In the small Upper Midwestern town (approx. 1,700 souls) where I reside, I have an acquaintance who spent some years of his life in El Paso, Texas. It's as close to that city as I've ever been, and likely ever to be. When a thought of El Paso passes casually through my wandering imagination, it is usually followed by a snatch of a blues or r&b song I first heard on a Catfood Records album.

I don't know if there is an El Paso blues scene -- as there is, for example, in Austin, Dallas and Houston -- but El Paso is the home of a small independent label whose periodic releases bring to mind another kind of food, this meant for human consumption: meat and potatoes. (Of course the "cat" might, probably does, mean hipster here, as opposed to the stuff the four-legged cats who share this reviewer's living space gobble up when they're not engaged in their other favorite activity, if that's the word: snoozing.) Like meat and potatoes, Catfood albums are not fancy, but they are dependably pleasurable.

Label head/bassist/bandleader/songwriter Bob Trenchard signs artists who share his belief that a good song, ably sung and capably arranged, will carry itself and need not blow you out into the street to attract your attention. It will also feel lived-in, as if the circumstances it evokes could have happened to somebody you know, or maybe even to you. This used to be the governing principle of blues and its cousins and children. This was before electric guitars, played at eardrum-crushing volume, came to dominate what in time felt no longer like blues, rather like something else passing for it. Let's just say -- wild guess here -- guitar rock from a few decades ago.

The character Chicago-based vocalist Derrick Procell plays is a familiar one in this particular strain of American music: the wounded tough guy. Or maybe that's who he is in real life. I guess it doesn't really matter. But lots of the cuts here, the ones that don't tell us about love realized, chronicle romantic trainwrecks. (In that regard, the occasional train mention rolls ominously through the lyrics.) If the songs' content is hardly novel, Procell still finds a new way of telling you how lousy he feels, sometimes managing to be witty about it. The title tune, written by Procell and Terry Abrahamson, avers that his "mojo must have entered the witness-protection plan," an image that made me laugh. All ends happily, even though the listener is already in a splendid mood well before the story reaches its conclusion.

As with most Catfood releases, the label's house band, called the Rays, provides the back-up with characteristic energy, professionalism and grace. The horn section, as it ought to be in this context, is more prominent than the guitars. That shouldn't sound particularly worth noting, but sadly, it's become so. Procell sings like a real person, resisting the temptation to annoying excess and respecting the listener's taste and intelligence.

Contrast him with a flashy stranger who may or may not win you over, though the stranger will do his best to make the sale, even after you've started wishing he would leave. Procell, on the other hand, is exactly who he appears to be: amiable, unassuming company. He's pushing nothing but music that, while you've heard something like it before, never wears out its welcome, especially when it's carried in good hands like these.

[ visit Derrick Procell's website ]