Chuck Prophet is a regular on World Cafe, a radio show found on WUWM. The host’s song of choice is the title track of this bluesy rock album. “Age of Miracles” is best described as beautiful. Each song has a different feel as Prophet does everything to hold the listeners attention.

Pairing Prophet with LA’s roots-centric New West label (home of the Drive-By Truckers, Tim Easton, etc.) might strike you as peculiar until you consider that the singer-songwriter in question can be pretty peculiar himself, at least when it comes to mashing up genres. Ever since his days two decades ago playing guitar for cosmic country junkies Green on Red, Prophet has followed his own many-forked musical path. He’s been invited to open shows for both Lucinda Williams and Heart (who covered his “No Other Love”), and his seventh solo album features contributions from folks who’ve worked with PJ Harvey, Frank Black, the Mekons, and My Morning Jacket. All of which should tell you something about the man’s range, not to mention his taste.

AOM is a multi-colored brush stroke of taut rock moves (“Automatic Blues”), blue-eyed soul (“Heavy Duty,” which nicks a recurring piano figure from the Beatles’ “Hey Bulldog”), and radio-primed modernist pop (“West Memphis Moon”). “You’ve Got Me Where You Want Me” recalls Sea Change–era Beck, who may be Prophet’s closest pan-genre contemporary. (Prophet’s drowsy-with-a-cold vocals also echo Beck’s.) No matter what territory he’s staking out, Prophet’s guitar playing is both tasty and tasteful, and a battery of support - from Wurlitzer organ and Moog synthesizer to horns, and a bona fide string section - keeps the sound wide and lush yet wonderfully intimate. Miracles just about lives up to its title: it’s eclectic and cohesive, fresh and classic.

The touch of something human Is what I really crave Oh, just give me one thing I can sink my heart into Not another measure of these automatic blues

With these words, growled tiredly against a backdrop of greasy, industrial blues, Chuck Prophet begins his transcendent 11-song exploration into the heart’s desire to feel in a world of technology and automation.

Prophet has had a long, slow rise to recent Americana/AAA success, due to his creative strength; he simply refuses to dumb down his songs or production into a consumer bin. The result is a colorful record that tinkers with hip-hop, funky Southern rock, heartfelt folk-pop and downright mean metal.

If “man vs. industrial alienation” is the main theme of the disc, the subplot mines the darker side of humans. West Memphis Moon tells the arrest and trial story of “The Memphis Three.” Pin A Rose On Me, co-written with the distinctive Kim Richey, digs unflinchingly into an abusive love triangle.

Prophet’s guitar playing is the muscle mass of the disc, and Jason Borger adds a heady dose of keys that bubble throughout like fine champagne. Chuck’s partner, Stephanie Finch, adds vocals that manage to be sexy and wholesome at the same time. But it’s Prophet’s unapologetically real baritone that is at the heart of the songs. He has lived these tales, dreamt them in the belly of his tour bus, seen them in his wife’s eyes, and they must be told to a numb world that just might be saved by the knowledge they reveal.

Solid Gold, the disc’s final song, brings it down to earth with a simplicity that shows off Prophet’s big heart:

You don’t need to move no mountains, friend To prove your love You don’t need a membership Just take your pretty hand, put it in my glove

While alt.country squandered its moment on vintage gabardine shirts, Chuck Prophet’s roots-rock has never needed dressing up, whatever sub-genres he has crossed along his fifteen-year solo career. Not to say Prophet’s music is bare—Age of Miracles, the SF singer and guitarist’s sixth album, has Beatlesy strings, bluesy snares, a top hat’s worth of synth tricks, and Prophet’s own seasoned leads and drawled vocals. It’s the sort of virtual orchestra Beck would use for postmodern bachelor-pad music, but Prophet writes the kind of fundamentalist pop songs underrated in the music industry since the mid-‘60s: ones that would look good no matter what they’re wearing.

If the Brill Building were still in business—and let’s say we have a stage-set view of what goes on inside—we might catch the Flaming Lips psyching out Miracles’ liltingly cynical title track (Gonna eat and drink our fill/Lose that baby fat for real/No secrets left to conceal). In the next window, maybe we’d spot Jack White belting the politics out of “West Memphis Moon” or Rufus Wainwright balladeering “The Smallest Man in the World” into exquisite melodrama. And look, there’s the maestro himself on the top floor, counting his money. But here in the real world, Prophet embodies all those elements himself (except the money-counter), still hungry and decking out his songs with his own lush, slightly scruffy sound. Lucky for us, at least.

Age Of Miracles

With his seventh record, “Age of Miracles,” Chuck Prophet, crooning like the bastard son of Leonard Cohen and Marianne Faithfull, serves up a potent brew of hip-hop, electric blues, soul, pop-rock and funk. With his knowledge, love and mastery of such disparate influences as Dylan, Brian Wilson, Johnny Cash and Isaac Hayes, the former Green on Red singer-guitarist fuses 11 otherwise wayward, fragmented tracks into a cohesive whole. The chugging “Automatic Blues” churns with a hypnotic cacophony of guitars and car horns, while the title track picks up where Cohen’s “Tower of Song” left off, insisting, almost delusionally in the face of the overwhelming darkness of the age nearly upon us, that “there’s more to see, all lost time will be retrieved, I know it’s true, it’s on TV, in the age of miracles.” Prophet proves he can deliver a pop hook on “Just to See You Smile,” which slips loose with gorgeous, muted guitars shimmering just below the surface. It’s “Pet Sounds” meets “Highway 61 Revisited,” with the latter seeping through and pooling in the next track. “West Memphis Moon” is, underneath its traditional country gleam, the tortured lament of a brutal child killer who is no more than a child himself, and as dark a song as Dylan or Cash ever wrote. With its electronic country-swamp folk flavor, “Age of Miracles” is a post-modern traveling revival show, setting up just down the road from Wilco’s “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel.”

Chuck Prophet is on a streak. With a consistency born out of a strong work ethic and an almost obscene amount of pure talent, he’s released three great albums in a row. So does his latest record Age of Miracles achieve the standards of Homemade Blood, The Hurting Business and No Other Love? Absolutely. Once again, Prophet and his musicians gracefully paint a rootsy building with modern colors, mixing soul, folk and good old rock & roll with contemporary electronic production methods. So many artists make this combination sound forced or gimmicky, but not Prophet; his style is never less than organic, and this record is no exception. Make no mistake: this is not some singer/songwriter layering his words and guitar solos over pre-programmed backing tracks. Real instruments are the foundation of every cut; the lush mixing, electro-flavored arrangements and ability to pick just the right effect put what might have been an extraordinary roots rock record into a universe of its own. Of course, all this is merely gravy on the main course: songcraft. Though an accomplished bandleader and a white-hot guitar picker, Prophet has always subsumed flash in service to the song, and his tunes here add more classics to his catalog. The slinky R&B of “Pin a Rose on Me” and “You Did (Bomp Shooby Dooby Bomp)” shares worthy space with the heartfelt balladry of “Solid Gold” and “You’ve Got Me Where You Want Me.” Rock groovers like “Automatic Blues” and “Heavy Duty” use quirkiness the way actor Johnny Depp does: as flavor, not a substitute for lack of substance. Prophet sneaks some social commentary into his usual examinations of the dance of the sexes; “West Memphis Moon” looks at the infamous West Memphis Three and the deeply sarcastic title track tunefully surveys the state of America. One could argue that Prophet does nothing here that he hasn’t done in his most recent work, and that’s a valid point. But since Prophet’s music sounds like little else out there and it’s of consistently high quality, that’s mere carping at nothing. Age of Miracles is yet another brilliant record from a great American artist.

Chuck Prophet knows how to keep a listener’s attention on “Age of Miracles” (New West) with slyly twisted (think Randy Newman meets Bob Dylan) lyrics and a “pan-genre” musical aproach that shifts gears from rock to soul, pop to funk, blues to hip hop without ever “clutching.” A great follow up to his 2002’s gem “No Other Love” and past work with Green On Red. A-

Since Chuck Prophet released the bleak masterpiece Homemade Blood in 1997, bringing down the curtain on the alt-country and roots-rock stage of his solo career, his music has come to encompass a dizzying array of styles. Multigenre hybrids like 1999’s The Hurting Business and 2002’s No Other Love nodded to influences as diverse as Bobbie Gentry, Dr. Octagon, Chuck Berry, and Maxine Brown. On Age of Miracles (New West), which comes out this week, Prophet indulges an affection for sweeping pop-soul and funky spaced-out blues. While his lyrics have always been indebted to two-fisted noir proponents like Warren Zevon and cockeyed southern storytellers like Dan Penn, on Miracles their more subtle qualities—wry humor and a keen understanding of women—yield the most satisfying results, as on the cool kiss-off “Pin a Rose on Me” and the supple surrender “You Got Me Where You Want Me.” Elsewhere, Prophet’s laconic baritone gives contemplative tunes like “Solid Gold” and the title track a craggy warmth that few—besides perhaps Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits—could hope to match.

Like Joe Henry, onetime Green On Read Stalwart Chuck Prophet has evolved since his alt-countryish beginnings into a refreshingly unlabel-able artist who, in mixing and matching genres, thrives on offbeat textures and carefully etched moods. One difference is that while Art has been whispering a little too loudly in Henry’s ear of late, Prophet has over the course of seven solo albums raised his accessibility as he has honed his vision. His new album, Age Of Miracles, features some of his most infectious tunes. If not quite as challenging as its two immediate predecessors in drawing from ‘70s soul and back-porch blues to hip-hop and Moogified pop, it’s more cohesive and consistent. While there’s a current of modern unease running beneath the tunes for Prophet’s craggy baritone to bring out, the album has a brightness of purpose that lifts even the sad stuff. He may not have written a more convincing feel-good song than “You Did (Bomp Shooby Dooby Bomp)”, which answers the age old question, “Who put the bomp?” (as posed by Bill Building wordsmith Barry Mann), with a loving expression of gratitude and a seductive hip-hop groove. “Just To See You Smile” is nearly as uplifting, and with Prophet’s wife Stephanie Finch on answering vocal, “You Got Me Where You Want Me” (one of two tunes written with Kim Richey) happily completes a romantic trilogy of sorts. Another knockout song is the oddly affecting “Smallest Man In The World”, which can be read as a meditation on freakdom, or fame, or both. With its Chinese menu’s worth of guitars (including baritone, tres and lap steel) and keyboards (including organs, electric pianos, synthesizers and harpsichord) and other instruments, Age Of Miracles could have you playing a game of name that effect. That it doesn’t is a measure of how successfully Prophet integrates the musical styles that influence and move him – and how well the songs, separately and as part of a package, work. “Who cleared the static and made it sing?” He did.

Prophet’s follow-up to The Hurting Business finds him in excellent form, still making American roots music but casting his net a little wider to bring in a few more influences. For example, “Elouise” kicks off with a rhythm straight out of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” before evolving into something looser and less threatening, and “Summertime Thing” has the laid-back vibe of the Young Rascals’ “Groovin’” welded to some funky wah-wah guitar influenced by the Isley Brothers. With a voice suggesting that he’s training to be Tom Waits when he grows older and occasional lyrics (as in “Run Primo Run”) inspired by the vintage Dylan songbook (the Farfisa organ that recurs in the album only furthers the connection), there’s a strong romantic streak running through his work, most evident in “No Other Love” and even the growing-older wisdom of “Old Friends.” His songwriting continues to grow and his guitar skills (which he tends to hide under a bushel a little), never flashy or grabbing the spotlight, have become mature and sophisticated, a long way from his days in Green on Red. One of America’s great underground artists, Prophet’s slowly blooming into a major figure.