Hawk is the first artist I've heard who has gorged more heavily on Tom Waits' music than the Gants did with the Beatles' catalogue. Such blatant and thorough homages don't typically suggest great things, but Gerald Hawk is very good. King of the River Canoe, while obviously the product of fervent imitation, is not at all irritating (as when Kenneth Branagh played "Woody" in Celebrity). And though it's hard to explain why, it even comes across as startlingly unique.

Rather than setting his hipster-delivered lines of dark imagery against a purely copycat background, Hawk allows his music to veer slightly from the Waits/Ribot noise chain by adopting a more "working-class" avant-garde sound. He does not bang on the scenery of a Robert Wilson play; instead, Gerald Hawk uses everything on a plumber's belt. When he's not speak-singing at all, you might wonder if someone's doing work on your pipes.

Song by untitled song, the tracks on Hawk's CD are less clever and beautiful, but no less intriguing, than Mr Waits' material. His Jim Carroll-like tales ("I'd bet Carl that he couldn't jump off the cliff") have a powerful degree of honesty about them. On track nine, he says "My mother-in-law has lupus/Which makes her skin look like a walrus." Was that supposed to be funny? Quite possibly, but you hear such a line and it disturbs you. It's a raw, blunt, mean observation that gives one little sympathy for the song's narrator...and this is a good thing. Gerald's album brings you to a world where the drunks and lowlifes are not romanticized. The observations sometimes made me wince ("She'll sit on your lap kinda pretty/And tear up all your philosophies"); it's like sitting at a bar beside a homeless drunk who likes Jeff Foxworthy. You want him to move, or at least shut up, but he keeps on talking. And you keep listening.

Hawk also appears to have been influenced by horror films. I don't recall any Tom Waits record where there's lots of whispering, but whispers abound on King of the River Canoe. One minute you're in a crummy bar and the next you're in a forest, chased by the invisible Blair Witch tart. I don't like these moments as much, but they are interesting. Really, the only song that fails to excite is Track Five, on which Hawks simply talks over a lightly strummed guitar. King of the River Canoe is a disc on which every uttered word becomes most effective when surrounded by clanging and bashing metal.

Tom Waits will probably always have Hawk beat at the art of cool, but Hawk might one day produce more formidable and far less sentimental work than his master. I, for one, am happy Hawk does not have it in him to lend an air of class to a Civil War story about flying testicles. It's almost fun to get this disturbed by a song; there is a beauty to his often inelegant smut.