LA’s Chuck E. Weiss, immortalized in song by both Rickie Lee Jones and Tom Waits, is a walking, croaking pharmacopœia of American roots music that he distills into his own hipster brew. This disc is a follow-up to his Ryko debut, 1999’s Extremely Cool, and that’s a small miracle when you consider how that CD ended an 18-year hiatus after his first LP, 1981’s The Other Side of Town.

Weiss’s embrace here is even wider than before, ranging from grizzled rock to spoken-word eccentricity to dirty roadhouse blues. There’s a narrative poem about Al Jolson’s second wedding night that rides a greasy beam of rock guitar, and a 1970-recorded jaunt through the Amos Milburn barrelhouse anthem "Down the Road a Piece" with the late Willie Dixon slapping upright bass. And gris-gris dust coats the New Orleans blues "Congo Square at Midnight." Waits and Weiss share the same whisper-to-yowl vocal style and sense of twisted humor — both of which are captured in the B-3-organ-stoked "G-d Damn Liars" (also the name of Weiss’s band) and the Lord Buckley slow burn of "Sneaky Jesus," which welds toy piano to a jazz-funeral drumbeat. Surely when Weiss wrote the tongue-in-cheek lament "No Hep Cats," with the tag line "ain’t no hep cats anymore," he was joking, because he is, obviously, the shit.