My uncle's mid-life crisis manifested itself in a pretty unique way. Instead of buying a cherry-red sports car he couldn't afford, or flinging with a ponytailed co-ed, he went to a music store, plunked down for a Fender and some recording equipment, and set out to become the best graying, home-studio bluesman that Worcester, Massachusetts had ever seen (nevermind the dearth of legitimate competition).

After I got a copy of his first demos, I was struck by a particular line railing against "The Man" or the establishment or some such. "Uncle Paul," I said. "You're a white, middle-aged tenured professor of philosophy with a wife, two kids, a minivan and a mortgage. You are 'The Man!'" The point is, of course, that the blues is one of those polyglot art forms-- one that speaks to everyone, regardless of skin color, bank account, or sexual preference. Or whether or not they have tenure.

Cash Audio is a duo from Chicago-- a city internationally renown for its blues-- who have heeded the raspy-voiced call of dead, colorfully nicknamed guitarslingers. They've been at it though three albums and a lawsuit-induced name change, playing minimalist blues-rock with a punk sensibility. With the The Orange Sessions, their fourth album and first away from Touch and Go, John Humphrey and Scott Giampino have given us a dozen tracks of electric rock blues and one uninsightful interview snippet.

Humphrey-- the ax-wielding maniac of the pair-- elects to sing on roughly half of these tracks. That is, when he's not self-absorbed in his own ferocious power scales. Each song contains its own religious moment. The opener, "Don't Put Me on Front Street," ends with the repeated dusty implosion of scales tumbling like bricks from a condemned building. "Chicken Heart" kicks off with some Southern-fried handclaps and a jukejoint-groovin' boogie. "Hey You" sounds like a barroom brawl set to music, with Humphrey egging on participants with lines like, "Hey you, over there/ I saw you staring at my woman." Look out, guy.

A gritty treatment of Lonesome Sundown's "My Home Is a Prison" comes as one of The Orange Sessions' surprise highlights. And the old standby, "Rumble," by power-chord pioneer Link Wray, is a welcome inclusion. Sure, it's hard to screw up a great track like "Rumble," but the fact that Cash Audio manages to deliver an actual decent version is reassuring.

Humphrey's sloppy riffs and Giampino's thick, gooey drumming hold a lot of first-impression appeal. Still, despite all the fun abandon at work here, I found myself pining for the more genuine, stumbling blues growl of 1999's exceptional Green Bullet. There's no guest harp here as on that disc; it's been sacrificed for the basic approach of the strict duo arrangement. Guitar, vox and drums are the minimum needed to extinguish your pain, so that's all they used. Along with the absent harmonica, the risk-taking of more challenging variations on the form such as were found in "Capitol City Blues" are also absent. You know these two can do better, mostly because they have. And recently.

The album closes painfully on an emotionless, stilted interview track. Most of the blame here lies with interviewer/critic Mitch Myers who reads off cards as if English were his second language, while utterly failing to follow-up on the interesting openings that Humphrey and Giampino send his way. Which is a shame, because more albums could benefit from a dash of insightful spoken word or dialogue tossed in to put the musical tracks in perspective. Here, it's a wasted innovation.

When all's said and done, just like my third generation bootleg copy of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's A Reverse Willie Horton suffers from some sound degradation by-product, so, too, does Cash Audio make one wish they mined a little closer to the source. Still, the fact is that The Orange Sessions holds appeal no matter how you were first introduced to this sort of music; whether through the bona fide work of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, or the stolen-goods fencing of Led Zeppelin or even the revisionist twists of Spencer.

As the cliché goes, genuine blues can be heard in the emotional harmonics of the singer's voice: the pain of experience. Cash Audio at times feel like the most pain they've endured recently is being on the losing end of the legal dispute that forced their name change from Cash Money. Nevertheless, for the eager neophyte eager to find some passionate, contemporary evangelists of an underserved genre, Cash Audio remain, as always, a pretty safe bet.

-John Dark