Kevin Bronson on July 8th, 2010

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At the risk of inducing blank stares from the hipsterati who are only occasionally hip enough to embrace their progenitors, I’ll take a moment this morning to tout the new album by Peter Case, “Wig!” (out last week on Yep Roc). Crate-diggers might know Case from early pop-punkers the Nerves (excellently re-issued, by the way), and Angelenos of a certain generation get a certain glow talking about the new-wavey Plimsouls, who had a hit in “Million Miles Away” and whose 1998 disc “Kool Trash” deserved a better fate. Case’s solo work has spanned folk and blues (my highlight: 1992’s “Six-Pack of Love,” along with the ’04 compilation “Who’s Gonna Go Your Crooked Mile?”) with the intellectual, if not musical, bite of a songwriter who won’t let his senses stand still. Case, now 56, had a health scare last year, undergoing double-bypass surgery, and after his A-list friends (including the likes of T-Bone Burnett, Richard Thompson and Loudon Wainwright III) rallied to organize benefits to defray his medical costs, Case slowly recovered and got back to songwriting, energized. As appreciations go, this is far too brief, but suffice to say that the electric blues on “Wig!” show that Case still plenty of gas left in the tank.

||| Download: “Look Out!”

||| Live: Peter Case plays two shows on Friday night at McCabe’s in Santa Monica.

||| Stream: After the jump, listen to selections from “Wig!”: