Glitter in the Gutter

After '90s rock 'n' roll torchbearers D Generation crumbled, the band's frontman, Jesse Malin, won fans and shocked others with his surprisingly folksy solo debut, 2003’s The Fine Art of Self-Destruction. Once the brouhaha settled, Malin amplified his melancholy with healthy dollops of straight-up pop and punk for 2007’s great Glitter in the Gutter. And because he was now viewed as a voice for the post-blank generation, it made sense that (old-time) rock 'n' roll dreamers showed their support: there’s a Springsteen duet (“Broken Radio") and a Jakob Dylan cameo (“Black Haired Girl”), his running bud Ryan Adams is heard everywhere, and Malin fan Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day funded this on his own label. The songs are filled with ghosts (“Spent my childhood at the movies/Lenny Bruce and young Joe Buck/One day you’ll wake up and you’re 30/And you can’t even drive a truck”), while Malin's spare recasting of The Replacements’ “Bastards of Young” goes lengths to show how he's always been on the right side of the left end of the radio dial.