David Lowery has always been his own worst enemy. He's built a career on making people guess whether or not he's joking, and even his most vocal supporters are likely to have differing opinions on the subject from song to song. For twenty years and at least three bands, the man has been playing the Shell Game with his tongue and cheeks, like this:

David Lowery: "Now, thadies and jdendlemen, waj clodely and keep your eye on da thung, but ruhmember, da thung is fadser dan de eye! Now, thadies and jdendlemen, where joo you thuppothe the dung is now?"

Listening Public: "It's right there, David, in your left cheek."

David Lowery: "Ah! Wrong! It is, in fact, on the bookcase to your left, hidden behind that dusty bottle of Unicum, the national liqueur of Hungary!"

Listening Public: "Sure, David. Sure."

Camper Van Beethoven-- criminally underrated during their existence and disingenuously lauded after having disbanded-- just couldn't shake the perception that they were somehow a novelty act, because nobody was able to determine when they were actually being serious. So Lowery went and formed Cracker, a band that can't shake the perception that they're really Blues Traveler, because now nobody can tell when they're not being serious.

David Lowery is the David Eggers of rock-- critics and listeners generally admit there's something to his work, but keep their distance nonetheless, afraid of being lured into some mean-spirited trick. That whole noncommittal thing was Lowery's long before anybody else tried it, though, and to many of us, it's clear that his past is peppered with heartbreaking works of staggering... well, something.

Now, more than 10 years after Camper Van Beethoven's demise, Lowery and cohorts Victor Krummenacher and Jonathan Segel have decided to release, through Lowery's own Pitch-a-Tent Records, an album of outtakes, live performances, demos and rarities. Sounds like a bad idea to you? It probably was. But some of us really miss Camper Van Beethoven. And to those of us who've found ourselves, despite our best efforts, thinking that maybe Cracker's chicken-fried shtick has passed over the better bits of Camper's sensibility, it's a bad idea whose time has come. Somehow, the boys make it sound alright.

Camper Van Beethoven is Dead, Long Live Camper Van Beethoven is shrouded in the usual Camperian mystery. The idea, evidently, was to release an album of "leftovers" that didn't sound like one. To this end, the various live bits, partially completed songs and demos have been cut-and-pasted together, smeared with an obfuscating layer of samples and sound effects, and had their origins generally obliterated. The whole thing bleeds together, with unfamiliar bits starting out blurry, coming into focus and then resolving into more familiar melodies before suddenly disappearing. It's an interesting approach, and it helps smooth over the cracks in what is, by its very nature, some uneven material.

None of this stuff is revelatory, of course, but a lot of it's better than it really has any right to be. The live material includes an excellent cover of Zappa's "Who are the Brain Police?"-- which sounds more like it's being performed by the Soft Boys than by Camper Van Beethoven-- and "S.P. 37957," a medley which exemplifies the sort of Camper Van strangeness that so bewildered people in the '80s: the track careers wildly from an original Eastern European-tinged instrumental to a spot-on recreation of Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused." Other highlights are the possibly partly maybe new "Klondike," which features a sample of the violin melody from Camper's own "The Fool," and an orchestral version of "All Her Favorite Fruit" from 1989's Key Lime Pie, quite simply one of the finest songs ever put to record.

Sure, this is pretty much a cult-fodder release, and it's naturally much thinner than the band's proper albums-- especially their last two. Still, it hangs together remarkably well. The album's real value, of course, is that it hints that Lowery, Krummenacher and Segel are still in touch with their snotty, inscrutable weird sides-- and with each other's snotty, inscrutable weird sides, for that matter. And in that there is hope for the future.

-Zach Hooker