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Cross-posted at Jersey Beat.

Tris McCall’s last record took us on a guided tour of hipster Williamsburg, using both metaphor and keen powers of observation to convey a keenly felt sense of time and place. On Let The Night Fall, McCall’s back in his beloved New Jersey, whether celebrating the Garden State’s unique cultural institutions (“WFMU,” “The Throwaway,” “Sugar Nobody Wants”); schoolyard bullies (“You’re Dead After School”); summer camp humiliations (“We Could Be The Killers”); or — of course — backroom politics (“The Ballad Of Frank Vinieri”).

Jean Shepherd once called New Jersey the birthplace of Slob Art, where even the largest cities exist as suburbs of someplace bigger; and no one captures that unique blend of arrogance and inferiority-complex better than Tris McCall: “Mountainside” is his answer to “My Home Town” (all Jersey songwriters have to measure themselves against The Boss sooner or later) while the seven-and-a-half-minute magnum opus “First World, Third Rate” traces the history of Jersey culture from colonial wheatfields right up to the salad-bar spit-shield at your favorite strip mall. Along the way, you get the rollicking piano and synth-based pop that Tris has been creating for nearly two decades, combining witty wordplay with catchy tunesmithing (there’s even a short semi-classical instrumental to show off his chops.)

Since Tris had to record this album without a band to call his own, a small army of guest stars contribute performances and vocals, including Overlord’s Steve Pasles, Cropduster’s Lee Estes, My Teenage Stride’s Britt Whitmoyer, Prosolar Mechanics’ Amy Jacob, various members of the Negatones and Palomar, and the Hon. Jerramiah T. Healy, mayor of Jersey City, whom you’ll hear harmonizing on the elegiac album closer, “Sunrise, Rte. 7.” And finally there’s the title track, nothing less than a reaffirmation of our American faith — Tris’ Obama moment, if you will: “Let the night fall,” he sings, because by dawn’s early light, we’ll still be here … in the land of the free, and the home of the weird.