Return to X is the high-water mark for that rarely heard sub-genre, spinet-rock. As Grove's Dictionary of Music relates, it was back 1748 that Josiah Frotte first dragged his tinkly-tankly harpsichordian spinet out from the hayloft and out to his village's Michaelmas hoedown. In previous years' celebrations, the village's pastor had seen fit to entertain the populace with his interpretive Morris Dancing. How the children sat, cross-eyed and rapt, by Pastor Purvis' unique terpsichorean narration of the tale of Jonah and the Whale! How they winced as Pastor Purvis depicted the debilitating effects of cetacean gastric juices on the human body, however fortified with parable-power!

But the week before the Michaelmas celebrations of 1748, Josiah Frotte was rummaging around his barn for a missing milkmaid and stable boy and, despondent that he could find neither, rested his vexed body on the soft embrace of late-summer-fresh hay. Looking up, he did not imagine what the milkmaid must have seen as passion seized her youthful plumpness; no, he looked up and into the sunless dark of the musty recess of his barn. Unable to recall what had been stored up there, and in the absence of any pressing labor, he procured a trusty ladder and ventured forth.

Like a diver heading into the undiscovered deep dark, Josiah groped his way through dust motes the size of cow pies. The uncirculated air reminded him of his grandmother's influenza elixir, gravid with bacterial growth and soggy with dank clag. Amid the disintegrating chests, their contents ignored for successive generations of undistinguished Frottes, stood the damp-warped spinet that would shortly distinguish Josiah.

Binding the spinet with ropes and hooking on the barn's pulley system, Josiah lowered the venerable instrument down into the sunlight of the waning afternoon. In that light, one could clearly see the craftsmanship of the person who made the Frotte spinet. Along one side, the artisan had painted a representation of Acteon and the hounds, transplanting that unfortunate voyeuristic Cypriot from Diana's private haunt, to the more familiar, less Mediterranean surroundings of Bogmor, Massachusetts.

As Pastor Purvis' Michaelmas sermonizing was promoting lassitude amongst the parishioners and as the sun was lowering itself towards the bosky horizon, Josiah hollered to announce that he would be beginning his tribute to the harvest, and to the holy day of Michael's Mass. Lurching over the keyboard of his refurbished and chaff-free spinet, he glanced wide-eyed at his startled audience and rocked his left hand down low on the keys. Josiah's audience bounced up from their yawning and discovered new sensations. As one-by-one the townsfolk experienced stirrings in their loins, Josiah ran down his proto-boogie stylings.

Pastor Purvis, threatened by Josiah's interruption of his meditation on Divine Grace, became doubly so as Widow Thrimp's rheumy eyes were suddenly rid of their gooeyness. The town's children danced in manners then unbecoming to decent Christian folk. Their faces pulled and skewered in intense liberated pleasure. Wives, hitherto respectful and docile, tore away from their husbands and thronged, passion-thirsty, around Josiah as his fiery performance crescendoed in intense sensuality. It took half a dozen of the town's sergeants to remove the wives and wrench Josiah from his spinet.

In court, the magistrate, who, modern authorities all agree, had heard of Josiah's libidinous performance, had already decided on his verdict before the trial commenced. Denouncing the "wanton licentiousness and the flagrant flouting of accepted codes of decency of God-fearing folk" with which Josiah had whipped the people into a "fetid orgy of misconduct," the county magistrate sentenced Josiah into exile: Josiah was to be paraded though the town, tarred and feathered, before being driven like a caged animal a day's ride from the town. There, he was to be abandoned without apparel or nourishment so that he may live like the beasts of the wilderness that he most assuredly admired.

As for the spinet, it remained where it had stood that evening for a while until the burghers set it alight to celebrate the "goode gatherings of the field and the veritable riddance of a Demon from our Territory." A piece of the spinet, heavily tarnished by flame and smoke, is in the permanent collection of Shrewsbury museum. As for Josiah, the townsfolk told their children of a beast man in the far-off yonder hills. On windy nights, when a nor'wester blows terribly, one can hear a strangely human voice shrieking "wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boo."

Rather than making unrestrained homage to Josiah Frotte, whom long ago should have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Simmonds takes a spinet and applies it not to proto-rock 'n' roll, but rather to fusion-y jazz. Perhaps Simmonds is mindful of conventional society's revenge on renegade Josiah, for his instrument tinkles and tankles threatlessly throughout Return to X.

Simmonds leaves it to the other musicians to stoke fire in the belly, as though ready to point an accusatory finger should any sergeants arrive to quell the fervor. And moderately fervid Return to X gets. "Alvin's Blues" has a McCoy Tyner-ish punch to it and "Swingin' Millie" fuses the fussy baroque of Domenico Scarlatti with the orchestrated bop of Charles Mingus. On the pumped-up, no-nonsense, spinet-less "No Bamboo," Simmonds revisits the dancefloor-jazz of his Last States of Nature album and proves once again that if anyone can untangle that bastard genre, it's him.

When Simmonds does use his spinet, it's never the focus of the tracks. Rather than making the instrument the gimmicky axis of the album, he uses it as a theme-sound, such as a soundtrack composer would associate a particular character with a particular instrument. Unlike Daft Punk's motiveless doing-it-to-death of the vocoder, Simmonds' spinet has a distinct purpose. The instrument represents the restraint and the delicacy of X, the calm center to which he might return. Amid all the clashing dancefloor noises, the stampede of kickdrums and the killer-bee sound of hi-hats, Simmonds has cordoned off a tranquil area to which everyone can visit when the mood or necessity takes them. Wild man Josiah might not approve of the taming of the spinet, but I do.

-Paul Cooper