Category: Record Reviews

The Best of the Classic Years

King Sunny Adé (Shanachie)

The Rough Guide to Highlife

Various Artists (World Music Network)

When Bob Marley died in 1981, the music industry, unable to find a successor to the mantle of Designated Third-World Superstar in any of Marley’s Jamaican peers, began grooming Nigeria’s King Sunny Adé for the role. A royal scion who’d begun playing music professionally in his teens, Adé was the most popular performer of “highlife,” a pealing, guitar-centered style of hypnotic dance music whose groove had spread throughout the entire African continent. America surely was next. Except, as it turned out, it wasn’t. Adé recorded three terrific albums for Island Records in the early ’80s, but, after some initial critical excitement, he proved a nonstarter in this country.

It turns out, though, that Adé had already made his greatest work by the time he got the stateside push. The Best of the Classic Years highlights 1969-74, the first six years of his recording career, and it’s enough to give even fans of the Island albums pause. Adé’s playing is absolutely demonic here: The self-titled first part of the five-song “Sunny Ti De” medley is soul-wrenching guitar talk that evokes Hendrix but never stoops to imitation, and the grooves percolate so friendly throughout it takes a while to notice how intricate they are. The singing is lovely too, but it’s secondary to the overall atmosphere, which is enhanced by the 10-to-20-minute lengths that are the rule here.

The bulk of The Rough Guide to Highlife goes back even further, to the horn-led ’50s and ’60s dance-bands that gave the style its feet, though there are more recent tracks as well, like George Darko’s synth-poppy “Hilife Time.” Here, the songs are short, though it’s probably no coincidence that the best track, Joe Mensah’s “Bosoe,” is almost 10 minutes and was edited down from a longer version. With no duds and many killers (Sir Victor Uwaifo’s “Guitar Boy” and E.T. Mensah’s “Medzi Medzi” in particular), deciding which to start with is a toss-up. — Michaelangelo Matos

Grade (both albums): A

Buzzcocks

Buzzcocks (Merge)

So my oldest relatives are now getting into the Clash, thanks to the recent media onslaught, and I’ve always been a superfan, but good God almighty, enough is enough. The Sex Pistols have never had to pine for press: John Lydon’s always had a great big mouth, and they are the Brit-punk reference point. (But, being a Svengali’s cash cow, they had more in common with the Archies than the supposed meaning of “punk rock.”) Then there’s the Damned one great album and then kaput. Which brings me to the genre’s confusing stepchild: the Buzzcocks.

The Buzzcocks were confusing for the same reasons that they flew heads and shoulders above the other three pillars of first-wave British punk. For one, they were first, and they were independent. Remember that the Pistols and the Clash were major-label from the word go. The Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP was released in early ’76, and it stands as the first overseas DIY record of the movement. The Buzzcocks also looked decidedly normal and sang apolitical, asexual (the band is/was split 50/50 in terms of sexual preference) lyrics about the human emotional condition in a wry, cynical tone that betrayed their years. The Buzzcocks didn’t hand you a stylish and easy-to-decipher extra-credit lesson on a plate. They afforded the nascent punk movement a balance between overt politics and something a little more challenging. Additionally, they were heavier, faster, louder, catchier, and degrees superior to their contemporaries in sound. A Sex Pistols or Clash fan can easily be someone who is happy owning a large number of greatest-hits CDs; a Buzzcocks fan is a lifer.

The band’s reformation in 1989 was a permanent situation, though each subsequent proper album has an unavoidable “reunion” air about it due to the volume of reissues and live documents (from the first wave) released over the past 15 years. Lifers know that the Buzzcocks are four albums into a second wind, starting with 1993’s Trade Test Transmission and edging up to 2003 with this eponymous record. Of the four, this is the most energetic and true to the band’s first run. Pete Shelley’s vocals have been torn into a deeper, almost ruined tone that comes with age or other things, and Buzzcocks poses the inherent problem of a once-seminal post- or pop-punk band making music at this age: Those unfamiliar with the ground originally broken are going to find the new material indistinguishable from younger peers.

Buzzcocks is an album made by half of a band (Steve Diggle and Shelley are the remaining original members) that invented intelligent pop punk, but listeners who don’t know that could possibly lump it in with the lowbrow Warped Tour/Fat Wreckords nonsense tainting the world of pop punk. —Andrew Earles

Grade: B-

Feast of Wire

Calexico (Quarterstick)

Tucson-based multi-instrumentalists Joey Burns and John Convertino are perhaps better known as backup for artists such as Neko Case, PJ Harvey, and Howe Gelb’s Giant Sand than as Calexico, an indie outfit that draws heavily from the musical traditions of their native American Southwest. But that may change with the release of their ninth full-length, Feast of Wire, which is surely one of the smartest and most impassioned albums we’re likely to hear all year.

Like its predecessors, Feast of Wire inhabits the nether-desert that separates America from Mexico, but the band now sounds more comfortable in this setting, and Burns’ vision of both countries is confidently epic. For the characters in these songs, for whom “the future looks bleak with no sign of change,” the vast, arid Arizona desert is a blessing and a curse, a place to get lost in and a place to lose yourself utterly.

Burns’ songwriting sounds newly assured and inventive. On “Not Even Stevie Nicks” he tells of a friend who plays Fleetwood Mac to soundtrack his own suicide: “Not even the priestess with her secret powers could save him,” he sings, his voice registering sad-sweet resignation. And the Springsteen storytelling of “Across the Wire” — about two Mexican brothers crossing the border — beats just about anything the Boss has done in the past decade.

But Feast of Wire is as much about sounds as it is about words: If Burns’ lyrics strike a rare poetic clarity, then Calexico’s music surprises even more with its accomplished eclecticism. Burns and Convertino cover mariachi pop (“Across the Wire”), ethereal folk balladry (“Woven Birds”), hipster jazz (“Attack el Robot! Attack!” and “Crumble”), and, most intriguingly, trip-hop (“Black Heart”). And then there are the interludes, long a staple of the band’s records, but here they sound inspired by a purpose beyond decoration. Instrumental tracks like “Close Behind” and “Dub Latina” are more than mere set pieces: They conjure a very specific mood that contributes considerably to the album’s atmosphere of loneliness.

All of these disparate elements could have made for a fragmented album, but Feast of Wire coheres into something unique mainly because the diverse styles, like spokes on a wheel, all lead to the same dark-hearted, desolate core — the Western states as both geographical setting and emotional terrain, simultaneously political and personal. —Stephen Deusner

Grade: A

Transplants

Transplants

(Hellcat)

There probably aren’t a lot of music fans who would ever admit to recoiling in horror at the punk-rock “revolution,” but it must have happened; otherwise, the Ramones would have been instant millionaires.

So take a ride on your back-in-the-day-cycle and imagine just how wrong punk rock must have sounded to so many ears when it first gained momentum and credibility in the late ’70s. Imagine seemingly incompetent singers fronting seemingly incompetent bands that only held about a half-hour’s worth of live material and played up ugly sound and ugly looks as the new beautiful tomorrow for the nonexistent future. Imagine audiences spitting on a band as a sign of approval. Imagine the scandal when rock singers took shots at the Queen!

Today, the shockwaves of punk rightfully belong to a time made simple by loss of detail. But the best thing about Transplants is the way in which its Frankenstein’s-monster music improbably evokes the scattershot psychosis of early punk.

A mini-super-group, the Transplants take punk rock for a wild ride that’s equal parts tune and attitude, throwing everything into the mix and coming out like avant-garde geniuses. Rough edges stick out all over. Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker’s percussion races off in every direction. Rancid’s Tim Armstrong marshals synths and some Bob Stinsonian guitar-scribbling behind the piano samples, organ intros, and Beach Boy choruses that buoy the hardcore and make it go pop. And singer Rob Aston scream-raps beery profundities about hard living and untimely death.

If the record has a flaw, it’s Aston’s relentlessly shrill hip-hop vocalizing and hard-ass posing, which steamroll even his wise and tender outreach on “Sad But True.” If the record has a hero, it’s Armstrong, who co-wrote and produced everything and whose slurred crooning is so far beyond speech that it becomes as lovable as the howling of a neighborhood mutt. As de facto boss, he also gets to “articulate” the communal theme of the enterprise by gurgling “This is for the misfits, the freaks, and the runts.”

Join the party. — Addison Engelking

Grade: A-

The Delgados

Hate

(Mantra/Beggars Banquet)

It takes a lot of cheek to title a track “All You Need Is Hate” — not a one-joke Beatles parody either, but an invigorating piece of pop music: a dark, comically cynical song with a sing-along chorus — half pop hook, half pub chant — that bristles against the song’s hateful sentiment like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Not only does the Scottish band the Delgados have the nerve to write such a slyly pessimistic song, they’ve also named their third album after it. Hate is a mixture of similar contradictions: Fronted by Stewart Henderson and Emma Pollack, the band manages, thanks to and in spite of producer Dave Fridmann, to sound simultaneously heavy and ethereal.

The opening track, “The Light Before We Land,” begins with soft strings before blasting in with heavy Bonham-style drums. The lilting melodies that mark each song — more focused and clear than on their previous album, The Great Eastern — shine through a filter of manic production, noisy feedback, and ambient sound effects, so much so that at times it feels like Henderson and Pollack are trying to sing above the din Fridmann has created.

But together, the two principals are the biggest contradiction on Hate. Pollack’s introspective lyrics and vocals are edgily detached and dryly self-assured, many years’ worth of hurt and tragedy affecting her voice. Henderson, on the other hand, sounds alternately self-lacerating and drunkenly bemused: In one song, he sings, “How can I find what’s right/The truth is our lives were shite,” but later claims, “I had hope now where I keep my doubts.” This small admission of hope, albeit long gone, sounds like his greatest triumph in life –he may be under the table, but he can still see a little light.

Both personalities inform the Delgados’ music, making Hate a vivid, textured album, a monument to sarcasm, irony, and hope in the face of all life’s pain. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: A-

The Best of Morphine

1992-1995

Morphine

(Rykodisc)

The career of Boston three-piece Morphine effectively ended on July 6, 1999, when bass player/vocalist Mark Sandman collapsed and died from a heart attack at the age of 47 onstage during a performance in Palestrina, Italy. After his sudden death, the surviving members did a farewell tour as Orchestra Morphine with guest vocalists and released an album, The Night, which the group, with Sandman, had completed before his death.

Morphine was not your usual three-piece band. For starters, the group consisted of saxophone, drums, and two-string bass, with only Sandman on vocals. This allowed them to play modally at times, since they were not shackled to a guitar as the only melodic instrument. Sandman, with his vocals and swooping two-string bass, along with saxophonist Dana Colley carried the main melodic lines in very unusual ways. What sounded on paper like your usual willfully obscure, unlistenable, avant-rock lineup turned out to be a tuneful, almost mainstream-sounding (well, at times) thinking person’s pop group with R&B overtones.

Also unusual is Rykodisc’s releasing only a partial best-of package on Morphine, covering the band’s early years, 1992-1995, and drawing on the albums Good, Cure for Pain, Yes, and a handful of unreleased tracks. If you’re looking for a taste of Morphine or a starting point, get The Best of Morphine, but you’re likely to want the rest afterward. My advice is to start with Cure for Pain or The Night.

Great band, wonderful music, cheesy package. — Ross Johnson

Grade: A-

You Are Free

Cat Power

(Matador)

On past albums, Cat Power’s sole member, Chan Marshall, played the role of

the girl who sits at the back of class and is too timid to raise her hand and

give the answers she obviously knows. She was eccentric, introverted, nervous,

and very nearly brilliant. If her primary flaw was her unwillingness to assert

herself, on her new album, the meaningfully titled You Are Free, she

sells herself as a major singer-songwriter with more facets than shy and skittish.

You Are Free widens and develops Marshall’s sound beyond the stark

intimacy of voice and minimal accompaniment. A slow, sad electric-guitar riff

illuminates the country-bluesy “Good Woman,” while a chorus of background

singers — including Eddie Vedder and two girls named Maggie and Emma, ages

10 and 11 — play male and female devils and angels on Marshall’s shoulders.

Other songs feature odd string arrangements from David Campbell (Beck’s dad)

and violin from the Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis. The result is a piercing, ramshackle

sound that is dynamic enough to volley confidently from the ghostly folk of

“Werewolf” to the crunchy alt-rock of “He War.”

She still communicates painful, scary intimacy better than just about anyone

else (other than, say, Lucinda Williams). On “Werewolf,” the verses

disintegrate into a wordless chorus of soft whoops and ee-ahs that conjure an

otherworldly eeriness, while on “Names,” her voice takes on the scars

of a thousand tragedies as she catches up with her teenage friends who’ve lived

rough, ill-fated lives.

Marshall has developed her songwriting voice; she has also honed her physical

voice considerably. She projects a wide range of emotions through the sheer

raspiness of her vocals and the rhythms of her phrasings. At times, she sounds

like a more nuanced PJ Harvey but without the bull-in-a-china-shop wail that

Polly Jean passes off as feminine sexuality. On “I Don’t Blame You,”

the type of rock-and-roll metasong that would fit perfectly on a Sleater-Kinney

album, she sounds self-assured and confident as she deconstructs her own tortured

stage persona, while on “He War” she sings “I’m not that hot

new chick!” with punk-cool attitude.

In other words, You Are Free may be Marshall’s fourth album, but it’s

her first to approach greatness. It should lift her out of the indie arena she

has been haunting for years and drag her into the national spotlight, a development

that Marshall will probably still view with some reluctance and that everyone

else will applaud. —Stephen Deusner

Grade: A

Lovebox

Groove Armada

(Jive Electro)

When rave came along, it was celebrated because it was the antithesis of classic

rock. Now it is classic rock and often very self-consciously so. See

the last couple of Chemical Brothers albums or Fatboy Slim’s Halfway Between

the Gutter and the Stars. And now add the new Groove Armada to that list.

Londoners Andy Cato and Tom Findlay broke through with 1999’s Vertigo,

in particular when Fatboy Slim’s remix added some badly needed funk to their

single “I See You Baby,” giving the duo a massive club hit. But Vertigo

itself was often watery — sometimes to great effect (“At the River”),

usually not. Something similar applied to 2001’s Goodbye Country, Hello Nightclub.

It’s with Lovebox, though, that Cato and Findlay make their classic-rock

move.

This isn’t to say that the album sounds all that different from their earlier

work. It’s just that these arena-rave tricks (bludgeoning drumbeats, enormous

basslines, a thick overall sonic ambience) have become so expected that it’s

hard to be thrilled by them anymore. Also, for dance artists and listeners,

disco has now become part of the classic-rock canon, so disco drumbeats and

diva wailing signify in much the same way as the guitar solo or the sneering/leering

British male vocalist does. Lovebox has a little of all those elements,

as well as the Jamaican sounds that have long been prevalent in U.K. dance culture.

The way Cato and Findlay deploy them is appealing in a holding-pattern kind

of way: The album is both more self-consciously funky than usual but also looser,

all without feeling very notable in the end. — Michaelangelo Matos

Grade: B

Wonderful Rainbow

Lightning Bolt

(Load Records)

Just when you thought a bass/drums noise duo that play through 3,800 watts

of unmic’d power couldn’t sell 30,000 albums, along come Providence, Rhode Island’s

Lightning Bolt. I know, nobody has really ever pondered that, but Lightning

Bolt have developed into a minor phenomenon. Up until Wonderful Rainbow,

their third full-length, Lightning Bolt albums have been little more than dressing

for the live experience. Said experience starts with two guys quietly setting

up gear in a corner of a club (usually opposite the stage), then the second

the opening band concludes their set, Lightning Bolt commence to cleaning the

ears of every patron sporting the berries to stick around.

Brian Chippendale plays like the future of our world depends on how hard he

hits the kit, and Brian Gibson looks like he’d rather be making lunch as he

picks his instrument (which is strung with three bass strings and a banjo string),

but what comes out of the latter’s 10-foot stack will have you second-guessing

any preconceived idea of “intensity.” Sonic Youth were wowed enough

to invite Lightning Bolt to play a handful of high-profile gigs and tried to

coerce the duo into playing last. Seems the experienced veterans had

some trepidation about following the live act of the new millennium — a live

act that has rounded up quite a drove of believers, as is evident by album sales

previously unheard-of within the realm of discordant noise so far removed from

pop or rock standards.

So what do you get out of the new record? You get a conspicuous branching

out from prior albums. Long passages of, dare I say, hypnotic bass noodlings

(don’t get the idea that we’re talking Jaco Pastorius here) provide a pretty

cohesion between the times when the guys lock into their rhythmic romper room.

Too few notes (and even less fidelity) to be prog-rock- or metal-based, the

dominating sound is a more pedestrian, driving take on Japan’s Ruins or early

Boredoms. The sparse vocals are delivered through a talk-show lapel mic fixed

inside the drummer’s ski mask, and they come out through the bass amp, so don’t

expect an intelligible sing-along to the bouncy, nursery-rhyme yelps. For a

convincing visual document, last fall’s VHS/DVD The Power of Salad lovingly

follows Lightning Bolt on a cross-country tour and is available through the

label. Become a believer. — Andrew Earles

Grade: B+

Get Rich or Die Tryin’

50 Cent

(Shady/Aftermath/Interscope)

One of the most memorable hip-hop moments of the

past year came in the opening credits of 8

Mile, when Eminem’s B. Rabbit prepped for an upcoming MC battle by spitting

lyrics in front of a bathroom mirror, the song playing through

his headphones Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Pt. 2.” The song

rocketed the viewer back to the film’s 1995 setting, capturing

the moment as few other songs could. “I’m only 19 but my

mind is old/And when things get for real my warm heart turns

cold,” one half of the duo rapped on the song, offering a depiction

of their native Queensbridge housing projects as hell on

earth. Over the course of one great sophomore album

(The Infamous) and its one classic single, the duo’s fixation on violent street

life didn’t seem exploitative but rather cinematic, unnerving,

impossible to turn away from. It didn’t last. What had come

across as a warning shot from America’s urban underside quickly

devolved into self-parody, a tired for-addicts-only style

dubbed Murda Muzik on a later album.

Listening to the latest rapper to up the ante on

hip-hop’s dubious “reality” principle, Eminem protégé and current

Billboard kingpin 50 Cent, I can’t help wondering if he’ll meet

the same artistic fate. “Many Men (Wish Death),” the best

track on 50 Cent’s fast-selling debut Get Rich or Die

Tryin’, is a worthy inheritor of “Shook Ones Pt. 2,” witheringly honest

and matter-of-fact about its protagonist’s outlaw lifestyle

but without an ounce of regret. With its dead-eyed,

sing-songy chorus (“Have mercy on my soul/Somewhere my

heart turned cold”) and rising organ hook (lifted from

Tavares), the mood is muted, somber. It takes you there.

It also unabashedly plays off a biography that 50

Cent has exploited more assiduously than perhaps any

rapper ever: The song, indeed the entire album, is informed

by his much-discussed past as drug dealer and

triggerman (he admits to having shot people in the past), by the

nine bullet wounds and one stabbing that scar his body, by

his arrest on gun charges just a couple months before

the album’s release. You don’t think he’s playing this past

for every Sound Scan number it’s worth? This is a guy

who thanks his parole officer (“Miss Donna Harris”) in

the liner notes to his debut album, just above a photo of

him and two associates at a table surrounded by guns,

liquor, and stacks of cash.

50 Cent isn’t the only current hip-hop act to

play off the is-it-a-myth-or-reality that music isn’t a

necessity because the drug money’s so good. But where

the Clipse’s recent also-bad-for-you Lord

Willin’ repays close and repeated listens (given the Neptunes’

fascinating, ear-popping production and unexpected bursts of

lyrical wit, as on the sexually mischievous “Ma, I

Don’t Love Her”), the album’s not inconsiderable

pleasures are all surface: Executive-produced by Dr. Dre

and Eminem, the music is more durable and

sure-footed than ecstatic, 50 Cent’s smooth, articulate flow

more conducive to casual head-bobbing than

headphone scrutiny. The deep, strong meditation of “Many

Men (Wish Death)” and the engaging playfulness of

the deserving smash single “In Da Club” aside, this is

hip- hop as ace background music: Its relentless,

single-minded, tough-guy attitude gets tiresome the

closer you get to it. —Chris Herrington

Grade: B+

Scandinavian Leather

Turbonegro

(Epitaph)

Denim rock is back! Hot on the heels of their

northern compatriots the Hives and the

Hellacopters, Turbonegro — Norway’s tongue-in-cheek answer

to death metal — reformed just in time to capitalize

on the Scandinavian rock revolution. It’s been five

years since the group released the raucous Apocalypse

Dudes (they disbanded shortly after), but as of right

now, Hank von Helvete and the rest of the boys are back

— harder, heavier, and more fun than ever.

Think eighth grade when you put this album on

the stereo — masking hickeys and zits with caked-on

concealer, circling the opposite sex around the school cafeteria, bragging to

your friends about what you would (or would not) do, drinking stolen beer in the

convenience-store parking lot, smoking your older brother’s pot, huffing the glue

that came in that model airplane kit. You made do with Judas Priest and

Iron Maiden then but rest assured: Had Scandinavian

Leather been available then, it would have been the soundtrack to

those blurry years.

“Wipe It Til It Bleeds” combines the sonic assault of Euroboy’s

electric guitar (think Randy Rhodes) with a catchy sing-along chorus,

while “Turbonegro Must Be Destroyed” brings to mind Henry

Rollins-era Black Flag. Verboten lyrics on

“Sell Your Body (To the Night)” add fuel

to the “homo or not” argument that’s followed Turbonegro throughout

their career, while the darkly humorous “Fuck the World” rivals

black-metal kings Mayhem for head-banging anthem of the decade. “Drenched

In Blood (D.I.B.)” takes the party to an even higher level as von Helvete

evokes the late Joey Ramone on the syrupy-sweet chorus. Ironic

rock-and-roll? That’s for you to decide. Chances

are, you’ll down a shot of whiskey, crank the volume up to 10, and pogo

along to the beat. — Andria Lisle

Grade: A

Turbonegro will be performing at the New Daisy Theatre on Saturday,

March 15th, with The Queens Of The Stone Age.

Toward the Sun

Jeffrey Gaines

(Artemis Records)

A decade after his eponymous major-label debut, Jeffrey Gaines has broken

out of his comfort zone as an established soul-folk artist to record the emotional

Toward the Sun. Thanks to co-producer

Mitchell Froom, Gaines’ sexy growl has an underlying edge to it on these 11 tracks,

making for a far more memorable album than anything in his late-’90s oeuvre.

A full band accompanies Gaines’ gentle acoustic guitarwork, while Froom

rounds out the mix with a range of piano, moog, and Hammond B-3 riffs. The group

melds on tracks like “Our Lie,” a

modern-day breakup song tailor-made for Adult Contemporary audiences, and on the

brooding “Beyond the Beginning.” Gaines

really grooves on “In This Lifetime,” a

gritty call to seize the day. Not surprisingly,

the song’s dynamics evoke the shimmering pop rock of his 1998 hit “Belle de Jour”

with its soaring radio-friendly riffs.

More palatable than the overly sentimental Duncan Sheik and

more grounded than the wildly eccentric Terence Trent D’Arby, Jeffrey Gaines

has neatly expanded his soul-folk niche with Toward the

Sun. With any luck, its heartfelt lyrics and unpretentious

folky-yet-soulful rock instrumentation will

inspire Gaines to put his heart on the line and push the envelope even further.

n — AL

Grade: B+

Jeffrey Gaines will be performing at

the Gibson Lounge on Saturday, March 15th.

Audioslave

Audioslave

(Epic/Interscope)

What happens when Rage Against The Machine turntable guitarist Tom Morello and his fellow lumbering, shrieking instrumentalists collide with the full-throated wail of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, the Samson of Seattle’s ancient grunge mythology? Well, there’s plenty of noise and plenty of old-fashioned soft-loud dynamics and a few genuine houserockers until the show eventually wears itself out.

But I can’t really say I was surprised by the fact that Audioslave’s new album starts as strongly as any recent hard-rock record before it meanders into the last remaining light. It seems as though overgenerosity is as much a part of this kinda-supergroup as it was when its members toiled for different bosses. Think about it. As great as they were, both Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine overstayed their pop moments by one album each. Rage’s cover album Renegades was a bum nostalgia trip coming on the heels of their finest album, and I’m pretty sure nobody has ever heard the Soundgarden swan song Down On the Upside. But careers are hard to end. Just ask Michael Jordan. They are also hard to resuscitate. Just ask Michael Jordan again.

Still, it’s comforting to hear the Rage boys’ racket again, especially Morello’s as he coaxes the usual bleeps and squeals from his guitar but shows some astral tenderness on “Like a Stone” and “Shadow of the Sun.” The one-two-three punch that opens the album is sure to make you wish you had long hair to swing around. And nobody needs to worry about politics when Cornell is writing lyrics about his pained soul and psycho girlfriends and screaming the hell out of them.

These tried-and-true pleasures are all good for casual listening. But when I tried and tried to get past all that sound and fury, I kept coming up with this distressing equation: Cornell – Morello = Coverdale – Page? —Addison Engelking

Grade: B+

Red = Luck

Patty Larkin

(Vanguard)

On this, her 10th album, singer-songwriter-guitarist Patty Larkin traverses the same familiar but very fertile ground. Red = Luck finds the artist in a partly Zen, partly feel-good mood.

Larkin compares each of her albums to an art opening, in the sense that she explores a different motif with each successive release. An Oriental theme prevails here, with songs about cranes, quotes from the Dalai Lama, and heavy color symbolism. Red = Luck is a sort of manifesto for Larkin, a redhead — a very grown-up statement of her feistiness, sexuality, and playfulness but also, ultimately, of her acceptance and gratefulness to take things as they are. Ruminations on lost love and lost opportunities find her merely reflective, not bitter at all. Recorded in the aftermath of 9/11, this release emphasizes, more than ever, the need to “be here now” instead of pining for some mythical good old days or fearing a postapocalyptic future. As always, Larkin moves lightly between the gossamer realms of rock, pop, funk, ethnic music, and folk. Achingly beautiful pop songs, exquisite little guitar meditations, and innovative instrumentals abound, all capped off by a bouzouki and mandolin romp with Middle Eastern and Celtic tinges, where East truly does meet West.

Each of Larkin’s releases finds her doing bolder and more upfront things with her guitarwork. (She plays a mean slide and ranges from elaborate, tiny finger patterns to a percussive slap.) Her smoky alto voice has never sounded better, and her wry sense of humor and cutting social commentary are still very much intact. I’d say in this sense, with her latest album, we’ve all lucked out. — Lisa Lumb

Grade: B+

Evil Heat

Primal Scream

(Epic )

What would it be like if Primal Scream made an album that had more than two or three memorable tracks on it? I was suckered into buying 2000’s XTRMNTR because the first three songs promised and delivered on Radiohead’s deferred dream of exciting, distorted cyborg rock-and-roll. Those first three songs — “Kill All Hippies” (sexy), “Accelerator” (distorted and desperate), and “Exterminator” (sexy again!) — still blow me away. The rest of XTRMNTR was a betrayal, full of mood and drone and synth-plunking and chill-out music.

Every year or two, I wonder if I’ve missed something when the band releases another collection of new music, but as Evil Heat shows, the band has apparently found a bait-and-switch pattern they love, and they plan on sticking to it. This year’s model is composed of more synth-plunking and the kind of loud, vaguely threatening music that Iggy Pop might put on when he wants to have sex. I know consistency, conshmistency. The market rules Primal Scream’s decisions, though, and times are tough. They may say they’re restless, but I say they’re either pandering or totally lost. For the curious, “City” and “Skull X” are in the style I prefer. — AE

Grade: C+

Soft Rock

Lifter Puller

(The Self-Starter Foundation)

Soft Rock is a posthumous collection of early music by a short-lived band that you’ve probably never heard of. Why care? Because at their very best, which is captured on the first six tracks of this two-disc compilation and occasionally throughout the rest of the 40 songs collected here, Lifter Puller approached greatness.

This Minneapolis band broke up shortly after the release of their apotheosis, 2000’s brilliant concept album Fiestas & Fiascos. Three years later their cult seems to have actually grown, thus Soft Rock, which compiles almost everything the band recorded prior to Fiestas & Fiascos — their eponymous 1996 debut, 1997’s Half Dead and Dynamite, and 1998’s The Entertainment and Arts EP, plus a handful of singles, demos, and stray tracks. On it you can hear the band evolve from a fine if borderline conventional indie-rock band into the outfit that can be heard on Fiestas & Fiascos, a band that was basically a genre unto itself.

In the band’s final form, lead singer Craig Finn looked like late-’70s Elvis Costello, sounded like croaking Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachman, and spewed narratives with the verbosity of early Springsteen (a direct influence paid homage to with song titles “11th Avenue Freezeout” and “Candy’s Room”). The band mostly eschewed verse-chorus-verse in favor of straight-line stream-of-consciousness, Finn giving the impression of making each song up as he goes along, like a stand-up comic enraptured in a rant a few steps beyond merely funny. And the band sounds like they’re just following his cues, their stuttering stop-start dynamics, angular post-punk guitar riffs, and funky-drummer beats simultaneously propelling Finn’s monologues and playing off them. The effect sounds more spontaneous than perhaps any guitar-bass-drums song-music I’ve ever heard, even if it’s all no doubt worked out in great detail.

And the band’s unique form served equally idiosyncratic content, their great subject summed up by a song title from Fiestas & Fiascos: “Lifter Puller Vs. The End of the Evening.” The band’s entire career seemed to follow one long nightlife adventure with recurring places and characters (a bar called the Nice Nice, drug dealer Nightclub Dwight, paramours Juanita, Jenny, and Katrina). It’s a chronicle of drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and long nights hopping from bar to bar, club to club, concert to concert. One of my favorite moments is when they hang out in front of a club in the early-morning hours and pour their drinks into the street in memory of dead-tired homies who didn’t make it to the end of the party.

“Secret Santa Cruz” is quintessential Lifter Puller, a breathless description of nightlife transgressions where Finn takes the voice of Jenny, at this point a co-ed back on campus recounting her wild summer to sorority sisters, the motormouth rush of images giving an indication of what pretty much all of the band’s songs are like: “Twenty-seven lovers in the back half of the summer/I know you think it’s way too many/But the X makes me feel sexy and the sex makes me feel empty/The alcohol destroys me/And I did it in a disco with some guy from San Francisco who looked a lot like Roger Daltry/And the night of all that bloodshed I was kissin’ on some crackhead who said he knew about a party/He keeps it in his mouth in those crazy chipmunk cheeks/I gave him $50 and he kissed me, spit a little treat between my teeth/I think we’re starting to peak/Woke up at some hedonistic rodeo with cowboys kissing cowboys, trading magazines for videos/Yeah, God bless the radio, all that fine fine music without all the messed up musicians/And Dwight’s a magician/He gets sensible people makin’ terrible decisions.”

If there’s anything the band cares more about than drugs and late-night escapades, it’s rock-and-roll. If you caught the Velvet Underground reference in the previous lyric (“all that fine fine music”), that’s standard operating procedure, a wide-ranging obsession manifest in everything, from references to Archie Bell and the Drells (from “The Pirate and the Penpal”: “Told her about the tighten up/The way they used to dance down in Houston, Texas”) to Pink Floyd. Finn rouses one drifting lust object with the sardonic “Wake up, little floozie” and on “Roaming the Foam” leaps from Guns N’ Roses to Salt-N-Pepa, taunting his assembled subjects with “Do you know where you are?/You’re in the jungle, baby/You’re gonna die!” while the band segues into the keyboard riff from “Push It.”

This music might be the soundtrack to your life. It’s sure not the soundtrack to mine. But I find it endlessly fascinating as pop-music anthropology: the soundtrack to someone else’s life.

— Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Backwards

The Post

(SA Records)

Tribal beats and tape loops are the last sounds you’d expect to hear from a trio of Indianians, but, as the murky cover art suggests, the Post are full of surprises. Backwards, their debut, comes across like a post-apocalyptic merging of organic and artificial musics from both man and machine. While it’s obvious that these kids grew up listening to such experimental grandparents as Sonic Youth and This Heat, they add their own vocabulary to the mix. Keyboard collages and samples that could’ve been lifted from a DJ Spooky 12″ or a Stereolab remix add complex layers, resulting in an ethereal, often unsettling, sound.

But don’t expect the laidback, atmospheric rhythms of Tortoise or Low from this crew. The hypnotic “Fear of Numbers” revisits Can’s “Yoo Doo Right” with its aggressive rant, although the Post cuts their number much shorter than that epic prog-rock chant. “Hum” rings like an outtake from Sonic Youth’s ’85 landmark Bad Moon Rising, while “Minus” draws on the late John Fahey’s minor-chord acoustic guitar technique, melding the notes with soaring vocals and a dense background track. It’s a spine-tingling contrast to the first half of the album, which — from “Waiting” to “Drown” — unwinds like the perfect soundtrack for a dreary winter afternoon.

— Andria Lisle

Grade: A

The Post will be performing at Young Avenue Deli on Saturday, February 22nd, with the Coach & Four and the Duration.

Flying Saucer Tour, Vol. 1: Pittsburgh 6/20/91

Love, Laughter, and Truth

Bill Hicks

(Rykodisc)

After you listen to one of Bill Hicks’ comedy albums, you inevitably start to wonder what he would make of the world today. As befits one of the only true social satirists stand-up has ever produced, his bits play like nihilistic op-ed pieces interspersed with pot humor and dick jokes (as a sop to the audience, Hicks liked to say). He spent countless hours trying to convince

the world that the moronic, hypocritical public attitudes toward sex, drugs, and religion not only defied logic but — and here’s the twist — prevented human beings from evolving spiritually and morally. His flame burned brightly and constantly.

What would he make of today’s crass and hypocritical anti-drug commercials? What would he think of Gulf War II, faith-based charities, or the bickering about the Pledge of Allegiance? No one will ever know. Dead of cancer in 1994, Hicks’ voice continues to grow louder each year as his aural legacy expands. All four of his “official” records and a best-of remain in print, and two new additions to the canon offer revealing footnotes to his brief, stunning career.

Though there is plenty of Hicks’ famed hostility throughout Flying Saucer Tour and Love, Laughter, and Truth (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND AMERICA!” he shrieks at one point), the new discs are noteworthy for their inclusion of atypical Hicks material about childhood, bad drivers, and airplane inconveniences, which undermine his self-generated persona as a dark outlaw-poet driven to expose social ills. Love, Laughter, and Truth collects leftover bits that show off his graphic imagination and geekily precise comic vocabulary. When he spits, “Someone actually asked me once, ‘Who’s your favorite New Kid?’ … THE FIRST ONE THAT DIES,” it’s gallows fun and games, but the psychotic revenge scenario “You Can’t Get Bitter” isolates his transgressive impulses from his sense of humor.

Flying Saucer Tour documents a tense Pittsburgh show where Hicks repeatedly prays for nuclear holocaust and dryly remarks, “I’m amusing people one at a time here tonight. This is unique.” By the end of the disc, it’s unclear whether the clueless audience realized how unique it was to witness Hicks’ talents.

— Addison Engelking

Grade (both albums): A-

Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!

David Cross

(Sub Pop)

Funnyman David Cross has become a rock star of sorts. Largely through his innovative work in cult TV (he wrote for The Ben Stiller Show, co-wrote, co-produced, and co-starred in HBO’s Mr. Show, and played Eliot’s faux-retarded brother Donny on the only two remotely entertaining episodes of the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me), his name is now valuable currency in hip rock circles. The Strokes named their current tour after a Mr. Show sketch, and Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme recently sported a Titanica T-shirt in concert. But rock stars are not as fearless as Cross is onstage. Over the course of the 125-minute Shut Up, his standup act takes aesthetic risks few artists not named Eminem would even contemplate.

The thrills of this largely improvised double-disc live comedy album come in fits and starts as Cross articulates and directs his bottomless wrath for and at such worthy targets as Republicans, censorship, Southern Baptists, the Promise Keepers, Rickey Henderson, the Book of Genesis, drive-time deejays, the “flag-waving, cheerleading rah-rah bullshit” organized in the wake of 9/11, the war on terrorism (“It’s like having a war on jealousy,” he sighs), and the misuse of the word “literally.” Though his improvisational skills occasionally falter, the weak bits and dead time actually enhance the spontaneity and sting of his best work. His assessment on the child-abuse scandals of the Catholic Church may elicit moans of disgust, but his horrifying, bleakly comic conclusions have an impeccable logic.

Disc one is triumphant when Cross discusses the uncertain times after the WTC attacks (which he calls “the week football stopped”) and drops into startling impressions of strident, baffled middle-class women. Disc two — wherein Cross disappears into a dozen characters as quickly as he thinks of them, dismantles the new Bush regime, and shares an epic shaggy-drunk story based on a chance encounter with a group from VH-1’s Bands on the Run — deserves a place alongside the best comedy albums of Cosby, Pryor, and Hicks.

Two caveats: 1) There is a lot of profanity. 2) The track listings are misleading. —AE

Grade: A

Scarlet’s Walk

Tori Amos

(Epic)

Tori Amos’ new Scarlet’s Walk is a strange breed of album: part road movie, part Great American Novel, part postcards from the edge. The famously red-headed singer takes a long, hard look at the culture and identity of post-9/11, pre-World War III America, navigating L.A.’s porn industry, examining border conflicts in the Southwest, delving into suburban ennui in the Northeast, and straining her eyes against Vegas’ inhuman glare. In the end, she comes up with something that feels strangely predetermined: Either America is strikingly similar to Amos’ worldview and aesthetic or else she went searching with an agenda and found exactly what she wanted to find — namely, material for a new Tori Amos album.

Each of the 18 songs here follows a woman traveling around America, usually with Amos singing in the voices of her characters. It’s an approach she took as far back as her first album, but she fine-tuned it on last year’s cover album, Strange Little Girls. The best songs on Scarlet’s Walk have a very specific point of view and overflow with the well-studied details of short stories. “Wednesday” manifests a couple’s tension as a Thumbelina-size ghost, and the narrator hums “When Doves Cry” to distract herself from her fears. On “A Sorta Fairytale,” a woman drives around the desert with her lover, the top down on their convertible and the hot wind blowing on their faces. The song’s momentum matches the narrator’s movement along the barren landscape, but car trouble hints at romantic turmoil.

Alas, not everything works quite so well. Amos’ worldview is predictable and impractical, from preachy sentiments like “We’re just impostors in this country” to unctuous PC exercises like the a cappella “Wampum Prayer.” The lead-off track, “Amber Waves,” is a well-meaning paean to a porn queen (whose name she cops from Boogie Nights), but with campy lines like “From ballet class to a lap dance/And straight to video,” Amos not only condemns the men who make money off women’s bodies but also takes a dig at the women who shed their dreams along with their clothes.

Like too many of Amos’ albums, Scarlet’s Walk lacks any trace of humor, warmth, or joy. At times, it sounds like it wasn’t much fun to make. What’s worse, it’s often a chore to listen to.

—Stephen Deusner

Grade: B-

The Music in My Head 2

Various Artists

(Stern’s Africa)

The Music in My Head (1998), an anthology compiled by British writer Mark Hudson to accompany his novel of the same title, is one of the great African compilations, riding a hectic, transfixing groove mostly from the Senegalese mbalax style that is the book’s primary object of desire. Along with a couple of terrific ringers from Congolese giant Franco and Mali’s Salif Keita, the disc’s tough groove is grounded in great songs, many of them Youssou N’Dour-related, with a handful of tracks from N’Dour’s early band, Etoile de Dakar, or its spinoff, Etoile 2000.

Similarly, the recently released The Music in My Head 2 centers on West Africa exclusively. But this time around, Hudson’s selections sprawl a bit more: Instead of a song album stuffed with killer grooves, this is a groove album full of desirable songs.

Etoile de Dakar’s frantic, head-spinning “Dom Sou Nare Bakh” throws you directly into the field of action: Horns hurtle forward, guitars slant right, percussion spins left, and call-and-response vocals hop all over, nasal and thrilling. It calms down with repeated plays, but not by much. Just as wild is the guitar line that hooks Thione Seck’s “Diongoma” and the percussion on just about everything, which pushes the beat in odd directions without quite decentering it.

The basslines, especially on the Rail Band’s “Jurukan” and Super Diamono’s “Bass,” lurch and thrust in a similar fashion; as a result, the songs seldom stand still, even when they get as contemplative as N’Dour’s “Pitche Mi” or Ousmane Kouyate’s “Beni Haminanko.” The latter also boasts a horn part that lays you as flat as a classic Stax chart; so does Keletigui et ses Tambourinis’ “Demba Ti,” a calypso-flavored swing number. If The Music in My Head 2 isn’t quite as good as its predecessor, it comes impressively close.

— Michaelangelo Matos

Grade: A-

American IV: The Man Comes Around

Johnny Cash

(American Recordings)

Toward the end of his life, Rembrandt painted a series of self-portraits that attempted to document and defy death through artistic expression. The beauty of these harsh, shadowy works comes from both the age of the artist and the cosmic futility of his task: In each successive portrait, Rembrandt’s facial expressions grow more impenetrable as the lighting grows more grotesque and the brush strokes grow less steady.

If pop music were like oil painting, then Johnny Cash’s erratic American IV: The Man Comes Around — with a cover portrait of the country legend in Rembrandt-esque chiaroscuro — might be valuable as a document showing the indomitable spirit of an influential pop-cultural figure in decline. The big difference is that Rembrandt’s works have a silent majesty, whereas every time Cash opens his mouth on the new record I want to shriek — I thought Johnny Cash was dead until this new album came out!

The most striking error on the new record is the atrocious song selection. Along with two or three Cash originals, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (my least favorite song ever;there are dictators I like better) is included, as are tracks penned by the likes of Don Henley, Sting, and Trent Reznor. Cash tries to embrace every tune with his once-mighty baritone, but at this stage he sounds literally toothless.

This is one of the most depressing albums I’ve ever heard. Look away, look away. — Addison Engelking

Grade: C

One Bedroom

The Sea & Cake

(Thrill Jockey)

The Sea & Cake is a sorta-supergroup consisting of Chicago solo artists Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt, as well as musicians Eric Claridge (formerly of Shrimp Boat) and John McEntire (Tortoise). Together they make a brand of breezy pop that is often called “post-rock” but might be more accurately described as “background music” — fine to listen to while cooking or cleaning, not quite so compelling for active listening.

It’s not that the S&C are bad. In fact, they’re all technically proficient musicians, and their past work shows they can be innovative and inventive (see Prewitt’s solo album White Sky and Shrimp Boat’s forgotten Duende, if only for the Holiday Inn lounge decadence of “What Do You Think of Love?”).

But between conception and execution, something goes well, not wrong, just awry. Or perhaps askew is a better word. One Bedroom is a little bit poppier than its predecessor, Oui, but it still doesn’t manage to grab your attention. Squiggly guitar lines and fluttery drums abound, and there’s even a cover of David Bowie’s “Sound & Vision,” which seems a little hopeful, I think, given the band’s minimalist style. The result is a respectable dullness — not a can’t-be-bothered or a jaded-beyond-exertion dullness, but a mellow-to-the-point-of-oblivion dullness, a dullness that took some work.

— Stephen Deusner

Grade: B

Morvern Callar

Various Artists

(Warp)

Well, what do you know? It’s our old friend, the soundtrack as aesthetic defining point and semi-pop marketing device. In the case of the disc accompanying director Lynne Ramsay’s acclaimed Morvern Callar, there’s something of a twist to the usual soundtrack CPR: The disc serves to reposition Can, the early-’70s German prog-rock group, as a pop band. By including Can’s two most immediately memorable songs (1972’s “Spoon” and 1976’s “I Want More,” the latter an actual hit record in England) and two similarly hooky cuts by bassist/producer Holger Czukay (“Cool in the Pool” and “Fragrance”), it offers Krautrock at its friendliest. For record geeks who’ve been attempting to foist this stuff on people for years, it’ll serve as a godsend.

It’s helped along by a bunch of other hipster-friendly selections. As befits a Warp records release, there’s plenty of that Sheffield label’s avant-electronica, with smart selections from Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and Broadcast. We also get a welcome edit of Stereolab’s endless “Blue Milk,” some dub from Lee Perry, some gamelan, and a pair of country parodies, one good (Ween), one stupid (Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood). But considering what mishmashes soundtracks tend to be, one that keeps its focus as straight as this one is a blessing, even when it stumbles. — MM

Grade: A-

Tallahassee

The Mountain Goats

(4AD)

The second-most quotable album of 2002, after the Streets’ Original Pirate Material, comes from what would seem, outwardly, like a diametrically opposed source. Rather than a brash, beat-driven geezer, John Darnielle is a ‘zine writer (Last Plane to Jakarta, now available on the Web with a .com after its title), death-metal fan, and acoustic-guitar-wielding singer-songwriter. As the Mountain Goats, Darnielle has nurtured a fervent cult, and Tallahassee, his first album for 4AD, allows newcomers the privilege of discovering what the fuss is about.

To call the album “literary” is to shortchange both Darnielle’s cognac-dry melodies and pinched-but-urgent vocals. But every line of every song is so meticulously composed and manages to sound so un-self-conscious, if you love words it can make your head spin. And that goes especially for his metaphors: On “International Small Arms Traffic Blues,” he evokes both unrequited love (“My love is like a powder keg/In the corner of an empty warehouse/Somewhere just outside of town/About to burn down”) and the uneasy peace of a longstanding relationship (“Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania/Trucks loaded down with weapons/Crossing over every night, moon yellow and bright/There is a shortage in the blood supply/But there is no shortage of blood/The way I feel about you, baby, I can’t explain it/You’ve got the best of my love”).

“No Children” sharpens the knife further: “I hope if you think of me years down the line/You can’t think of one good thing to say/And I hope if I found the strength to walk out/You’d stay the hell out of my way.” Pretty damn lucid for a guy who notes earlier, on “First Few Desperate Hours,” that “I speak in smoke signals and you answer in code.” Don’t bet on it.

— Michaelangelo Matos

Grade: A-

The Bootleg Series Vol. 5:

Live 1975 — The

Rolling Thunder Revue

Bob Dylan

(Columbia)

By 1975, Bob Dylan was no prophet. His most celebrated work was nearly a decade behind him. He had looked lost as Alias in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, had appeared onstage only a handful of times from 1966 to 1973, and was already gaining a stage and studio reputation as more of a holy presence than a bandleader. In short, he was quietly evolving into his current role as a tireless touring musician who happened to be one of the most compelling figures in rock-and-roll.

Although I was shocked and delighted when he regrouped with 2001’s “Love and Theft,” I’ve never been particularly interested in noncanonical Dylan. Life’s just too short. And that goes double for the whole Rolling Thunder medicine-show-circus-fantastic-voyage-look-Bob’s-back -with-Joan-Baez-and-Sam-Shepard’s-there-too! fiasco. The official document of the second “Rolling Thunder” tour, 1976’s Hard Rain, was a gigantic disappointment after his four previous LPs — Before the Flood, Blood on the Tracks, The Basement Tapes, and Desire. But history is mutable. Thanks to Columbia’s The Bootleg Series — the outstanding archival Dylan project that illuminated a shadow career with its first three volumes and officially released the epochal 1966 Manchester Free Trade/”Royal Albert Hall” concert as volume four — two previously unreleased CDs of the original Rolling Thunder lineup have been brought to the public for the first time.

Culled from shows in Massachusetts and Canada, the composite concert is a wild ride, and the most compelling and dynamic material connect from some unlikely angles. “Isis” and an enraged “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” turn into waltz-time maelstroms courtesy of the 13-piece, seven-guitar(!) backup band. The solo acoustic “Simple Twist of Fate” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” emphasize the feral, gritty, and wry vocal style Dylan favored at the time. And an electrified “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is much more palatable as music and jeremiad. Through it all, including the interminable “Hurricane” and a lugubrious finale, Dylan’s ease as an artist and power as a public musician sound as clear as they will be for nearly 20 years. When he sings “So easy to look at/So hard to define” during “Sara,” he could be describing his own post-Rolling Thunder career. It’s almost proph well, you know. —Addison Engelking

Grade: A-

Listening Log:

Kings of Crunk –Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz (TVT): Macho belligerence as predictable as it is largely incomprehensible and generally devoid of social purpose, only saved by the occasional cameo appearance by far more talented cohorts. Stupidest lyric among the countless contenders, from “B***h”: “Who we talkin’ about? Any nigga that act like a woman.” Oh no! Not a woman. (“I Don’t Give A ” [with Mystikal])

Grade: C

Girl Interrupted — Ms. Jade (Beatclub/Interscope): The Timbaland/Missy formula delivering the goods, even in its most generic form. (“The Come Up,” “Ching Ching,” “Feel the Girl”)

Grade: B+

G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories –Swizz Beatz (Dreamworks): This serviceable guest-star-laden producer’s showcase only proves that the Ruff Ryders-associated Beatz is a second-tier force in what is rapidly becoming a producer’s medium, without the recognizable sonic personality of a Timbaland or Neptunes, much less Mannie Fresh. Not bad, but this “story” collection only delivers about half of what the more provocative cover art promises. (“Shyne,” “Good Times,” “Guilty”)

Grade: B

200 KM/H in the Wrong Lane — t.A.T.u. (Interscope): American debut from Russian, teenaged, lipstick-lesbian-lovers dance-pop duo who have already gone platinum across the Eastern Bloc — now that’s marketing. Turns out “Russian” is the problem, though, since this stuff is so lacking in the funk department that it makes for better magazine fodder than radio play, though their vocals have more life in Russian than English. On the other hand, the lead single, on which one teenage girl professes romantic love for another, is a first of sorts, and how many other teen-pop acts would cover the Smiths to communicate their social agony? (“All the Things She Said,” “Show Me Love,” “How Soon Is Now”)

Grade: B

Mollie’s Mix –Various Artists (Kill Rock Stars): Kill Rock Stars is arguably the best punk record label of the last decade or so, not that you’d know it from this disappointing roster sampler, which is too often as amateurish-in-a-bad-way as scoffers believe all such music is. In this context, Sleater-Kinney sound even more monumental than they really are, and second-tier contenders the Bangs and the Gossip offer the kind of subpar performances more likely to ward tourists away than spur their interest. Nice to hear ex-Geraldine Fibbers frontperson Carla Bozulich back on wax, though. (“Bless Me” –Tight Bro’s From Way Back When; “Oh!” — Sleater-Kinney; “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” — Carla Bozulich)

Grade: B-

Nuclear War –Yo La Tengo (Matador): Hoboken’s finest use a long hiatus between proper albums to cover Sun Ra four times over in a too-prescient-for-comfort single/EP. Highlight: the call-and-response kiddie-chorus on “Version 2,” the tots singing with discernible potty-mouth glee, “It’s a motherfucker/Don’t you know?/If they push that button/Your ass got to go!” n

Grade: B+

— Chris Herrington

Failer

Kathleen Edwards

(Zoë/Rounder)

On this debut album, the 24-year-old Ottawa-based singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards sounds eerily, even suspiciously, like Lucinda Williams. According to her press kit, she’s a diplomat’s daughter who switched from classical violin to alt-country after discovering Whiskeytown, but it’s not former Whiskeytown frontman Ryan Adams who has inspired this familiar-sounding marble-mouthed drawl, especially when bearing down on words such as “heart,” “mouth,” and “face.” It’s his Lost Highway labelmate Williams. So complete is Edwards’ mastery of Williams’ trademark vocal mannerisms that it’s sort of embarrassing on first listen. When Edwards sings “and everything” at the end of a line on “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like,” the first thing that comes to mind is Williams’ devastating delivery of the same evocative, open-ended phrase on Car Wheels On a Gravel Road‘s “Right in Time.”

And it isn’t just Williams’ vocal style that Edwards evokes. She also nails the hard-drinking, reckless, and emotionally raw mood, the combination of vulnerability and wry self-loathing (just look at the album title) that sometimes colors Williams’ music. On “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like,” Edwards muses that “No one likes a girl who won’t sober up,” while on “Hockey Skates” she confronts a lover with “Do you think your boys’ club will crumble/Just because of a loud-mouthed girl?”

But further listening reveals something more than just an ace mimic. Edwards is a compelling artist and sharp songwriter in her own right. She flashes a personality more individual than the standard alt-country cutout: The imagery on “Hockey Skates” is clearly her own, while on “Westby,” a quick-and-dirty narrative about a motel rendezvous with an older man in which Edwards flips through the cable after he passes out, she sounds her age (or a few years younger) in a way that you can’t imagine Williams ever has. And she shows her songwriting fangs on the chorus, observing with pointed nonchalance, “And if you weren’t so old I’d probably keep you/If you weren’t so old I’d tell my friends,” before slowing down for the deadpan punchline: “But I don’t think your wife would like my friends.”

But best of all may be the lead cut, “Six O’Clock News,” in which Edwards treads dangerous ground. Looking for an interesting way into one of those increasingly familiar Dog Day Afternoon-style scenarios (think Columbine but a few notches less intense), Edwards manages to avoid awkwardness in a song more writerly and topical than anything else on the album. Imagining the helpless lover of someone at the center of a bad situation, the song’s accumulated detail evokes Nebraska-era Springsteen more than Williams, and Edwards scores a knockout with a glancing blow when her narrator envisions an escape hatch not likely to materialize: “Peter, sweet baby, there’s just something that I gotta say to you/Gonna have your baby this coming June/We could get a little place down by Gilmour Park/You could do a little time and save my broken heart.”

— Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Shut Up

Kelly Osbourne

(Epic)

Television stardom rarely translates from the tube to the turntable. For every success like the Monkees, there are scores of embarrassing, nearly forgotten also-rans like Rick Springfield, Don Johnson, and — inevitably — Kelly Clarkson. Does anyone remember former Young and the Restless heartthrob and “Rock On” singer Michael Damien? Can you sing the chorus to the Heights’ big hit, “How Do You Talk to an Angel?”

With the fleeting nature of crossover celebrity in mind, it’s surprising how good Kelly Osbourne’s debut album, Shut Up, is. The reality-TV star’s debut has the accessible feel of the best pop-punk, equal parts Avril Lavigne (who has better hooks) and Sum 41 (who have more fun). The title track stands out as a radio-ready single, and “Coolhead” cries out for a montage in some unfilmed teen movie. Unfortunately, too many of the other overproduced songs sound indistinguishable from one another, making Osbourne sound like so many other post-Britney girl rockers.

Shut Up is a fine effort, but it’s not quite good enough to launch a career as anything other than Ozzy’s daughter, the Princess of Darkness. It desperately wants to be a real rock album, but it will inevitably be filed under pop curiosity — neither good nor embarrassing enough to be memorable.

—Stephen Deusner

Grade: B

Mama Says I’m Crazy

Mississippi Fred McDowell and Johnny Woods

(Fat Possum)

Let’s put it this way: Without Fred McDowell there would probably be no Fat Possum or any current interest in what has become known in recent years as North Mississippi hill-country blues. McDowell was the prototype for this style of bottleneck guitar blues that is played in an open-chord country tuning. Fat Possum’s Matthew Johnson turned this unadorned and powerful music into a signature record-label sound and identity decades after McDowell’s death. And Johnson’s most bankable artists, R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, great as they are/were, never really made it to the same league as McDowell. He could switch from quiet acoustic blues to devastating electric boogie depending on the recording date or live gig.

And the late Johnny Woods, McDowell’s favorite harmonica player, could have given the hard-drinking, liver-damaged Fat Possum artist roster a run for their money in a moonshine-swilling contest. I once played a benefit gig with a very drunk Woods during the summer of 1979 in Little Rock. (As I recall, the benefit had something to do with a group home for the profoundly retarded, and most of the home’s inhabitants seemed to be in attendance that day. They enjoyed dancing to our music in a large circle while holding hands, but that’s another story.)

Woods wobbled in front of me, staring blankly into my eyes and furiously blowing harp as if trying to tell me something. (That my drumming sucked?) I never did understand what Woods was trying to communicate to me during that performance since he was too intoxicated to speak afterward. But I’ll always remember looking into those yellow, bloodshot orbs of his and noting that nobody seemed to be home. He looked drunk and pitiful that day (so did I, for that matter), but he played and sounded great.

And he sounds that way on this very casual, home recording session taped by George Mitchell in North Mississippi in 1967. It’s not the same caliber as McDowell’s 1969 classic I Do Not Play No Rock and Roll, but it’s a great chronicle of how two masters made music effortlessly and intuitively. Yeah, “Shake ‘Em On Down” is included here, but it was never a cliché when McDowell played it.

Fat Possum is to be commended for uncharacteristic restraint in not making references to “boozy bluesmen” in their liner notes or promo material. Nice one, Matthew. — Ross Johnson

Grade: B+