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*** Various Artists

FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE

(Koch)

Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley, and the unfortunately named Damien Echols were anonymous teenage outcasts when they were convicted (and Echols was sentenced to death) in the brutal murders of three 10-year-old children in their poor Arkansas home town, just across the Mississippi from Memphis. The harrowing HBO documentary of their trial, Paradise Lost, has made their case as emblematic of horribly miscarried justice -- for rural black-clad metal youth, at least -- as Mumia Abu-Jamal's is for the wider culture. The film prompted a less interesting but equally depressing sequel (following Echols's failed appeal), as well as this legal-defense disc, which drives its point home by announcing (somewhat disingenuously for those of us living outside the Bible Belt) that "owning this CD could be disastrous."

Probably not as disastrous as wearing black skin in Manhattan, but inasmuch as the bands here owe the Three a great debt -- for making metal seem the least bit dangerous again -- the sentiment is honest enough. A couple of these folks even composed songs expressly for the cause, and that turns out to be good (Rocket from the Crypt's searing "Wrong and Important," Steve Earle's gnarled bluegrass lament "The Truth," Tom Waits's broke-ass blues "Rains on Me") but also really, really bad (L7's "Boys in Black," another brick in that paved road to Hell you've heard about) and funny (Kelley Deal's new setting for the lyrics to Pantera's "Fucking Hostile"). There's no sign of anyone whom the Three actually listened to -- not even Metallica, whose "Sanitarium (Welcome Home)" provided the movie's haunting refrain -- but Nashville Pussy, Zeke, and the Murder City Devils step up to impersonate the unholy trailer-trash trinity of AC/DC ("Highway to Hell"), Iron Maiden ("Wrathchild"), and the Misfits ("She"), respectively.

-- Carly Carioli