It’s too bad that comedians and musicians don’t cross-pollinate more, because in Moshe Kasher, I hear a bravado and indignant boy-man-ism reminiscent of the most insular shows at the Vermont House. He gets it. If you’re in a band, you should actually bring Kasher’s CD in the tour van with you this fall. It’s one hell of a road-trip album: the chronicle of an exasperated yet bemused Jew wandering from San Francisco to Los Angeles and burning his bridges along the way with short stops in Germany, the piss-soaked streets of Spain, and the homophobic auditoriums (“Naw, dawg!”) of Modesto.

Now Kasher isn’t exactly breaking the mold with his aggressive comedy style. Though there’s something in his cadence and outsider observations that evokes the now-sober ghost of Mitch Hedberg, Kasher’s forceful stride through life’s absurdity often swaggers a bit like the beefy comedy of Dane Cook—more jock than nerd. But while Cook’s alpha-male exasperation feels like a pick-up artist using a “neg” to insult us into respecting him, Kasher admonishes for worthier causes: berating bigots, ridiculing spam-bots and temporarily conquering the white-haired juggernaut of time itself.

And there’s also pussy. Kasher loves to explore the awkward rules of etiquette that arise when guys have a healthy sex life with strange young women they hardly know. And Kasher’s platonic love-affair with gay culture gets even more fabulous. “An Open Letter to Modesto, California,” though recorded as one of those in-studio David Sedaris soliloquies that fail so miserably even in Michael Showalter’s—or Sedaris’—hands, succeeds at giving a hilarious middle finger to homophobes. He’s being mean to a well-deserved monster, yes, but Kasher doesn’t resort to David Cross’s shrillness or Jello Biafra’s butthole puns. There’s no moment where the gravity of the situation slows down his delivery—it’s all go-go-go, whether you’re the grandson of a Nazi or just someone’s hairy forearm.

That’s not to say that the album is start-to-finish hilarious. There are some awkwardly unfunny moments, most surprisingly from a misguided intro piece about a will and a widow that not even artist Emily Heller’s voice could save. But even comedic geniuses such as Robert Klein have made the mistake of beginning a killer album with a retarded intro, and we’ll let it slide this one time. With such a creative and hilarious debut, it’s safe to say that most comedy careers you know will die before Moshe Kasher’s does.

—Dan Collins

Moshe Kasher’s Everyone You Know Is Going To Die, And Then You Will is available from Rooftop Comedy.