it's hard to imagine a more agreeably perplexing singer-songwriter than Vic Chesnutt. Trying to get your mind around one of his songs is like trying to figure out the moon — better to just stare off into the distance, tilt your head, and allow its curious luminescence to wash over you.

A collector of details and images, Chesnutt is a post-punk folkster who writes songs that have a childlike simplicity and yet remain imaginatively complex. Fans of the 31-year-old Athens, Georgia resident will already be familiar with his four previous CDs on the Texas Hotel indie label, but "About to Choke," his impressive major-label debut, should garner him the wider attention he deserves. The album features a dozen songs that breathe new meaning and mystery into everyday words and pictures.

Quirky and forlorn, there is a sweet, misbegotten quality to Chesnutt's voice. By turns pleading and growling, dolorous and hopeful, it is a voice that makes the sound of his stories as interesting as the stories themselves. On "New Town," he juxtaposes the beautiful and the sad with disconcerting abruptness, singing, "And the little bitty baby draws a nice clean breath/from over his beaming mama's shoulder/he's staring at the worldly wonders that stretch/just as far as he can see/but he'll stop staring when he's older."

As he tells us on "See You Around," Chesnutt "ain't got time for the niceties." He doesn't wrap his songs in pretty ribbons — he prefers ragged packages, oddly shaped, bent, full of despair and longing. On "Hot Seat," where Chesnutt sounds uncannily like Cat Stevens, he sings about the near-fatal car accident that left him paralyzed at the age of 18. Part celebration of survival, part expression of regret, the song nonetheless ends up sounding like the resigned acceptance of a reluctant fatalist: "Maybe I slipped up and learned a lesson/to work my proclivity toward second guessing."

Fortunately, "About to Choke" also contains a few lighter moments, as on "Little Vacation," where he playfully rhymes a "long-awaited chemical buzz" with "an unexpected pleasant run-in with the fuzz." A loopy gem, the song begins with a Beck-like garbled wall of noise and then changes pace, with Chesnutt singing in a grizzled style reminiscent of a young Tom Waits. Chesnutt is one of those rare artists who seems to have been influenced by everybody and nobody, with a voice and style that distinguish him from the cookie-cutter crowd that currently dominates the pop music scene.

Earlier this year, Chesnutt had his songs performed by a who's who of musicians, including Joe Henry and Madonna, R.E.M., Hootie and the Blowfish, the Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, and Nanci Griffith, on the "Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation" benefit album. (The Sweet Relief Musicians Fund was created to help singer-songwriter Victoria Williams pay medical bills and has gone on to help other musicians in need.) There are several brilliant efforts on this tribute to Chesnutt's songwriting. But just as his songs are intrinsically linked to his own experience, "About to Choke" reveals that Chesnutt's stories are best told in his own voice.

— Joe Heim

Joe Heim is a Berkeley-based writer.