(Bloodshot)

www.bloodshotrecords.com

While there are plenty of examples to back up the aphorism that most musicians want to be actors and most actors are simply frustrated musicians with better cheekbones -- witness the crossover careers of Alicia Keys, Jared Leto and, ahem, Lindsay Lohan -- little attention has been paid to another pop-culture maxim: Inside every novelist is a rock star waiting to step away from the keyboard and strap on a guitar and sing.

Writers have proved much more capable of quelling this urge than actors -- and for the sake of this argument, I'm going to exclude further mention of music critics and rock journalists. There are exceptions, of course: The Stephen King-Amy Tan-Dave Barry goof The Rock Bottom Remainders; the Kurt Cobain-William S. Burroughs collaboration "The Priest They Called Him." (Sadly, the aging lion Philip Roth has, to the best of my knowledge, never expressed a need to rock out, even though the titles of his novels - particularly Portnoy's Complaint, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain -- are begging to be appropriated as names of punk bands.)

Jonathan Lethem, whose acclaimed novels include Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, avoids Rock Bottom silliness with I'm Not Jim, the cryptically named project he created with The Silos' Walter Salas-Humara. Lethem, in fact, doesn't perform on You Are All My People, the outfit's debut release, though he did write lyrics to which Salas-Humara added melodies and the production team known as The Elegant Too - really New York scene vets Philip Hernandez and Chris Maxwell - surrounded with digital beats, chopped-up guitar lines and other studio effects. That Salas-Humara's seen-it-all vocals and Lethem's impressionistic wordplay occasionally seem at odds with the production only makes the work more interesting, providing a conflict that would have been missing had the writer and musician attempted to capture these songs in a more-traditional band setting.

While that may not sound like a reason to crowd a dance floor, I'm Not Jim does deliver songs that border on flat-out rock 'n' roll: the bluesy and defiant "Drink ‘Til I'm Sober; the punchy, snarling "Towtruck"; and the Petty-esque sing-along "Uncomplicated." With its distorted vocals and slinky beats, "After Mild Winter" could be mistaken for a new Twilight Singers track. "Elevated Plane," meanwhile, is further evidence that Salas-Humara's gift for producing grabby melodies with seemingly little effort remains intact more than 20 years into his career.

I'm Not Jim's literary roots are most evident on a trio of spoken-word interludes - "Howard," "Walks Into" and "Missing Persons" -- in which Lethem's writing assumes a menacing edge and You Are All My People becomes that rarest of enterprises: an experimental side project deserving of a sequel.

Standout tracks: "Amanda Morning," "Uncomplicated" JAKE CLINE