Joan Osborne: Eric's Trip

Osborne performs gutsy songs redolent of Janis Joplin in a hoarse, ironic voice that sometimes feels like Sinéad O'Connor, Stevie Nicks, even Marianne Faithfull. She writes some of her lyrics ("Spider Web," about a dream in which Ray Charles tells Osborne he can see again but doesn't sing any more, is a good one) and backs herself up with a four-piece rock band. Centerpiece of the Osborne band is guitarist Eric Bazilian, a master embroiderer whose slithery runs feel like an Osborne itch being scratched.

Osborne needs Bazilian's fussy detail work badly, because she is, most times, a very clumsy singer. She does have an easy-flowing, country soprano, and she uses all of it to make "One of Us" feel like a revelation believed. But this voice never reappears throughout Relish (Mercury), and more's the pity. Perhaps if the Kentucky-born singer weren't trying to be so hip, so downtown cool . . . but no. She adopts influences that are wrong for her, partly because that's what folk rock sounds like in the Age of Attitude, partly because she obviously loves her blues to be as big-hipped as possible.

And if attitude's chief attribute is to impede the real world? Enter Eric Bazilian. Unhappily all he can do, sometimes, is steal the show. Because the chief themes of Relish are real-world indeed: the desire to get laid, addressed by "Let's Just Get Naked," "Right Hand Man," and "Help Me" (a reconfigured Sonny Boy Williamson song); and, in "Man in the Long Black Coat" and "Dracula Moon," the lurking presence of the dark side of life. Singing with attitude, as Osborne likes to do, may magnify the smell of horniness or intensify the fearfulness of a bad end -- but perfume and melodrama don't exactly call a spade a spade. What one remembers from "Help Me," after Osborne's flimsy brush past Williamson's sly-smile vocal, is Mark Egan's five-note blues bass lines.

On stage at the Orpheum last Saturday, Osborne sang most of Relish and really seemed to enjoy herself, as well a VH-1 star might, on her first big tour, playing to a full house of slightly rumpled ex-urbanites of many sexual persuasions. Eric Bazilian was there, and he too was noticed, a lot, as his guitar frissons made "Dracula Moon," "Spider Web," and the bawdy "Right Hand Man" (the CD's second single) shine. But the skinny blonde Osborne looked silly and overmatched trying to force the lurking menace of "Help Me" into female shape. Neither was she able to focus in on the lyric preciseness of "Man in the Long Black Coat" -- a Bob Dylan song better performed solo than by a loud band.

She did sing "One of Us," but she flubbed the "no one calling on the phone, 'cept the pope maybe in Rome" punch line -- maybe because she remembers Sinéad O'Connor only too well and knew she was in very Catholic Boston. A bit of vulnerability, however, makes sense in a song that asks what if God were "just a slob like one of us . . . a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home?" Eloquent words. Guess who wrote 'em? Big prize if you answered "Eric Bazilian."

-- Michael Freedberg