The interior sleeve for Lou Ford's second album, Alan Freed's Radio, sports something you don't see in many liner notes: a quote from acclaimed underground American poet and legendary drunk Charles Bukowski. The quote goes, "The most important thing is the obvious thing that no one is saying." And on Alan Freed's Radio, Lou Ford seem to truly believe those words of wisdom, instead of simply borrowing Bukowski's name to buy cheap indie cred.

I say this because one word that could conceivably be used to describe Lou Ford's music is "obvious," but in all the best ways. By obvious, I don't mean predictable or stale-- those qualities are still bad. Here, obvious means "making perfect sense" or "such a good idea we should have thought of it ourselves." Both of those qualities describe the straightforward, soulful and satisfying music of total unknowns Lou Ford.

To clear some things up, Lou Ford isn't a dude, but instead, four guys making simple, surprisingly smart music. Mixing deep twang with clever songwriting that's one part alt-country, one part Bill Haley-era rock n' roll, and one part toned-down arena rock, Lou Ford has produced an album that, despite my clumsy efforts to throw adjectives at it and make them stick, just can't be categorized that easily. All I can say for certain about the music is that it's heavy with guitar work, and consequently, Alan Freed's Radio seems to cover a lot of musical ground in only fifteen tracks.

Lou Ford take a "less is more" approach, never complicating their song's Zen-like purity with needless clatter, and the band's stripped-down sound is refreshing in a world ripe with studio gluttony. Yet, the entire album is skillfully produced, sounding as intimate as a backyard concert without becoming anemic like so many folk-rock records tend to.

The polished, singable chorus of the album's opening song, "Storz Bar," is a testament to Lou Ford's subtle power and songwriting skill. When frontman Alan Edwards croons, "They're just waiting on/ The next hit song/ They won't wait too long/ Man, radio's the best," it's meant to be sarcastic. But he sings the line with such heartfelt conviction that you can't help but hear a musician's love for music of all kinds in his voice.

"Said What I Said," a straight folk groover about the hassles of working for The Man, has such a strong Eisley Brothers feel to it that it's almost lawsuit worthy. "Move Up to the Mountains" is as downhome a bluegrass song as you get without having a washboard in the rhythm section. The jazzy but heartbreaking "A Mile A Way" (written by Alan Edwards' brother and bandmate Chad Edwards) not only serves as a solid, earnest unrequited love ballad, but also showcases Lou Ford's tendency to garnish their simple, stark-naked storytelling with emotionally heavy lyrics.

In the end, the elements that make Alan Freed's Radio such an enjoyable listen are the same ones that utterly separate it from today's music scene. It feels like an album completely unstuck in time, like something dug up from a long-buried time capsule, without coming off kitschy. But Lou Ford seem to enjoy being anachronisms, even if they do self-consciously fuse past music trends with current ones. For instance, this record could easily belong to early-'60s A.M. radio, but carries enough modern sophistication and cynicism to prevent it from becoming hokey. And while the album's cover art looks like test shots for the Leave It Beaver set, one of the photos features a father figure with his eyes obscured by a black bar-- the kind news shows use to hide the identity of crack addicts-turned-police informants. That tension between the old and the new is the true originality that lies in this record.

Though Alan Freed's Radio does feel immediately familiar-- like it "fits" somehow-- it's only toward the end of the record, when the music is winding down, that we realize that the time this music fits isn't really ours. And that trick makes the album both accessible and surprising, along with being just plain old good music.

-Steven Byrd