Somewhere Gone

The foundation of the best punk rock, the music that lasts and remains relevant, isn't self-desctructive anger or smash the state bravado, but a sense of alienation and dislocation. The longing of the outsider. No band epitomized the burst of creativity and energy in this essential awareness better than X and their singer and co-lyricist Exene Cervenka. And even though the expressions of fiery emotions and actions of youth fade or moderate, the search for a roadmap through the desolation persists, and it is why Exene's distinctive lyricism still resonates.

Somewhere Gone, Exene's firs tsolo album since 1991, is a sometimes dreamy but always intimate, circuitous passage through folk and country; subdued, but no less edgy. Invoking other artists who travel easily between the worlds of words and music like Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith, Exene's lyrics are immediately rcognizable, simultaneously fragile and totemic vocals carry all the passion of X without all the loud.