Benjy Ferree

shhhhhh. we don't want to disturb him.

i'm going to forgo my usual diet of haute americana, such as dave alvin, james mcmurtry and the bottle rockets, all of whom are are coming to town this weekend, to try something new.

on the advice of our aging pop critic, i'm digging into the work of benjy ferree, who's playing johnnny brendas on sunday, with public record and frightened rabbit.

the boy's from d.c., and seems to be big europe - hence all the myspace love from france and belgium and finland.

you can stream various songs from his november release,"leaving the nest," on britain's domino records here.

pitchfork says he "talks the talk and walks the walk."

i love cleveland says this (we can let him use upper case. it's time to wake Bengy):

His latest offering, Leaving The Nest, is a sweet combination of glam styled pop, southern swamp gothic, and out there indie influences. Sometimes he has me thinking Marc Bolan, like on the disc's opener, the blissfully catchy boogie, "In The Countryside." Other times, when I listen to "Little At a Time" and its slightly off-kilter approach to instrumentation, I'm thinking Badly Drawn Boy. Then, we get to a song like "Private Honeymoon," a haunting ballad of violin and piano, it makes me wish I could take back all of the other times I used the Jeff Buckley comparisons to artists that failed to craft a song in the Southern tradition that's as haunting and inspiring as this one.

Most of the time he just leaves me thinking, "This is one really fine disc."