Ralph Carney is the odd man's odd man. He hangs around with an eccentric musical crowd, having worked with such noted professional outcasts as Allen Ginsberg, and Marc Ribot. He's such a unique chap that musical wildman Tom Waits has used him as his main horn-player since 1985, when Waits reinvented his image with his landmark Rain Dogs LP.

Having hovered in the background for so long, it seems only natural that Carney would eventually catch the solo album bug. It's also no surprise that, with his patchwork musical background, his album would force a million different song styles into a handful of loosely held-together songs. I Like You (A Lot) is the second such bit of phlegmy prog-rock discharge Carney's spit up due to this solo artist illness, the first being 1997's Ralph Music. And after examining the specimen, the prognosis isn't good.

The album is a strange, wildly erratic and completely idiosyncratic sonic collage, a piece so convoluted and forced it could only entertain the listener if the listener were Ralph Carney himself. And because he wrote all the songs and plays all the instruments, this is all Carney all the time. Let's just hope it fulfills his need to express his musical vision, because if it doesn't, no amount of recording will, and that means that he'll try this shit again.

I Like You has no overriding theme, sound or purpose, and the individual songs clash with each other like the letters of a ransom note. The closest comparison I can make is demented ice-cream truck music laced with infantile studio effects, and that is damned hard music to appreciate. The title track is a chore in itself. It consists of one line: "I really like you/ I really do," which is repeated over ghostly background vocals, staccato drum machine beats, high-pitched electric whines and slightly distorted circus music.

Does Carney really believe he's going to convince the world at large that he's musically advanced by strumming an unplugged electric guitar over a de-tuned sax and pinball machine noises while repeating, "They'll be fresh tube socks," in a creepy voice? I mean, no one's doubting the guy's gifts-- he plays a million instruments and his work on other artists' albums is standout, to say the least. But a dozen other quirky musicians have made albums that are ten times as strange as I Like You without sacrificing the audience's enjoyment. If Carney wants to get noticed, he needs to quit wasting time with sound effects and get to writing some real songs.

-Steven Byrd