I was unimpressed by this Henry Rollins album. I've listened to two of his other spoken word albums; a recent effort, Think Tank, and an earlier double album, Black Coffee Blues. I thought that both were a little bit cooler and a little bit edgier.

The concept of this album is that Rollins performed five or six speaking dates, one a week, all at the same venue. In the liner notes and on the CD, he says that the material was written over a relatively short length of time. He warns that he will be stretching himself thin, and he does. The CD is purported to be the best 60-70 minutes out of 10 hours' worth of material. Apart from one funny and powerful rant about Rollins' woes in asking out women who are mature enough to be hip to his tired pick-up techniques, A Rollins in the Wry feels at times forced and uninspired, and at other times simply seems a rehash of some of his better-presented Think Tank material.

In his defense, his re-hashing is doing something very popular (and something I dig about Rollins), ranting about people who are stupid in public. This is new material, just not a new idea. And it's material that people want to hear.

However, it's telling that with over ten hours of material to work with, even the most cream ten percent of the show comes off weak and contrived. To sum up, A Rollins in the Wry is what would happen to any speaker, no matter how talented, who was booked into this losing proposition of a month-long spoken-word/stand-up series.

Although, it's hard to take anything away from Hank for doing this thing, since he was a good sport about it, and is probably better-suited to this type of endurance gig than almost everyone on the planet. There was just no way to make the gig work.

All and all, an interesting disc, but probably not worth the $16 it cost me to get my hands on a copy.