Tweaker
2 a.m. Wakeup Call
BMG/iMusic

Let's begin with Bill Clinton. He's been in the news lately, uncommonly thin, toting around 957 pages of memories — still charismatic, well-spoken and even a bit repentant. The reviews of his memoir are roughly similar to assessments of the man himself. Depending on your political allegiances, his reappearance may take you back to a decade journalist Haynes Johnson, in his book "The Best of Times," referred to as one of unprecedented peace and prosperity, confidence in the future, and "solid grounds... for Americans to think their good fortune would continue, perhaps even multiply, propelling them into an even more golden period." Johnson immediately mitigates this sunny assessment: "A disturbing disconnect was present, however. Despite their blessings, Americans increasingly felt something was wrong with their society."

This was a decade for Tortured White Man Music. Brooding, moody poets and apocalyptic ranters were industry gold. In videos, interviews and magazines, messrs. Vedder, Manson, Reznor, Keenan, Cornell, et al., furrowed their brows in agony, lurked in shadows or stood knee-deep in the throes of some act of perversion that ought to be viewed as a symbol — of a country going in the wrong direction, a soulless empire, a vast land of strip malls and wounded citizens whose dreams are endlessly painful and bereft of poetry.

They made cash cow music, and some of it was pretty damn good. Nine Inch Nails, for example, excelled in this format, benefiting from Trent Reznor's deft arrangement of goth, industrial and alternative styles (to say nothing of his fairly riveting persona). NIN can't accurately be called a group — it was Reznor's project, first to last — but, for several years, Chris Vrenna was its drummer, and a significant contributor to its dense, detailed sound. Vrenna, a musician of considerable talent and scope, parted company with Reznor by 1997 to embark on a solo career of some note. He has produced, mixed or programmed the music of Nelly Furtado, U2, Rasputina, Hole and Skinny Puppy, among others. He has composed scores for films and video games. And he recently released 2 a.m. Wakeup Call, his second album under the moniker Tweaker. He describes it in Rolling Stone as a "nighttime record about things that keep us up at night."

Vrenna's inspiration for the album is his wife's insomnia; he told Rolling Stone that she would bolt awake every night at the same time — 2 a.m. — and he wound up waking with her. It was during these sleepless nights that the album found its shape and theme. Vrenna told the seven guest vocalists to tailor lyrics to his music based on the idea of being up in the middle of the night. More often than not, the results are dark, enigmatic, pained. Kind of like Nine Inch Nails.

Vrenna and his producing partner, Clint Walsh (of Jack Off Jill), labored for a more organic sound than Tweaker's first album, The Attraction to All Things Uncertain, which was heavy on distortion loops, auto-tuning and dozens of tracks layered with reverb. They used live drums, live guitars and bass, even a glockenspiel, Vrenna's favorite instrument. The songs are more directly emotional than the first album, the melodies pop and Vrenna still achieves a massive sound, humming with distress, uncertainty, anger, even moments of rapture. Kind of like Nine Inch Nails.

Oddly, of all the guest vocalists, the Cure's Robert Smith turns in the weakest effort (or the track, all grinding guitars and half-considered electronica synth patterns, is the weakest). Mellowdrone does a great reading of late-night regrets on "Worse Than Yesterday"; over a beautifully melancholic piano figure and an array of electronic percussion, the singer informs himself, "Boy, you've gone and done it now/ You're stuck down the middle/ And left of the center/ All those jokes and silly games/ You wasted so much time." That glockenspiel surfaces in the hard-driving '80s lick (Simple Minds meets a full-on anxiety attack) on "Sleepwalking Away." And that's Johnny Marr on "The House I Grew Up In," augmenting a breezy acoustic guitar opening with a light, effortless lead guitar lick. "Ruby," the opening track, is immediate and unsettling, the sound of a man startled from his fevered sleep by buzzsawing guitar chords. "The color of my dreams, if I had dreams, they would be you, Ruby," sings Will Oldham, whose understated reading is quite affecting.

2 a.m. Wakeup Call, track for track, certainly feels like a middle-of-the-night album; Vrenna approaches the discordance of insomnia with specificity and a production of considerable depth. If the album came out in 1996, there would be some light on it. However, the era of inward-turning music cast in darker hues seems, as conservative firebrand Lucianne Goldberg said in her assessment of Clinton's bio, "so 9/10." There's plenty of gloom available to us in the light of day in 2004; at night, give us our sleep. 2 a.m. Wakeup Call, for all the muscular production and assault of live guitars and drums, slept through one too many alarms and rose a few years too late.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)