Bitter Honey

Clem Snide is often seen -- justly or not -- as a vehicle for the songs and singular voice of Eef Barzelay. Bitter Honey finds him out on his own for the first time, and it truly is a solo album -- as it features just his voice, an acoustic guitar, and the usual balancing act of quirkiness and heartbreak. Lyrically, there are a couple of tunes that tip the scales a bit too much on the quirky side, like the opening "Ballad of Bitter Honey," which casts the singer as a female hip-hop groupie and contains the timeless rhyme "That was my ass you saw bouncing next to Ludacris/It was only on-screen for a second but it's kinda hard to miss." That's really a tough way to start an album, but Barzelay recovers with some typically fine songs -- the desolate "Words That Escape Me," the tears-in-my-beer ballad "I Wasn't Really Drunk," the spare and yearning "Escape Artist Blues" -- that are as moving and arresting as his best work. His cover of "Joy to the World" is nice, too. The musicians who bac