If it hits a bit rough at first—the subject of the title track comes scurrying in like an overly avuncular first date who’s not going to let you get much sleep and may very well steal all the covers—it might only mean that Paul Cebar has been listening to too much Tom Waits of late. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, it’s near impossible to separate the all-singing, all-dancing, song-swirling bandleader and master musicologist from his record collection. It’s a prodigious assemblage of soul, funk, R&B and Afro-Cuban that he adroitly spins and spews on a weekly radio show out over the wavelengths of Milwaukee, with some soulful vocalize improvisations on the less-than-inspiring hometown weather thrown in for good blues measure.
But when the dust and wind all settle, this Fine Rude Thing is all about the laidback, midnight-hour territory of the exceedingly shakable “Baby Shake” and other such land that Cebar has near-perfected since the mid-’80s with an endless cycle of the road, barrooms and festivals. It’s a slinky, sax-honking world-music groove in danceable lockstep with, say, the Iguanas, or, what he might describe himself as a “wild panoply of beats and rhythms.”
At their best, Paul and crew channel Los Lobos—who may have already channeled everything about American music, ever—or the moody indigenousness of the Latin Playboys, with the bassy, backwoods of “The Whole Thing.” But they can just as easily upshift to “Curtis” positivity terrain on the rubbery, damn-it-all exultation strut of “Might Be Smiling.” Then there’s album highlight “Shack and Shambles,” co-written with the Lobos’ own multi-faceted co-frontman, Cesar Rosas. It’s a rollicking kiss-off declaration of self-sufficiency and “kimchee chased with hot sauce,” that gallops and chugs and spicily toots its way toward liberation and something resembling, for better or worse, a ragged, makeshift home.
Cebar changed the name of his longtime band from the Milwaukeeans in order to negate inherent polka connotations. And while the hook-happy “Summer Starts Right Now” hints at a delayed gratification that only a true, windblown Northerner could understand, he’s somehow a man of so many places, times, styles—Chess, Stax, N’awlins, Havana, record store, dancehall—he’s impossible to label. Actually, it’s too bad that the old “gumbo” analogy is so clichéd. Otherwise, it may be useful in describing an artist that it would take endless words to pigeonhole. Or—really, if you’re doing it right—no more than it takes to ask your partner to get up and dance.
