Musician Bobby Sichran, who attended Columbia in the early '90s, conceived his latest release, Peddler in Babylon, as a concept album about the modern American's crisis of faith. Accordingly, his style is grounded in the blues, Bob Dylan, and dreams of hitchhiking. He freshens up this older sound with unexpected influences like drum beats subtly cribbed from the Caribbean, but his plodding, mopey vocals prevent the album from taking off. While the reggae rhythm on "Black Haired Maiden" could have pulled this album out of its slump, it's hopelessly weighed down by an incongruous piano part that takes itself way too seriously. Ironically, one of the album's best tracks, "I Wish You Were My Baby," leaves the fancy keyboards and drums behind, finally letting Sichran showcase the subtlety of his guitar playing and let some emotion into his voice as it runs from a whisper to a throaty shout. Covering everything from America's favorite drugs-cigarettes and coffee-to an obscure metaphor relating the plight of the buffalo to our current trouble in the Middle East, Sichran definitely tries to get maximum mileage out of his lyrics and envisions a listener experiencing this album as one might experience a movie at an old-fashioned drive-in. But before you get to the track adapted from a Walt Whitman poem, you might want to put the Peddle to the metal.