The first thing we need to get straight is this: Thomas Truax does not sound like anyone else. I have to do the comparison thing, because that's how I get free records, but really and truly, Thomas Truax is his own guy, and you have to hear him to understand. So here goes: if e.e. cummings set his poems to toy piano road-house jazz, if a deadpan Leonard Cohen were to sing these tunes while playing home-crafted instruments right out of Dr. Seuss, it might come close to Thomas Truax. It just wouldn't be as good.

Truax is a New York-based performance artist and singer/songwriter. He is also the inventor of such fanciful instruments as the Hornicator, a twisted hookah of a horn that sounds like a kazoo's grown-up cousin, and the Cadillac Beatspinner Wheel, a motorized percussion instrument that resembles a sail-less windmill. He uses these, and a whole peddler's cart full of non-standard instruments, to create bizarrely beautiful settings for his complex and literate songs. Opener "Drifter of the Mind", for instance, incorporates what sounds like a music box and bells, in addition to guitars, drums and organ, into its swelling tones. Spooky theremin sounds appear on two tracks -- the short but mind-blowing "Lunar Tic" and the slightly more conventional "She'd Close One of Her Eyes". And when Truax talks about "Me, my toy piano and my pet bat, Bart," he isn't kidding about the toy piano part. Maybe not about the bat, either.

The unusual instruments are a treat, but Truax's lyrics are pure, off-kilter joy. I'm going to pay them the ultimate compliment, comparing them not to other music lyrics but to actual poetry. What came to mind was e.e. cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town", with its insistent internal rhythms and elusive, half-in-focus images. Truax's lines, particularly in the stunningly good title track, are likewise dense with assonance and alliteration, transposing sounds and ideas in ways that would be exhilarating to read, and that must come alive even more in performance. For instance, there's a line that reads "So the ladies / From Hades / Their eyes like burning rubies / As they escort / Arm in Arm / Henri Matisse to the bar"; it is not only interesting and evocative, but the rhythm of the words exactly matches the rhythm of the line. Try it out loud. You can't read it out of cadence.

Full Moon Over Wowtown also packs an amazing number of musical twists and turns. "Shooting Star", for instance, starts out with the scratching of drum stick on ridged wood, builds a "London Calling" wall of staccato '80s-style, equal-weighted 4/4, then layers what one can only call yodeling over the top. "Moon Catatonia" also begins with bare, interesting percussion, then adds a swooning gypsy violin. "Aphrodesiac Incense" starts with more or less the same loungy piano intro as Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are", but explodes unexpectedly with power chords -- and then, when you're least expecting it, bubbles up with a roller rink happy strut of organ and bass. In these cases, the component pieces accomplish a near impossible task: they not only surprise the listener, but also make complete sense.

Finally, unlike many artists and bands, Truax knows exactly how to end a song. The weirdly hypnotic -- and hypnosis-themed -- "Prove It to My Daughter" winds through a neat three and a half minutes of rollercoaster-pitched "woo-ing" and syncopated rhythms, past a swarm of buzzing bees (that's the Hornicator), through lyrics like "your praying mantis arms open to enfold her", before Truax says "I am about to snap my fingers / And when I do, this will be over." There is a snap, and the song is, indeed, over.

So, are you ready to feel the vampire's bite and dance away your cellulite, as Truax invites? You should be. There are a few, very few, artists so original and inspired that their creativity slops right over the edges of their music and floods the whole damned room. What Thomas Truax leaves on the floor for the waitress to mop up is a better brew than most people put right there on the table. Smart, beautiful, eccentric, exceptional -- if these are the kinds of words you attach to the music you love best, you need to drop whatever you're doing and get this album right now.

-- Jennifer Kelly