's also a terrible idea. What Lewis has in common with them is frustrated-idealist politics and a penchant for lyrics that rattle on and on. He's a funny lyricist and a good cartoonist, but his recordings are almost entirely a delivery system for words; it's hard to imagine anybody listening to them for their sound. It's also hard to imagine anyone wanting to hear 12 Crass Songs more than once when listening to one of Lewis's "real" albums, or alternately an actual Crass album, is an option.

Thankfully, Lewis doesn't try to sound at all like Crass-- he translates all the songs into his own idiom. But that idiom mangles them. His voice is flat and uncertain, both in affect and in pitch; he mostly sticks to one or two notes, which gets old fast when he's delivering Crass's 800-word lyrics; his arrangements, for the most part, are straightforward guitar/drum acoustic-antifolkie stuff, with occasional string and organ parts or Helen Schreiner's equally wobbly voice chiming in. The formal disconnect between source and style actually sort of works once, on the anarchist manifesto "Big A Little A"-- partly because the song's almost a jumprope rhyme ("No one ever changed the church by pulling down a steeple/ Systems aren't made of bricks, they're mostly made of people"), partly because Lewis doesn't shy away from its potential for big noise.

Twelve is eleven too many, but that song, by itself, would've been a clever gesture. Still, to make music in Crass's spirit isn't to repeat their utterances but to follow their example. (No American musician has come up with a response to the Iraq war as furious, direct and daring as Crass's string of records about the Falklands war: "Sheep Farming in the Falklands", "How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of 1000 Dead?", and "Yes Sir, I Will".) When Lewis and Schreiner chant the 27-year-old couplet "Be exactly who you want to be, do what you want to do/ I am he and she is she, but you're the only you", it's hard to tell if they're missing the point on purpose.