There's no arguing that David Christian's melancholia is feigned — after all, he was once victim to the ultimate musical betrayal when his entire band left him to form a new one. And let's not forget his national birthright — there's even a song here called "This English Melancholy." But City Fallen Leaves, his seventh album since 1995,is a wan portrait of a landscape that remains unfamiliar — and perhaps unsympathetic — to many people, even the English, and that landscape is the artistic squalor of the urban bohemian. With Kinks-ish lilt and ragged, experimental edges, these 15 songs lament bygone music scenes, messy apartments and aimless friends. Christian explains the crisis of the aesthetic life most succinctly on "Ballad of a Mix Tape": Our bookshelves full of mix tapes of punk and soul and damaged rock and roll/The Go-Betweens and Supremes and the Chills and the Dils ... but something is missing. Fortunately, the songs are tuneful, and Christian's adenoidal voice is full of bracing personality. But on the album's most upbeat track, "Fists in the Pocket," his only solution to cultural alienation is to jump into the ocean.
