Fast folkies

In spite of their questionable lineage, Griffin and Sexton are firmly ensconced as new-folk singer-songwriters, and on the basis of their live performances and self-produced tapes they have established reputations as rising young stars in their genre. Their new CDs will only add to the buzz that surrounds them.

Two-time Boston Music Awards-winner Sexton, who has sold more 15,000 copies of his own tapes, is best known for superhuman live shows in which he alternately channels an old bluesman, a vaudevillean, a jazz scat singer, a soul crooner, a trombone, and Peter Frampton's talkbox. He also does unspeakable things with an acoustic guitar and boasts an impossible vocal range, from deep bass to fearless flights into falsetto. "I don't know where it all comes from," he says over the phone from a Motel 6 in Eugene, Oregon. "I just hear things in my head, and I do whatever I have to do to accomplish them."

Produced by Crit Harmon and recorded in Boston with support from drummer Joe Donnelly, keyboardist Harry King, bassist Greg Holt, and others, Black Sheep -- really a soul album in new-folk disguise -- kicks off with the autobiographical title track, the infectious and sultry "Glory Bound," and "Diner," a doo-wop novelty that includes the effortlessly rendered line "They were made back in Worcester, Mass., of aluminum bakelite glass."

Midway through, however, the disk bogs down in some maudlin ballads that not even Sexton's jazzy, soulful vocals can salvage. And in 1996, a song called "Gypsy Woman" with a chorus that goes "Gypsy woman, how'd you do that to me/Gypsy woman, stole my heart and then you set me free" just doesn't light the incense. Sexton's is an untamed talent that would have been better served by a stronger-handed producer directing his wild energy toward a more focused vision.

Griffin's Living with Ghosts is a stark, stunning piece of work, an unprecedented major-label debut by a relative unknown featuring just her naked vocals and acoustic guitar, with no overdubs. "They're pretty honest, pretty close to what I really am," allows the soft-spoken Griffin by phone from her home in Portland, Maine. The 10 emotionally turbulent tunes variously betray her grounding in country, soul and pop. And in their raw passion, these unplugged compositions about poverty, loneliness, anger, and the dissolution of love recall Kurt Cobain, though the more popular comparison has been to a certain angry young female who won some Grammys last March.

"I get the Alanis comparison because of the negative emotions that are addressed in my material as well as hers," Griffin explains. Actually her thin-yet-powerful vocals are a suggestive blend of Dolly Parton and Aretha Franklin; her music, likewise, seems a fusion of homespun country and gospel-soul. "Time Will Do the Talking" could be a Motown ballad. With its far-reaching melismas, "Sweet Lorraine" (not the jazz standard, but a Griffin original) sounds like Lucinda Williams covered by Whitney Houston.

The stripped-down CD is really Griffin's demo tape, recorded in a room near Boston City Hospital (a couple of ambulance sirens provide the only other instrumental accompaniment on the album) and in a kitchen in Nashville. The people at A&M apparently liked it so much, they ditched a fully produced version in its favor.

"It's a way to do it, I guess," says Griffin of her unconventional debut. "I didn't know when I did it that I was making a record." Presumably if she had, she wouldn't have revealed so much of herself in these painfully cathartic tracks that could be the soundtrack to fellow Mainer Carolyn Chute's novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine -- as sung by Robert Johnson. o

Martin Sexton and Patty Griffin celebrate the releases of their new CDs in a concert at the Somerville Theatre this Saturday, June 1, at 7:30 p.m. Call 628-3390.