Staring smugly off the cover of his debut double album, "The Headphone Masterpiece," DIY-soul upstart Cody ChesnuTT looks more than a little full of himself. High-fives from both critics and bands like The Roots and The Strokes could be to blame, but ChesnuTT's condition is probably more a case of delayed gratification than a swollen ego. After his band, Crosswalk, dumped him when record contracts fell through, the Atlanta native took refuge in a bedroom studio he dubbed "the sonic promiseland." He emerged years later, with this lo-fi odyssey through R&B, hip-hop and rock 'n' roll.

Like most street poets with a screw loose, ChesnuTT's prose is prolific and puerile. With an average track time hovering under two minutes, he is able to breakdance, cry on your shoulder and hump your leg all in the time it would take him to squeeze into those tight leather pants he fancies. The spare arrangements, impassioned delivery and ever-present hiss of four-track recording give his off-key and off-color musings the sound of a black Daniel Johnston raised on Guided By Voices, Prince, and Sly and the Family Stone. Written and recorded without a smudge of gloss or polish, ChesnuTT's 90-second nuggets have all the sloppy enthusiasm of a love letter scrawled in crayon. Allegories and choruses give way to point-blank prose: "All this caffeine in me/is the reason I've been so mean/Oh baby forgive me for being the d**k that I've been to the children and you."

Aside from a single saxophone, ChesnuTT plays all his own accompaniment, with guitar, keyboards and a drum machine taking turns behind his scratchy falsetto. The thin, analog production makes tracks such as "Can't Get No Betta" sound like D'Angelo in a vacuum chamber while "Family on Blast" comes across like Outkast in a tin shack. But it's the '60s guitar licks throughout the album that stand out. Not only are the hooks infectious, but they also remind us of just how disappointing Lenny Kravitz's career arc really was.