[Martin Mull's] songs are a glossy and smoothly subtle blend of many influences shaped and channeled by a unique and whimsically droll point of view. Some of the songs are hymns in praise of such mundane subjects as eggs and Miami ("The only fish around are Nova Scotia lox") but mostly simply tell stories, exploring the narrow but fascinating range of ramifications spreading out from the dropping of an often tiny pebble of aberration into the placid waters of the American norm: a lover learns ventriloquism, a middleclass maiden loses her ring finger to a washing machine, a man marries a midget, a freak turns to booze and a classified ad for girls "to live in dreams" spirals into a flapper bachannal whose dionysian Dixieland rhythms bring to mind those jungle swing cartoons in which vaguely negroid monkeys kept the beat with coconuts on each other's heads. His...