Chuck Prophet has come a long way from his “paisley underground” years as a lead guitarist for Green On Red with whom he recorded eight albums. Age of Miracles is his seventh solo effort and the musical territory Prophet explores here has, again, widened from the country/rock area he hailed from since his musical beginnings to soul, funk, hip-hop and industrial noise. Prophet as the producer of the album, the main guitar player and the singer and songwriter could not have put his signature down more clearly, but co-producer Eric Drew Feldman (Captain Beefheart, Frank Black, PJ Harvey) has certainly not just been another fiddler on the knobs. He helped to drag Prophet out of a creational and inspirational impasse and added some crucial sounds on his Moog synthesizer on a couple of tracks.

The general mood on Age of Miracles shows a certain gloomy likeness to Static Transmission, the 2003 album of another ex-paisley undergrounder, Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate). Both musicians have matured into independent, individualist musicians who almost never do what you expect them to do. With this release, Chuck Prophet continues the path he has chosen with The Hurting Business (2000) and No Other Love (2002), at the same time carefully trying to avoid repeating himself. The outcome is an album that is hard to fall in love with immediately, but that if you continue to play it nevertheless, suddenly seems to creep up behind you and hit you over the head with all its might and nastiness. This effect has a lot to do with the arrangement and the production that are “subliminally mean” rather than straightforward: something evil is hiding under the surface and you can’t smell it right away.

The same is true for the lyrics.

Sometimes I feel so alive/ I wish I was dead, Prophet growls in the opener “Automatic Blues” against a backdrop of blazing horns. There is something terrifying in the air, something that you feel listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot or Lou Reed’s Berlin.

Lou Reed’s presence is hovering throughout whole album including the title track, a sluggishly moving song with heavy string arrangement (Jason Borger) and female backing vocals (provided by Prophet’s wife Stephanie Finch):

The night is gonna crush the day

Once it was the other way

We hope that you enjoy your stay

In the age of miracles.

Prophet is accompanied on pedal steel in “The Smallest Man in the World” and it sounds good, but it’s a song with a weird lyrical twist underlined by Feldman’s piano playing that seems to quote from Newman’s “Little People” ­ know what I mean? “Whatever he does, he’s the smallest man in the world” and that is not good news.

“Just to See You Smile” continues in the Lou Reed groove, but this time with an almost Phil Spector-like orchestration complete with booming bass, glockenspiel and a whole girl choir. Prophet immediately wipes the smile off any listener’s face with “West Memphis Moon,” the tragic story of the West Memphis Three, three young men who were convicted for murder of three boys in 1994, one of them sentenced to death, even though the evidence was, to say the least, questionable.

There’s a melancholy country feel about “You’ve Got Me Where you Want Me,” a duet with Stephanie Finch co-written by Kim Richey. Richey also contributed to “Baby Pin a Rose on Me,” which turns out to be about an abusive relationship:

You saw a light

I saw a freight train coming

I tried to tell you he was no damn good

You heard bells, I heard the hammer falling.

He ran you down like I said he would.

“A man’s strength is on the insidebut you better be careful with this stuff,” Prophet warns in “Heavy Duty,” a weird and frightening song (co-written with D. (Dan?) Penn), that sounds like Depeche Mode in their darkest period battling it out with Doug Sahm.

The closer “Solid Gold” (again featuring Stephanie Finch on vocals) is another song reminiscent of Lou Reed’s Berlin-period, with a very soulful, delicate string arrangement.

I wanna raise a toast to everyone

to my friends near and far

I wanna raise a toast to stand up men

Wherever you are

I wanna raise a toast to you my love

For putting up a fight

Then I’m gonna raise my glass again, for you and you alone

on this star- crossed night.

I drink to that. Not every song on Age of Miracles is equally convincing, but it is an album that will make you feel as if you have just been crushed by a truck. That’s not a feeling you want to have every day, but sometimes it helps to make you enjoy every day life a little bit more.