Telefon [VHS]

What you see is rarely what you get with Jimmy Buffett. While he may contend that he is the king of slackers, a modern day Dean Martin whipping up fizzy rum drinks under the palm trees in a silk Hawaiian shirt, this best-selling author and raconteur is actually the thinking man's party animal. His deceptively breezy lyrics and lazy charm belie a shrewd social commentator and a man not at peace with his world or his own mortality--taking well-aimed potshots at everything from cell phone culture to ancient Greek history to the threat of terrorism, as on the sharply ironic "Party at the End of the World." But having said that, all the unrest exhibited in these 14 songs makes for a far more interesting album than he's made in over two decades. Reflective, unstinting, and often nostalgic, the musician changes the tempo and the subject matter, swapping his usual languid island exhortations of alcohol and brief bikini tops for the fascinating emotional ambiguity of "Whoop De Doo," or the simple charm of "Nothing but a Breeze," which seems so autobiographical it's hard to believe that Buffett didn't write it. But the standout track is his chilling cover of Mary Gauthier's "Wheel Inside the Wheel," revealing exactly what kind of demons have been residing under the singer's ever-present baseball cap. --Jaan Uhelszki

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