I ran into Kris Hansen, without the Left Hand Band, not long ago at Tazza Caffe. A stranger to me, I bummed a cigarette from him and found he looked familiar. Before too long, we established that we had been classmates at School One in the nineties and that he was pretty dedicated to music these days.

Right away, taking in the bird's-nest beard, sand dune locks and world-weary gravitas, I knew his music must be good. He looked like he'd just made his way across the Mojave Desert after having stayed in Venice Beach a day too long. He looked like every poet worth his salt should look: liked he'd lived a number of lives. In reality, he has lived at least two.

 Hansen is a nimble songwriter, a courageous poet and a musician who deftly manipulates all of the tools at his disposal, from Beatles-esque chordal harmonies to arena-rock guitars. As a singer, Hansen is understated and restrained, and possesses the stately elegance of Smiths-era Morrissey. Musically, the Left Hand Band is, at its heart, a stripped down alt-country version of Depeche Mode or The Alarm, comprised of singer-guitarist Hansen, drummer Bob Giusti, and George Dussault, who plays "everything else." Lyrically, their eponymous album is a refracted meditation on mortality; rich with paranoid shifts in context and meaning that would make Paul Celan jealous, wordplay ("Woody Allen Poe!"), and love songs with a bare, crisp simplicity. 

The duty of a poet is to make for your eyes and ears what can only be seen or heard by the heart; to give to you in its purest form an experience you have not had, or have had and couldn't explain. From "The Song They All Wanted": "The calmest way I could explain this to you/ would be to pluck it out of air and then show it to you."

"The Song They All Wanted" is one of several works here that will remain with you, a smartly arranged reflection with a sinister guitar lick peeking around its shoulder. On 1 and 7, the gravity of the human condition is gaining, the atmosphere heating up. An inversion of Chuck Berry's Thirty Days, here there's nothing at the end of the calendar but a mournful flamenco guitar and a ghostly Doo-Wop refrain:

 "…And this is my death, dizzy I lay down but up/ I'll frown, I'm around, seven more days and I'll meet god."Or will he? The album's masterpiece, "Ebola," builds the tension. It's a funereal march behind a cello and a violin, a long, theatrical answer to Bohemian Rhapsody in which the narrator must answer a question, finally and completely:

"You never see and don't, the mask that you have bound/Don't you want to die with your conscience clean/Why don't you believe in anything"

I wouldn't share a pup tent with a poet who doesn't know that we are nothing without our myths, that they are our meaning and our measure. But I haven't known too many who have dealt with those myths as directly as has Hansen. From the magnificent "Bastar":

"Granted it was pure but there will never be a cure/And forever was the myth I was looking for."

Kris Hansen's "Left Hand Band" is not a downer. There are serious songs on serious subjects, proclamations of devotion, of faith, of love, of fidelity. And there is the shadow that pushed open the door and found Hansen not ready to go. But there are also whammy bars, slide guitars, barnyard animals, lounge acts, chain saws, hysterical gang vocals, plinking mandolins, country fried guitar licks, banjos, hand claps and a hidden track.

 This is the joyous music you make to be sure that the next time that door opens, many years on, you won't regret some chance you didn't take, some gas you left in the tank, some cards you left face down on the table.

This is the music of a courageous poet.