(Standard Recording Company)

www.standardrecording.com

A three-disc set of 43 songs about each of 43 presidents may sound like a gimmick worthy of They Might Be Giants, but Of Great and Mortal Men shares more with Sufjan Stevens' 50 States project: it's an ambitious, thoughtful, historically astute collection. J. Matthew Gerken, Blurt contributor Christian Kiefer and Jefferson Pitcher originally conceived the project as part of "February Album Writing Month" (www.fawm.org), and each demoed songs for fourteen presidents (leaving W. for later). Many of the songs are first-person narratives that seize on a few telling details: they are dramatic monologues or confessionals, more often about the mortal, day-to-day psychologies of the men than about their political talking points, more descriptive than evaluative. Dylan said, "even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," and that principle is behind most of these songs.

Gerken, Kiefer and Pitcher are not interested in stylistic diversity or in matching music to era (unlike, say, the Magnetic Fields similarly ambitious 69 Love Songs). They favor somber slowcore: moody, deliberate songs anchored in acoustic guitars and colored with shivery feedback or reverberating banjo. A glance at the guests gives a good sense of the style: Low's Alan Sparhawk, Smog's Bill Callahan, Mark Kozelek, Rosie Thomas, Califone.  But there's variety here, too, from distorted anger (in a nine-minute epic about Richard Nixon, "2 Under Par Off the Coast of Africa") to wistful melancholy (for Jimmy Carter on "A Great Beam of Light"), from an REM-like reverie (for William McKinley's assassin in "Czolgosz's Dream") to a ghostly banjo tune (for James Madison on "Zinger").

Of Great and Mortal Men is a history lesson disguised as an indie-rock album, but even without the socio-political hook (and the accompanying fancy book of portraits and lyrics), it's a collection of good songs. It gets my vote.

Standout Tracks: "In Hindsight," "Was Ever Alone," "Suits and Fine Trousers vs. Hiroshima" STEVE KLINGE