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.”