Stream: Butch Bastard, ‘I Think It’s Gonna Rain’

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Butch Bastard

First thing: Butch Bastard’s forthcoming album is titled “Elegy For the Baby Boomer.” Which, from this ’50s baby’s point of view, is interesting. It’s nice to know somebody cares enough to pen one.

The album will come out next spring, more than four years after the lamentably overlooked Butch Bastard debut, “I Am Not a Man,” which itself arrived four years after its author, Ian Murray (once of the Sub Pop band Poor Moon), packed his things and moved from Seattle to L.A. “I Am Not a Man” is full of sadness and sarcasm and humor, not necessarily in that order, the kind of miserablist blues that spill out when life gets so ridiculous your blood boils and you’re too bent to scream.

So this week brought the arrival of “I Think It’s Gonna Rain,” “Elegy’s” first single and a sweeping ballad (thank you, Laena Myers-Ionita’s strings) that sprinkles Rapid Dry on the spirit of an already desiccated generation. To hear him, Murray’s been lurking in Class of 1974 chatrooms, taking notes.

“This song is kind of a big swing, I admit,” the songwriter says. “A bit out of my comfort zone. I have a tendency to put a twist of irony into a lot of what I say and make. Part of this is to avoid being overly sentimental, and part of this is to shield myself from the responsibility of saying things directly. On this song I am very direct. But it’s not the voice of a preacher. It’s the voice of someone in their underwear screaming in the middle of a Cracker Barrel.”

That image in mind, it is with nothing but fondness and admiration that “I Think It’s Gonna Rain” earns this one-word review: Bastard.

||| Stream: “I Think It’s Gonna Rain”

||| Previously: “I Am Not a Man,” “Hot Blooded, Heavy Handed Blues,” “Sloppy Seconds,” “Butchie Baby,” “Magnolia”