I started my hardcore record collecting back in my early high school days. I wasn’t looking for collectible discs, per se, it’s just that I wanted to hear everything, especially stuff that didn’t make it to the radio. In my teenage years, when everyone else was playing football or studying for finals, I spent my weekends combing through stacks of vinyl in dusty record stores that were far off the beaten track. And then a like-minded friend and I would spend Saturday nights listening to what we’d bought, getting high and, on occasion, sword fights with real swords. (I never claimed to be normal, did I?) Some might argue that this wasn’t the most productive use of a teenage boy’s time but I never gave it much thought.

This friend and I found a shop way over on the west side that was just cartons of records lying on shelves in steel cabinets and stacked up on the floor – promotional copies, cut-outs, returns - and everything was 50 cents or a dollar. At that price, who cared if you had heard of the artist, let alone any of the songs? If we liked the cover art, we bought it. If the combination of instruments was unusual or the song titles seemed weird, we bought it. A lot of it got tossed away; some of it is still with me to this day.

In college (or university for those who don’t speak American), the first thing I did after signing up for classes was to get a time slot as a DJ on the school’s radio station. All week long, I’d hang out at the studio just waiting for boxes of new records to come in from the record companies. I’d listen to side one, track one of everything. I once did a show with a friend where we’d play every new record that had come in that week. If we thought it sucked, we’d take it off in the middle of the song – on air – and move on to the next one. It was college radio, you could do that.

Years ago, I’d read about some new artist and then have to wait until I heard them on the radio or playing in some record store. These days, the internet makes it easier than ever to discover new music. Bit torrent, internet radio, MySpace, Pandora and countless others makes it simple to not only find out about interesting new acts but to hear them as well.

So it’s pretty rare for me to not have at least heard of someone who has been making records for at least ten years, but I never heard of Johnny Dowd until last week. I came across a 5 star review of his latest album in one of the UK music magazines and researched him a bit and then downloaded his latest album, A Drunkard’s Masterpiece, via iTunes. Without a doubt, just the album title alone made me want to hear it.

Most people wouldn’t be that interested in hearing a record by a 49-year-old Texan who used to own a moving company in Ithaca, New York, especially one featuring lead vocals from a woman who runs a hair salon. But as I already noted, I’m not normal. His Wikipedia listing says he’s been compared to a cross between Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart. Others have compared him to Nick Cave or Vic Chestnutt. And one reviewer said that he was “Johnny Cash reinvented by Quentin Tarantino” while another said his music was something you “might encounter if the Bates Motel had a lounge.” How could I resist?

Well, I’m glad I didn’t, because A Drunkard’s Masterpiece more than lives up to its title. This is the kind of album that I spent all those hours and days combing through cut out bins to find.

There are 17 tracks here, arranged into 3 opuses – Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven But Nobody Wants to Die, Putting Lipstick on a Pig and Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Ass.

All of this was recorded live in a low tech, 8 track studio in just 3 days by a band that includes Dowd on guitar and vocals, Michael Stark on keyboards, Willie B on drums and Kim Sherwood-Caso on vocals. Stylistically, there’s barely a genre that they don’t touch on here. The female vocals are reminiscent of some laid back jazz lounge somewhere, yet they’ll often segue into interludes that border on free jazz before breaking into some funky soul. The monstrously fuzzy guitar hits psychedelic rock, punk rock, heavy metal, spacey prog, the list goes on.

Dowd kicks off one song with this spoken introduction, “This is a song about the sacred bond between performer and audience. It’s called Union of Idiots.” The song itself is a pleasant funky number with scat singing that suddenly tosses in the chorus from Smoke on the Water.

Dowd’s gravelly voice and Texas drawl perfectly fit his darkly humorous lyrics and like some latter day beatnik poet, he’s in love with language. Infidelity starts off with, “The cockroach complains that he dreams of a better life, and spiders piss and moan about their insect lives, and when the gregarious bumble bee decides to live alone, that’s when I’ll forgive your infidelity.”

Sometimes the humour is a bit too sophomoric, bordering on Frank Zappa-esque (and I hear a lot of parallels to many Zappa albums here). On a song called Caboose, an ode to a woman’s rear end, he sings, “If she was a house, in the back door I’d enter, I’m a gangster of love, I’m Johnny Guitar Watson!” But even when Sherwood-Caso sings about finding the answer to life’s mysteries between Norah Jones’s legs, the whole thing is too knowing, too wink wink nudge nudge for anyone to really take offense.

I was actually planning to review some other recent albums in this column, but I just can’t stop playing this one long enough to pay proper attention to anything else. This is easily the best album I’ve heard this year.

A Drunkard’s Masterpiece was released on a label called Bongo Beat Records. You can stream the entire album at www.johnnydowd.com. And while I doubt that any retailer in Hong Kong is stocking this, some (like Rock Gallery) do their best to fill special orders or you can find it on the Internet from Amazon and other retailers. Even if you’re not an obsessive compulsive geek like me, it’s well worth the time and trouble to seek out.