How Atmosphere Went Electro

"It was this time of year that I was writing a lot of this stuff," he says. "I've been listening to this album for a fucking year, but it didn't start to make sense to me again until the snow came again."

By the time you read this, Slug will have done a dozen of these one-on-one drive-arounds with critics (publicists held advance copies until days before the release date last week). The promo campaign behind Lemons includes YouTube webisodes, music videos, an international tour arriving in Minneapolis May 25, and press mailings that contain moldy lemons painted gold. But Slug's commercial ambitions appear to stop at the studio door—never mind the new poppiness of some songs. The first single he chose wasn't "You," but "Shoulda Known" backed with the spare "Guarantees," which contains no sound other than the guitar strum of Nate Collis, who co-wrote, and the relaxed massage-to-a-punch Method rapping of Slug. In the first person now, he's a non-deadbeat-pop bellying up to happy hour, the better "to politic and tap the power" while talking to the television set. "Can't save no nest egg," he rants. "In fact this nest is rented/In fact that rent is late."

There are big-name guests on Lemons, but Slug asks that I withhold them until the album's release: Tom Waits beatboxing behind "The Waitress," which sounds like Waits in Short Cuts, and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe singing backup against the doomy "Your Glasshouse"—a vividly etched hangover, which Slug says is a metaphor for political awakening. It sounds like something dragged out of Escape from New York.

Playing the song in his truck before heading home to his south Minneapolis house and serious girlfriend, the mustachioed father of a teenager seems comfortable where the music feels imperiled. "I'm gettin' fat," he says, slapping his tummy. "And I like it."

Slug is not worried about seducing new fans. He's happy to "lock in" the old ones "for life." (Atmosphere released a free album for download over Christmas.) The erstwhile Sean Daley has reversed the electrical current of identification that many young listeners appear to feel, some actually crying when they meet him, and I wonder if Slug has teased out the young parents and self-medicaters on Lemons from real conversations after shows. If there's a "career plan" here, it somehow includes collaborating with '60s and '70s cult comedian Blowfly, as well as local reality rappers Muja Messiah and Moochy C, and possibly releasing Atmosphere's already-completed next album for free, again.

So is Lemons as good as its intentions? The music is masterly—it sounds startlingly out-of-time, with Ant's hermetic beats at a cool remove from loops of live music (piano, lap steel, trumpet, flute, popping bass) orchestrated by Ant and Collis and recorded by Joe Mabbott at the Hideaway studio in St. Paul. Slug's flow, more and more, finds beauty in simplicity. The album builds like a film—this is the first Atmosphere I don't skip through—and deepens in your memory. (Note to smokers: "The Skinny" is not about prostitution.)

But most of Slug's stories about people-that-aren't-Slug don't approach the graceful force of confessionals such as "Yesterday," which starts out sounding like another dead homiez tune, and turns out to be... Well, I don't want to give it away. Just say that the last line (actually the last word of the last line) delivers a sharper chill up the spine than the punch line of Tom Waits's "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis," and a lump in the throat.

The song made me want to call my Obama-backing dad, and the family members supporting McCain and Clinton, too. That's not quite changing the world, but it's something.

(Special thanks to Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus for their EMP Pop Conference presentations, without which I would have known less, or nothing, about the Mayer, McMurtry, and Roots songs.)