WILD IN the STREETS

George Elliott's profile has been maintained for a while given his role as partial curator for the Klaus Nomi legacy, but said legacy did grow out of the fact that he and Page Wood had worked together in the band Come On, so it's not surprising to see his own musical legacy go into overdrive in recent years. Wild in the Streets — which does not contain a cover of the psych-trash classic by that name, instead substituting a soft original — is perhaps by definition quirky, a collection of mostly brief songs that seem to hover between light piano bar oddity and curious rock & roll, a fusion clearly designed to please its creator more than an audience. Which is no criticism because the end results are often a gentle joy, an understated album that inhabits the murky sonic realm of someone like Stephin Merritt more than anyone else but which doesn't quite resemble it either. Perhaps the equally singular and strange work of Bobb Trimble would be a better comparison, but instead of Trimble's on-the-edge crumble, Elliott conveys something warm and sweetly cozy — the soft keyboard/melodica flow of "Coy Tease (Waltz)," for instance, or even the gently haunting "Texas (Girl) Blues." Nearly everything is fairly short, adding up to a total of 21 pieces in three-quarters of an hour, and sometimes the titles alone say it all — "Hollow-Furry," a fairy story of sorts, and "'Nice Pants'" stand out. One notable cover does surface — a pleasant ramble through Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now Baby Blue."