'Little Demon On The Back Seat,' by Greg McKillop.

• Author: Infante, Victor D.
• Position: Living

Byline: Victor D. Infante

'What's the word,'' asks singer-songwriter Greg McKillop, on the song "The Fool: Maps On Depressional Magick, "For when other folks learn how to be you but better?''

"Jealousy,'' he answers himself, but it's not just a rhetorical question.

With this song, McKillop lays out the themes for his ambitious and occasionally brooding new album, "Little Demon On The Back Seat'': A sense of being suspended between youth and adulthood and a bitterness toward aspects of a life in music that he needs to address.

Both themes are wrapped together in tarot card imagery: The Fool, on the first song, which denotes both folly and the search for experience and knowledge, but more prominently the Hanging Man -- often referred to as the Hanged Man -- which can both denote a traitor or a martyr, but more commonly means surrender or acceptance.

McKillop -- who performs with the Duende Project, Cat Thumbs-Sunnyshading and East Coast Runaways at 7 p.m. Feb. 7 at the Raven Music Hall, 258 Pleasant St, Worcester -- sings "this is not a song about how I have no regrets.'' Indeed, regrets crackle across the album with a fascinating aura of culpability. McKillop's not wallowing in bitterness here, he's picking it up, holding it to the light and examining it.

The album also adds a garage rock fuzziness to McKillop's usual folk-punk sound. It's a minor adjustment, but one that adds a necessary roughness, particularly on "The Flood,'' where he ponders walking away from friends, and the love song "Second Forever,'' where he ponders staying with someone.

"Someday you will ask me:,'' sings McKillop in the latter song, " 'How do I escape the weight/of all of this gravity?'/ Somehow, I'll try so hard/ not to fly away myself.''

It's a revelatory lyric, especially in the face of the preceding songs. It's with that insight that McKillop strips the sound all the way down to just acoustic guitar and voice with "Barbed Wire Song,'' where the song's persona lets loose a bitter and contemptuous tirade against the pop-punk legions.

"The devil won't make your band good,'' he sings, "and God will not make your music great in the long run.''

Yowza! It's a barbed critique, and one even the song's persona seems to think might be a little beneath him. But one imagines it felt really good to say.

There's not a lot of time spent on lacerations, though: With the next song, "Bitter Punk,'' McKillop puts his persona on the grill with all the brutal honesty he allowed him...