Not to be outdone, Shinyribs gets in more than his share of shots. The answer to "Baby What's Wrong With You" is simple: "I'm gone." Or this burn from "Walt Disney," in which he's somewhat put out with an absentee wife/lover while he lies hospitalized with no idea where his children are: "maybe the garbageman will give you what you deserve."

But overall, Okra Candy is much less fraught than Honeybear; even the music of "Walt Disney" is one part "Monster Mash," and "The Sacred & the Profane" sticks to your ribs like the best of the Stax catalog. Finding his bearings to the countrified James Brown shake of "Red Quasar," Shinyribs claims to be spinning "like a beach ball in a livestock yard." "Donut Taco Palace," a pure gas, celebrates heaven on Earth: chorizo and beans, cream-filled eclairs, and a '60s San Antonio organ groove guaranteed to cure whatever ails you.

But among all the verbal gymnastics, musical kaleidoscopes and sharp-edged comebacks, every so often both records circle larger issues as well. Honeybear's "Holy Shit" plucks a litany of buzzwords from contemporary life -- "carbon footprint," "Dust Bowl chic," "mobile lifestyle" -- only to ponder, "what's that gotta do with this black hole in me?" The question pointedly remains unanswered.

Meanwhile, in the extremely low-key, Lightnin' Hopkins-esque fashion of "Pak-It-Rite," Shinyribs weighs in on legislation that forces convenient stores to close at midnight and other modern inconveniences; in other words, "all that bourgeois bullshit, trying to kill the spark." But shortly afterwards, he mutters, they can't kill my spark.

He might put it in a little haughtier terms, but Father John Misty would no doubt agree.

Father John Misty performs tonight at Fitzgerald's; the show has been sold out for weeks. Shinyribs returns to Discovery Green Thursday, May 14.

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