Pitchfork

Reg Vermue is used to being among good company as a member of the theory-tinged queerpop concern The Hidden Cameras. His second solo album finds him fraternizing with Bry Webb, who contributes guitar to two songs on this record, and whose band The Constantines realized the anthem of the year with "Young Lions". Nine of this album's songs also feature members of the Kindercore-y Royal City, whose recent plaintive cover of "Is This It" is more interesting than the attempts of fellow Stroke-tenders Vitamin C, Detroit Cobras, Ryan Adams, Los Hermanos and Starsailor. Vermue's also found an able backup singer in painter Kit Malo, whose cover-art portrait of a featureless duo glowering at pastries sets up this album's twin tones of androgyny and sickening sweetness.

Vermue's stage name harks archly to the dozens of prissy wrestlers who were named Gentleman So-and-so. Though the word has also been cast as a euphemism for high-class homosexuals as well as male prostitutes, it could also simply mean "gentle man" in Vermue's case, since his music tests one's tolerance for the upper spectrum of fey wispiness. Nothing about Vermue's outing himself necessarily ghetto-izes his music (though he can sound like the gay-and-proud David McAlmont), because for every lisp, bit of lyrical shorthand, or overt reference to homosexuality, he aims for the universal elegance of hetero softies such as Stuart Murdoch and the late Elliott Smith ("Hard to Speak" could have been gutted from the midsection of Either/Or).

At his best, Vermue's vocals suggest white soul: a funkless Prince here, the most effeminate moments of interchangeable D'Angelos there. Still others will hear less-depressed echoes of the disputed sexuality of Nick Drake (please remember to spare your urinal neighbor the "Pink Moon" and "Fruit Tree" jokes). In fact, what the listener might initially consider tee-hee-ness is often just a general seductive pose that Vermue's vocals strike, similar to that come-hither quality that makes Vince Vaughn seem gay on the cover of Esquire even though he's surely thinking of last night's acrobatic, girl-stacked, purgatorial sixsome.

A tremendous EP is buried inside this album, though I had to own the thing a year before I could sort it out (Vermue admits in interviews that his music requires a "commitment"). "Statement" tiptoes around sexuality's relationship to identity, set to an if-Joan-of-Arc-were-optimistic arrangement. "Give Me the Chance to Fall" is a fine melodramatic crooner, complete with "Brimful of Asha"-style chords and claps that beg the question of why the hell humans beat their hands together to show approval. "Make Me Pretty" risks intimating a coy Cat Stevens, but the piano and the confident chorus save it. "You're So Alone" bounces on Belle-Sab organ to its omnisexual conclusions. "Heat" is a damn fine slow-jam about seasonal modes of coupling, despite its Dawson's Creek aftertaste. "Bless This Heart" dips Hank Williams histrionics in Boy George daintitudes, resulting in a genre- and gender-bender on par with Fargo's inversions of maternity and noir authority. "Anthem for Self-Confidence" wins with humor, as the speaker insists that he is his intended's destiny, despite his obvious insecurities and disbelief in that whole destiny charade.

Pity, then, that the album's six other tracks are a touch precious and adolescently hyper-self-referential. Failing to remember the Creative Writing 101 mandates of Ezra Pound ("make it new") and Emily Dickinson ("tell it slant"), they sound too much like blog entries, reeking of fraudulent privation. Clarinets can't save their romanticism from Sex and the City superficiality. Reg Vermue has since recorded an anti-war tune ("Bombs in Baghdad"); one wishes that more songs on this album were so unfragile, or were at least as interesting as their author's frosted eyebrows.