Jason Webley - Viaje (1998)

The debut album from Seattle's mix of singer/songwriter, pirate, and muse that is Jason Webley shows a rather rough edge in performance but a surprisingly mature hand in composition. Webley tends to move from style to style, alternating between rollicking self-made drinking songs made for some combination of sailors and college students and tender compositions for guitar. His accordion can move from punk to an ambient European background. While the music is almost uniformly excellent, the lyrics often show a sort of stream-of-consciousness style that works well for some rounds and seems to wander a bit for others. Regardless of the style and content, the sound is always powerful in one way or another with Webley. It's damn hard to categorize or label an album like this, but it's vastly more coherent than most uncategorizables -- and worth hearing for the quality at that.