2008 has been a busy year for Hawksley Workman. After Between the Beautifuls arrived in January Los Manlicious followed a mere seven months later. Beautifuls tries to bridge the gap between the folky singer/songwriter material of Treeful of Starling and the professional gloss of, say, (Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves. For the most part he’s successful, and these are the best bunch of songs since his debut. Tracks like “The City is a Drag” and “Piano Blink” have a whimsical and effortless charm to them. However, something like “No Stillness and No Rain” is bland radio fodder.

Los Manlicious is the flipside to Beautifuls, mostly because four songs appear on both records (“The City is a Drag,” “Piano Blink,” “Oh You Delicate Heart,” and “Prettier Face”). Where Beautifuls is soft, melodic and pseudo-folky, Los Manlicious finds Workman rocking out (and looking oddly like Billy Zane) with a blustery and slick production akin to 2003’s Lover/Fighter. And like Lover/Fighter, Manlicious suffers from the same faults. Workman's voice may be amazing enough to handle everything from fractured folk/pop to Manlicious’ mainstream rock du jour, but the production and arrangements are simply too generic and not dramatic enough to suit his voice.

The Manlicious material is not his strongest either. “Girls on Crutches” sounds like a Men at Work B-side, and album closer “Fatty Wants to Dance” is a clunky Scissor Sisters wannabe. All of the tracks that appear on Beautifuls are better there than here. The new versions of Beautifuls songs sound like polished radio mixes than different interpretations (case in point, the lone curse word in “The City is a Drag” is absent from the Manlicious version). Of the new material here only the lighthearted power-pop of “In the Bedroom in the Daytime” really measures up.

Hawksley Workman is an extremely talented artist, but somehow each of his albums after his debut manages to miss the mark. Each album has a couple of great songs, but Workman’s ideas are sometimes too scattershot and underdeveloped. And though Los Manlicious is a bit of a disappointment, Between the Beautifuls is his best and most focused record since For Him and the Girls.