The cover of Willis Earl Beal's debut album bears a phone number and the promise to sing you a song if you call him: part of the beauty of this Chicagoan's extraordinary avant-blues songs is that they sound like they were recorded down phone lines. He's said, "I want to be like the black Tom Waits", and that's plain on the discordant stomp of "Take Me Away" or on "The Masquerade" ,where he's a consummately devilish raconteur of revels. But Waits never did, for example, rap deftly (as on "Ghost Robot") over a freaky chromatic fug that recalls kids' TV shows from the 60s.