For Peter Mulvey’s 17th album, and Righteous Babe Records debut, Are You Listening?, he traveled to New Orleans to record with producer and friend Ani DiFranco and her band. Are You Listening? marks the 25th anniversary of a rich career of approximately 4,000 concerts and over a million miles traveled. Mulvey has shared stages with Emmylou Harris, Richard Thompson, DiFranco, Greg Brown, the Indigo Girls, and many others. NPR’s Robert Siegel wasn’t kidding when he said, “Peter Mulvey is a 21st century troubadour.” Lyrically, the songs from Are You Listening? range from the emotive, stream-of-consciousness flood of “The Other Morning Over Coffee” to the spare, haunting title track, which uses only seventeen words.

For sheer musicianship, it is difficult to think of many contemporary guitar playing singer-songwriters who can claim superiority to Peter Mulvey. His third studio album, The Trouble with Poets demonstrates once again the originality and technical proficiency of his guitarwork, incorporating echoes of accomplished fretsmiths like Leo Kottke and Ani DiFranco into a style that is distinctly his own (on "Wings of the Ragman," he even manages an effective impression of the Sundays' David Gavurin). The Trouble with Poets is also more satisfying as a thematic whole than his previous efforts, realizing to a new extent Mulvey's considerable promise as a lyricist.

Peter Mulvey submerges his bluesy art-folk in a big vat of modern rock on this, his second album with Eastern Front records. Its producer, Nicholas Sansano, has previously worked with a lot of acts who are much more funky than folky (Public Enemy, Janet Jackson, Sonic Youth, Soul Coughing), and it shows. Of those artists, Mulvey's new sound most recalls Soul Coughing, thanks to the impressively versatile heavy rhythms of drummer Mike Piehl and the electric ambience of David Goodrich's guitars (both are members of Groovasaurus). Their darkly driven rock blends surprisingly well with Mulvey's celebrated plucking and sliding: his frenetic acoustic style recalls both Ani Difranco and B.B. King, and his strings are tuned so low that the bass notes dominate the album, even though only one track uses an electric bass guitar.

"I want a deep, resonant, effortless voice," Peter Mulvey confesses in one of the tracks on this ambitious folk album. "A big voice – bigger than me." Throughout his semi-major-label debut, Mulvey affects a deep, gruff, bluesy vocal style which is, indeed, bigger than him, calling to mind the Rockwellian image of a small child wearing a suit three times his size. For all of its appealing melodies and accomplished acoustic guitar work, the album is full of that sort of overambition. But overambition is always preferable to underambition, and at times it make this record more interesting. Rapture is speckled with drippingly earnest spoken word pieces (including the previously quoted "The Voice," which concludes with the lines "with this voice I would cry freedom and then I would speak peace").

Boston singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey's solo effort conjures shades of Van Morrison's early freewheeling musical attitude; his eclectic musical approach is immediately apparent on this ambitious collection of songs, which is presented in a loosely improvisational style by a talented pool of musicians whose performances rely on empathy as much as on musical charts.