The Unmistakable Man is clearly an outlaw. Everything is in excess and always, refreshingly, bipolar. It’s an unfocused mess of spitting, fiery, rough, and organized chaos. It’s truly expression in that sense, albeit an amateur expression.

Each song on River City Extension’s The Unmistakable Man embodies its own self. It is a shuffle of a single day’s emotions. A sentimental track to open the album, a couple tracks through to the meat: a bitter, angry piece complete with a horn and obscenity. Hang in there past “Mexico,” and you’ll be “Too Tired to Drink”: an intoxicated tale, no doubt.

The Unmistakable Man is endearing and dangerous — almost foreign, but still all too familiar: “Sometimes all I want is a job and a god and a wife,” with such an unsettlingly ambivalent delivery.

River City Extension is an Easter basket of sounds using themes from southern folk, blues, ‘90s pop, and lots of punk attitude. It’s hard to give a definitive “good” or “bad” stamp to “Unmistakable.” I think, truly, that it is a mirror of someone’s soul — I don’t know whose, but it definitely echoes the inner workings of a disordered brain and all the ups and downs that that entails.

What is the most off-putting — what trips me up the most — is this idea that there is no constant factor to this album. One moment I am lost in a folk ballad and with only a scratch, sizzle, and pop later, I am high on an adrenaline rush. One balanced on the edge of a feedback riff and a pounding anthem. There is a definite mystery about Unmistakable that is compellingly dangerous. Such a mystery needs to be solved before one can approve the bold description of “good” or “bad.”

(XOXO Records, PO Box 1566, Asbury Park, NJ 07712)