Somehow I missed Randy Newman's first album of new material in nine years. Now, months later, I learn about it only because Pitchfork Media of all people had an interview with one of my favorite musicians. They didn't review the record, I guess he's too old (though they give Lou Reed a pass), but it got me informed and I was so excited I bought it on iTunes because I didn't want to wait to go to a record store.

The record is called Harps and Angels and it's mostly a blues record. At sixty-five Newman's voice has gotten a bit deeper. He hits almost all his notes these days, but you all know this if you've seen a Disney movie in the past 15 years. He's a better singer than he's ever been. His writing here is the best it's been maybe in thirty years. His writing is also as sarcastic, cynical, and so close to mean-spirited it nearly collapses in on itself. You'd be depressed if you weren't laughing so hard. There are some mostly throw-away love ballads here (the closing track "Feels Like Home" gets a too much praise (though it was originally written as a piece for a version of Faust where it's used to trick the devil, which if you think of it in that context, you've got something very interesting). But the bulk of tracks here are about things no other singer-songwriters write about, and here it's mostly done in a blues idiom with some show-tune rag time embellishments thrown in here and there. Newman our greatest orchestral composer singer-songwriter, manages to make everything here sound intimate, even when he's writing for a dozen instruments.

The title track/opener finds Newman offering maybe the finest vocal performance of his career. He tells a story to his band of a near-death experience. He avoided the afterlife due to a "clerical error", but in the mean time he hears an authoritative voice that was "a voice full of anger from the Old Testament/a voice full of love from the New one." The voice gives him a stern warning and leaves the narrator hearing what he can only identify as French, but the only French he knows is "encore" and "tre bien." And this is what Newman does so well. He speaks in so many voices with such authority that you're able to find something to love or at least understand in even his most awful, ignorant characters. He does it again on "Korean Parents" where he sings from the voice of a spokesman for a company that sells Korean parents for American parents who need help getting their kids to do well in life. It's so close to offensive that it's uncomfortable. But Newman has the uncanny ability, similar to Dave Chapelle, to be so honest about his characters, so convincing in speaking in their voice (even when, as in "Rednecks" the voice can't belong to any individual), that he manages to distance himself and the art from the things that make the characters so repugnant. He's a satirist certainly, but he's also an artist opening up characters for us to see a bit more clearly, allowing us to reject their viewpoints and decide a bit better about whether we want to reject them as people.