Category: Record Reviews

Addison Engelking:

1. One Beat — Sleater-Kinney (Kill Rock Stars): For me, Sleater-Kinney’s grand achievement was the best record of 2002 as early as July 17th, when I saw them headline a benefit concert for their native Portland’s fabulous Rock and Roll Camp for Girls. After 45 minutes of a VH-1: Storytellers-type show featuring career-spanning hits and anecdotes, the band launched into fearsome versions of the ebullient, clear-headed combat rock that makes One Beat local music that acts and feels like a global imperative. Girls ages 8 to 18 ran the sound board and light show, and 14 of the happy campers danced around and behind Janet Weiss, Corin Tucker, and Carrie Brownstein during the encore as I and several sets of rapt parents watched, awestruck, from our theater seats.

2. OOOH! — The Mekons (Quarterstick): Just when I thought One Beat‘s best tunes had epitomized 21st-century protest songs, this record came rumbling out of the ground like the drums of death pounding under the prologue of Gangs of New York. The imaginary and real wars that have preoccupied the Mekons for 20-plus years finally hit home September 2001, and though that may be good for artists, it might spell doom for everyone else. These 11 tribal battle hymns capture the imagination of disaster while insisting over and over that ancient hatreds will destroy us all or maybe not. “Better turn all the clocks back/I deserve to be happy” is just one of the hard truths scattered throughout the most frightening album in years.

3. Testament: The Complete Slash Recordings — The Blasters (Rhino); Send Me a Lullaby, Before Hollywood, Spring Hill Fair — The Go-Betweens (Circus/Jetset): These handsome reissues redefined the rock-and-roll canon of the 1980s and shed new light on such sere terms as “pop music” and “roots rock” in the process.

4. The Rough Guide to the Music of Nigeria and Ghana — Various Artists (World Music Network): I’m still too dumb to distinguish soukous from mbaqanga without a cheat sheet, but this is by far the funkiest Afropop comp I’ve heard. Thanks to Sir Victor Uwaifo and E.K. Nyame, it’s one of the purdiest too.

5. Songs for the Deaf — Queens of the Stone Age (Interscope): Turn it up.

Michaelangelo Matos:

1. Bootleg bonanza: From Boom Selection_Issue 01 (three MP3-CDs, 432 tracks, 34 hours) to under-the-counter compendiums like The Best Bootlegs in the World Ever to 2 Many DJs’ As Heard on Radio Soulwax mixes (Pt. 2 was legally issued by Pias Belgium, with Pt. 1 and Pt. 3 available less legitimately), 2002 was the year of the mash-up. In a year when none of Eminem’s singles had backing tracks as good as those surgically attached by Freelance Hairdresser or Jacknife Lee, it’s about damn time.

2. Original Pirate Material — The Streets (Vice/Atlantic): More catchphrases than you can throw a crumpet at, cheap-and-ready beats that retain their freshness dozens of listens in, a sense of humor broader than a season of Benny Hill, and more poignant than a very special episode of EastEnders, this was the best excuse for Anglophilia in ages.

3. Singles galore: As many good albums as 2002 offered, as a whole they weren’t a match for the singles. There are at least 40 legit, nonbootleg singles I could have happily put in my top 10, ranging from mainstream juggernauts (Kylie, No Doubt, Pink, the Hives, Clipse, Missy) to the more specialist likes of Shakedown, the Rapture, Royksopp, Sugababes, and DJ/rupture. So, uh, why does the radio still suck?

4. Microhouse madness: The beautiful bastard child of laptop glitch and club-bump kept on giving this year, thanks to mix discs by Triple R, Ellen Allien, and Swayzak, albums by Pantytec and Hakan Lidbo, and Herbert’s Secondhand Sounds collection.

5. Classic Afropop avalanche: Reissues of Orchestra Super Mazembe and the Bhundu Boys, not to mention comps like The History of Township Music, The Music in My Head 2, and African Salsa and Rumba, made living in the past sound every bit as inviting as the brave sonic tomorrows detailed above.

Stephen Deusner:

1. Original Pirate Material — The Streets (Vice/Atlantic): In the first verse of the first track of his first album, Britsploitation rapper Mike Skinner — aka The Streets — declares he’s “45th-generation Roman,” then he spends the rest of the album evoking a particularly Western world-weariness. His world contains “nothing but gray concrete and deadbeats.” What makes the album so powerful is his uncynical search for something more.

2. One Beat — Sleater-Kinney (Kill Rock Stars): With many people blindly swallowing the president’s war rhetoric, Sleater-Kinney have become the country’s new liberal conscience. One Beat‘s politics are best, though, when mixed with the personal: The album’s most haunting image is of Corin Tucker watching the 9/11 coverage with her new baby, both of them half a world away and helpless.

3. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots — The Flaming Lips (Warner Brothers): Forget the title character and her mechanical nemeses: The vague story line here isn’t nearly as important as the songs, which celebrate the wonders of human emotions — from love and happiness to fear and regret. The emotionally direct “Do You Realize??” is the most devastating pop song about death since “Everybody Hurts.”

4. Sea Change — Beck (DGC): God bless poor Beck. He splits with his longtime girlfriend and then records a breakup album that’s equal parts Pink Moon and Hot Buttered Soul. Sea Change marks the first time he’s been able to completely shed his various personae and reveal what sounds like his true self.

5. Songs for the Deaf — Queens of the Stone Age (Interscope): In 2002, the planets aligned as Mark Lanegan and Dave Grohl joined QOTSA mainstays Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri for Songs for the Deaf, easily the coolest album title of the year. It’s a lineup they probably can’t duplicate, but together they sound like they know there won’t be a tomorrow.

Andrew Earles:

1. Suicide Invoice — The Hot Snakes (Swami): My perfect rock record comes courtesy of the minds that teamed up 10 years back as Drive Like Jehu — a record that manages to convey a believably tense and troubled air without screaming or yelling about it.

2. Slanted and Enchanted: Live and Redux — Pavement (Matador): Holds up like a champ — a triumph, considering this is decade-old indie rock, and it’s difficult to think of anything that ages as poorly. Pavement was also borrowing heavily from early Fall and the Swell Maps long before turn-of-the-’80s post-punk was the bankable commodity that it is today.

3. This Night — Destroyer (Merge): This is music that gives Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes) the night sweats and humbles every other contemporary singer-songwriter operating outside the mainstream. Attention, Ryan Adams: Get out your notebook.

4. Each One Teach One — Oneida (Jagjaguwar): Don’t blame laziness or apathy for Oneida’s appearance on yet another of my year-end lists. Blame Oneida for putting out a record this brilliant. Oh, and blame other New York spotlight stealers like Interpol and the Liars for repackaging past genres into the underground rock equivalents of boy bands. Conversely, you cannot trace Oneida’s sound back to anything concrete. With impeccable taste, they piecemeal the past 40 years of volume-heavy rock and emerge peerless.

5. Live at the Witch Trials + Bonus Tracks — The Fall (Cog Sinister): For those intoxicated by Joy Division’s latest revival via Interpol’s popularity or 24 Hour Party People, I offer a literate, rollicking, sarcastic post-punk alternative. Be warned: Though an official label, it’s occasionally apparent that Cog Sinister finds it amusing (I’m sure in some quasi-Situationist fashion) to master their reissue catalog straight from the vinyl originals.

3D

TLC

(Arista)

TLC isn’t just the best-selling “girl group” ever, they’re also –along with D’Angelo, Mary J. Blige, and Tony Toni Tone — among the acts that kept contemporary R&B afloat in the Nineties between Prince’s artistic downfall and the emergence of neo-soul. The group’s 1995 breakthrough CrazySexyCool was one the decade’s great mergers of art and commerce.

The group seemed to have lost their crown to Destiny’s Child for a while at the turn of the decade, as that group of upstarts released a string of brilliant singles. But success showed just how callow Destiny’s Child was, and TLC’s more modest, more grown-up take on hip-hop-soul has proven more durable, which makes it all the more sad that 3D, the group’s fourth album, is a farewell.

Still struggling with the death last year of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, remaining members Chilli and T-Boz have produced a final act that captures the group at their best –in full, confident command of all facets of contemporary R&B. With a string of A-list producers helping shape the sound (Rodney Jerkins, Missy Elliott and Timbaland, Raphael Saadiq, Organized Noize, Babyface, and longtime collaborator Dallas Austin), 3D is a roadmap of modern soul. And the lack of any sort of intentional tribute to Lopes, the irrepressible hip-hop conscience of the group, only makes her few appearances all the more powerful, whether entering on the lead single “Girl Talk” to announce “Remember me, Left Eye from TLC?/You got to lick it ‘fore you stick it, and that’s just how I be” or getting in a few final words on that house she burned down during her rap on “Over Me.”

While 3D doesn’t boast any individual songs as time-capsule-worthy as CrazySexyCool‘s trifecta of “Creep,” “Waterfalls,” and “Red Light Special” or even anything as much of a sure shot as FanMail‘s megahits “No Scrubs” and “Unpretty,” it may be as consistently pleasurable an R&B record as has been released in 2002.

A typically saucy record, 3D has plenty of guy-taunting, but instead of the economic snobbery that undercut “No Scrubs,” Topic A here is sex, which has always been this group’s finest subject, one that TLC makes more an adult reality than most anyone else in the Top 40. Sometimes, this takes forms that are playful and confrontational, as on the Dallas Austin-produced “Quickie,” with its frustrated chorus “First he came/And then he went/Right to sleep on me.” Other times, the sex talk is smoother and more contented, as on the surprisingly melodic Neptunes-produced “In Your Arms Tonight,” a swooning slice of R&B driven by T-Boz’s velvety vocals.

Who knows what the remaining T&C will do next? But from the acoustic-driven pop of “Damaged” to the dance-floor eruption of the typically hot Missy/Timbaland track “Dirty Dirty,” this is a would-be artistic rebound turned worthy ending to one of the last decade’s greatest pop runs. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

( )

Sigur Rós

(MCA)

If Iceland’s Sigur Rós sang in English, they’d be unbearable and their new album of slow, otherworldly music would seem overly pretentious. First of all, they’ve named it ( ), which looks like an emoticon but is actually a set of parentheses. The cover and the album packaging are blank, marked only by light, grey-on-white graphics on vellum. There is barely any text at all — no band name, no song titles, no thank-yous, no production listings — only a small mention of the band’s Web site.

Touring the United States for their previous album, Agaetis Byrjun, the band discovered that English-speaking audiences, at a loss for the meanings of the Icelandic-language lyrics, were making up their own meanings for the songs and deluging the Web site with their own translations.

Rather than discouraging different interpretations, the band encourages them, going so far as to remove all obstacles to the listeners’ own personal experiences with the music. This is where the stark packaging on ( ) connects with the stark music. The lack of a tracklist lets listeners make up their own song titles, and the lack of text provides plenty of space to scribble individual interpretations. Even the title leaves the album open-ended, a blank to be filled not by the band but by its devoted audience.

Fortunately, the music is anything but blank. The band’s unhurried arrangements progress purposefully and patiently, not necessarily building to full-bodied climaxes but simply flowing to different points, as if the band is trying to see where the songs lead. The third track ends on a quiet coda as a piano and hushed keyboards slowly rise and fall to eventually fade into silence. The final track, which has become a staple of live shows, builds to and sustains an intense finale that caps the album perfectly.

Ultimately, ( ) is anything but unbearable or pretentious: It’s strong and solid enough to live up to any meaning listeners can assign it. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: A

Live from Camp X-Ray

Rocket From The Crypt

(Vagrant)

The last thing you need is to read about a band “that’s been doing it all along” –the “it” being the recent mainstream institution known as garage rock, or just rock, or rock with good-looking people, or just people with guitars who play them fast and don’t bark or rap along with the music. There are miles of illegible liner notes accompanying this album (written by Long Gone John of Sympathy For The Record Industry — an early home to RFTC) that provide ample vitriol in the name of RFTC’s longevity and relevance. To the credit of this position, the mainstream media often resemble your out-of-touch aunty once they get teeth into a trend that was originally rooted in the underground, so it must be preached, just not by me.

To understand the RFTC of 2002, you have to understand the RFTC of 1992. This is because they are almost the same thing; it’s the world around them that has changed. By 1992, RFTC had already established two things that would contradict each other for the next decade. Number one is the shtick: Frequently silly matching outfits, a silly horn section, and silly aliases (“Apollo 9,” “Speedo,” and “JC 2000”). Number two is the sound: Good-times punk that was far more advanced than the semiliterate, half-witted fare normally associated with Southern Californian punk and indie rock. It enjoyed a duality too, because it could flirt with sheer aggression and unfriendly chord abuse before flipping on a coin to bounce through some artsy, faux bowling-alley-parking-lot-rumble anthem.

As stated, little has changed in the overall package over 10 years, aside from Live from Camp X-Ray airing a little more dirty laundry than usual and coming across exponentially more pissed-off in the process. The band has followed a familiar script over the last decade: subject of a major-label bidding war and subsequent major label difficulties that sent them back to the indies. The band sounds freer now on punk indie Vagrant, but is it too little too late? The guess here is that, for RFTC fans, Live from will be no watershed, but a monthlong stereo staple could be banked on. —Andrew Earles

Grade: B-

One By One

Foo Fighters

(RCA)

Until a few months ago, I still felt sort of wrong for respecting, following, or even acknowledging the continuing existence of Dave Grohl. Like many others who were initially pleased by the birth of “alternative” music with the release of Nevermind, some deep, primal part of me still considered Grohl’s solo aspirations a senseless, thoughtless, and heartless desecration of his former band’s brief and strangely complete-unto-itself recorded legacy. But (nihilo sanctum estne?) the repackaging and resale of Nirvana’s music has finally started this year, so I finally realized how unfair I was to dismiss Grohl’s work. Ergo, I swallowed my infantile impulses and started to investigate the Foo Fighters.

Turns out they are pretty good.

The release of the band’s One By One is the second Grohl-related new release of the year. It is both a pop-friendlier adjunct to his work on Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs For the Deaf and a rebuttal to his own past with Cobain, Novoselic, and whoever else thinks they were in Nirvana. One By One also puts Grohl in a select group of workaholic artists (Eminem, Connor Oberst, Luna, and Sonic Youth) who are overcompensating for a shabby year in music by putting out as many good-to-great records, songs, and EPs as fast as they can.

The major surprise of One By One is how the countless glorious rock choruses complement the countless pleas for forgiveness, understanding, reconciliation, and transcendence throughout the record. The thunderous “All My Life,” the acoustic-electric “Halo,” and the two closing ballads are all primo power pop preoccupied with healing, escape, and God only knows what else. The music is sufficiently blunt guitars-bass-drums real loud, but the filigrees and little touches thrill me. File the whole thing under “modern rock” but recognize that such a label now denotes an outdated idea with very few skilled practitioners. What other band could exercise chops and exorcise demons within such a constrictive genre? Staind? Disturbed? Creed? PEARL JAM? None of ’em!

One By One is the best vaguely nostalgic guitar pop-punk genre exercise/statement of purpose since Blink-182’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. — Addison Engleking

Grade: A-

Paullelujah!

MC Paul Barman

(Coup d’Etat Entertainment)

The marriage of capitalism and artistry that is rock-and-roll is sometimes too awesome to ponder. For example, nobody in their right mind would ever say to themselves, “Hmmm, I think I’m in the mood for a Jewish Ivy League MC who attacks education, feminists, and Amazon.com, rhymes ‘Margaret Sanger’ with ‘bloody coat hanger,’ fantasizes about sex with Cynthia Ozick and Maxine Hong Kingston, and sounds like a demented guest host for a Saturday morning kids’ show.” Yet such an item exists: MC Paul Barman’s omnivorous, irrepressibly nerdy, and inexplicably triumphant new full-length Paullelujah!

Along with Slug/Atmosphere and you-know-who with the movie, MC Paul Barman is one of three white rappers worth caring about (maybe there’s a fourth, but you go “discover” him). His 2000 EP, It’s Very Stimulating, was the funniest Prince Paul production ever, brimming with comedy, outrageous couplets (“I got up in her cervix a lot/like I was Sir Mix-A-Lot”) and wacky samples. Although Barman flies without Prince Paul for all but one track on Paullelujah!, the noise is similarly childlike and disorienting.

Barman babbles more than he flows, offers a glimpse into the life of a hypersmart, sex-starved Jew that rivals Portnoy’s Complaint (“I want a sister not a shiksa” goes one glancing blow), and possesses a verbal matrix that bends words like Keanu bends not-spoons. The beats are jubilant, irritating, spunky, and lumpy. The catchiest track is also the filthiest. And the two best tracks make fun of folk songs and poetry readings.

Of course you need it! — AE

Grade: A-

Remission

Mastodon

(Relapse)

This past Thanksgiving morning found me not sitting by myself in a Barnhill’s Old Country Buffet (this will no doubt come later in life) but attempting the equally punishing act of wrapping my head around this new Mastodon album. Remission has caused a lot of brouhaha in the heavy and/or extreme music communities as an “unclassifiable” masterpiece — uniting fans of every tiny sub-genre into harmonious testosterone frenzy.

Unclassifiable? Not really. A masterpiece? Probably. As a metal album, and that’s what it is when the votes are tallied, Remission sits next to Judas Priest’s Sin After Sin, Maiden’s Killers, the F*cking Champs’ III, and maybe a better-than-average Slayer album.

I have no idea how a human can move like drummer Bränn Dailor, though it’s closer to the free-jazz tornado wailing of Ronald Shannon Jackson or Slayer’s Dave Lombardo (who is essentially a free-jazz drummer these days) than any metal drummer I’ve heard. Remission can be extremely complicated and math-y, almost paying tribute to Slint (who, when stripped of the indie-rock pretense, were a metal band) in its quieter moments, but it thankfully steers clear of the instrumental overcompensation of bands like the Dillinger Escape Plan and Mr. Bungle. You can hear the songwriting skills at work in the classic guitar trade-offs that recall the venerable work of Maiden or even Thin Lizzy. However, those addicted to melody need be thoroughly warned: This is not your divorced uncle’s metal; it is brutal and largely unrelenting in its velocity, and the vocals are akin to a thousand dying seagulls. Death metal or grindcore Mastodon are not, so perhaps I got ahead of myself in not subscribing to the “unclassifiable” tag. — Andrew Earles

Grade: A-

Dying in Stereo

Northern State

(Northern State Records)

If Mike Skinner (aka the Streets) has been universally christened “the British Eminem,” then the indie hip-hop crew Northern State –three liberal-arts-schooled white women in their mid-20s who go by the monikers Guinea Love, DJ Sprout, and Hesta Prynn (!) –can’t help but be seen as “the female Beastie Boys.”

That moniker is actually a truer fit for these former Long Island high school chums turned NYC causes célébres than for Skinner, whose only connection to Eminem is skin color. The music presented on Northern State’s two releases —Dying in Stereo and an earlier, available-for-download four-song demo Hip Hop You Haven’t Heard — draws unavoidable comparisons to Hello Nasty-era Beasties (it doesn’t have the sonic density of Paul’s Boutique, but, then again, what does?): It’s smart (and smarty-pants) old-school-sounding hip hop from three white, hypereducated New York hipsters, except, right, the MCs are all women.

And except that it’s better –more optimistic, more unexpected, more generous in its camaraderie, more righteous in its ’80s hip-hop nods, less concerned with establishing codes of cool.

Coming across like Roxanne Shante’s secret daughters, Northern State are so old-school that they even have anti-Giuliani and anti-police jokes (one MC warns a male harasser that she’ll “get more brutal than the NYPD”). But what is most redolent of hip hop’s golden age is the sense of positive momentum: Who else in hip hop lately (if ever) so unabashedly uses words like “optimism” and “possibility” and raps about being “just happy to be alive”? And given the attractiveness of the world they open up to the listener, who wouldn’t want to give in to this unfashionable hopefulness?

Like so many hip-hop records, especially on the indie scene, Dying in Stereo is a catalog of culture, with these women partial to baseball (Derek Jeter), contemporary literature (The Red Tent, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), country music (Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton), and trash TV (Dawson’s Creek, Nigella Bites). And the record gets off on rhyme-for-rhyme’s-sake (my fave is “psychiatrist” and “archdiocese”).

Things aren’t all sunshine and light: Dread creeps in on the 9/11-acknowledging “All the Same,” with its muted soundscape and entropy-warning chorus (“Round trip and you’re back where you started/Waiting at the station from which you departed”). But malaise just can’t contend with Northern State’s playful, gently confrontational leftism (“The country’s gettin’ ugly and there’s more in store/But don’t blame me ’cause I voted for Gore/Keep choice legal/Your wardrobe regal/Chekhov wrote The Seagull/And Snoopy is a beagle”) or insistent independence (“It’s the DJs and the MCs and the writers and the breakers/Not the corporations and the hit-makers/That keep hip hop fresh/The kids gotta hear it/I move closer to the speakers so that I can get near it/Think you’re controlling the world ’cause you’re controlling the wealth?/I don’t belong to you/I belong to myself”).

But Northern State aren’t self-righteous about their underground status, like so many “indie” hip-hop acts. They’d like to be stars but not in order to be rich or powerful. They just want the chance to confirm and maybe spur an imagined community, or, as they put it on “The Man’s Dollar” in the record’s most charming moment: “Are there ladies out there like us doing what we do?/Can’t wait to get on TV so that we can see you!”

For more info, see NorthernState.net. —Chris Herrington

Grade: A

Have You Fed the Fish?

Badly Drawn Boy

(XL Recordings)

Sound and subject matter cohere almost perfectly on Have You Fed the Fish?, the sophomore album by fuzzy-hat-wearing Badly Drawn Boy, aka Damon Gough. In this song cycle — or concept album or rock-and-roll one-man show — BDB sings about the incompatibility of romantic commitment and pop-music obsession; the music’s head-spinning eclecticism betrays a life spent obsessing over music. The lyrics tell the story of misplaced attention and failed affection, and the music, which switches between funk-rock, blue-eyed soul, and spaced-out folk, illustrates it perfectly.

The album’s first single is its most representative track. At turns self-effacingly comical and unspeakably tragic, “You Were Right” is a stunning summation of a life devoted to pop music as well as a confession of missed opportunities. In one verse, BDB describes a dream he had of rejecting Madonna’s advances; in the next, he solemnly “Remember[s] doing nothing on the night Sinatra died/And the night Jeff Buckley died/And the night Kurt Cobain died/And the night John Lennon died,” revealing just how far back his preoccupation goes — more than 20 years and most of his life.

Unfortunately, not every song lives up to the far-out charms of “You Were Right.” BDB lifts that song’s lyrics on “Tickets for What You Need,” a lively romp that sounds blatantly and desperately Beatles-esque. And songs like the title track and “Bedside Story” feel aimless and unstructured, as if BDB’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to recording got the better of him.

But the high points — the Marvin Gaye vibe of “Using Our Feet,” the ’70s strings on “All Possibilities,” the messy guitarwork on “Born Again” — stand out more dynamically than such low points. Fish? retains the off-the-cuff charm and scruffy unpredictability of its predecessor, the Mercury Award-winning Hour of the Bewilderbeast, and while it isn’t track for track as good as that debut, it does reveal Badly Drawn Boy’s increased confidence and his admirable propensity to take risks.

—Stephen Deusner

Grade: B+

Sean-Nos Nua

Sinead O’Connor

(Vanguard)

Sinead O’Connor’s first studio album in two years features only traditional Irish songs. Although O’Connor has always blended elements of British folk music with hip hop, rock, and reggae to make her own unique mix, this is the first time she’s done an album exclusively of traditional tunes. These songs, some of them quite ancient, are particularly meaningful for O’Connor, who learned some at school, some from her father, and some which have come to represent Ireland itself for her. O’Connor’s voice, which she uses as a delicate instrument, would seem ideally suited for these classics. Yet, despite high expectations for this album, the end result is mostly mundane or merely pretty.

The Gaelic title of the album roughly translates as “old style done new,” referring to a divergence from the usual a capella versions of these songs. But these arrangements, though sometimes lovely, are not particularly innovative. (Leave it to O’Connor to interpret the old folk chestnut “Peggy Gordon” as a lesbian love song, though.) They come across as quite standard folk arrangements, despite help from some interesting musical guests, including accordionist Sharon Shannon and vocalist Christy Moore. In fact, Van Morrison and the Chieftains provided definitive and far more powerful versions of several of the same tunes covered here on their classic Irish Heartbeat album. The only track which hints at the fierceness and individuality O’Connor usually brings to her recordings is “Oro, Se Do Bheatha Bhaile,” a Gaelic tune about a formidable female pirate whose ships terrorized the Spanish and French fleets on the west coast of Ireland in the 16th century.

Recommended for Sinead O’Connor fans only.

— Lisa Lumb

Grade: B

The Best of 1990-2000

U2

(Island)

U2 in the ’90s sounds like a hard sell. Despite the restless experimentation that made Achtung Baby the finest record of their career, the Irish quartet are most remembered in that decade for their odd foray into a garish brand of celebrity satire, which — on two albums and countless world tours — threatened to become the very thing it sought to parody. Fortunately, the clunkily titled but refreshingly sincere All That You Can’t Leave Behind was a surprising return to form, rescuing U2 from irrelevance and reestablishing them as one of the most popular and significant bands in the world.

Just as they recounted their ascension to fame during the ’80s with The Best of 1980-1990, U2 have collected their recent hits on this new collection. On the whole, the songs hold up surprisingly well after so many years. The Edge’s match-strike guitar emboldens “Mysterious Ways,” the band’s sexiest song, and Bono’s keening vocals give “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” its deep empathy. All of the tracks from the dancebeat-heavy Pop have been remixed, which would seem overly revisionist if it didn’t benefit the songs so much: Who knew “Gone” sounded so much like American indie rock or that the much-maligned “Discothèque” was so much fun?

As with The Best of 1980-1990, the obvious flaw in this compilation isn’t with the music but with the concept. Neither release takes into consideration that U2 have always been an album band, not a singles band. So some of the inclusions here are confounding (“Until the End of the World” and “The First Time”), while the omissions are glaring (“The Fly,” “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?” “The Wanderer,” “Walk On,” “Elevation,” etc.). But no single-disc compilation could ever satisfy every U2 fan — or, for that matter, every curious nonfan. In other words, the best collection of ’90s-period U2 remains the four discs that can only be purchased separately.

—Stephen Deusner

Grade: B+

Moanin’

Mr. Airplane Man

(Sympathy for the Record Industry)

Rockin’ guitar-and-drums duos seem to be everywhere these days. At the top of the heap, of course, are Detroit’s White Stripes (who migrated from Sympathy for the Record Industry to a major label a year or so and quite a few dollars ago). Then you’ve got Jucifer, the Black Keys, and even T-Model Ford with his drummer Spam, just to name a few. This instrumental template has some precedents in the past, most notably North Carolina’s Flat Duo Jets and perhaps even earlier with Athens’ Method Actors.

I’ve done some recording and performing in this format myself and can report that it is certainly easier in terms of band relations (it’s just you and the other person, and if you can stand each other, then it’s a lot simpler psychologically and emotionally than playing in, say, a four-piece band) and easier in terms of learning new material (if the guitar player knows the tune, then the drummer just follows along; it makes for a very fluid, expansive set-list). Tuning is easier too with just one melodic instrument. Things can sound pretty sparse onstage, though, and if one member of a guitar-and-drums outfit is having a bad night, then the whole thing reeks. Nowhere to hide in that context.

Bostonians Margaret Garrett and Tara McManus have been “guitaring and drumming,” respectively, as Mr. Airplane Man since the late ’90s, and this is their second release on Sympathy and their third record to date. (Their debut was produced by the late Mark Sandman of Morphine and their sophomore effort was recorded here with Jeff Evans a few years back — both great, by the way.) They’re still pursuing a sound and style that is not a million miles away from what Memphis’ Lorette Velvette and the often unfairly reviled Hellcats were doing here in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In other words, there is a heavy Jessie Mae Hemphill influence, and I count that as a good thing. A ’60s folk-rock thread also emerges here, and it works very nicely in combination with the slow, bluesy (no other word for it) numbers. Nice moody mix too by Doug Easley and the Reigning Sound’s Greg Cartwright done at Easley/McCain Studio in town.

Wonder where Sympathy for the Record Industry will find another guitar-and-drums duo as good as this one when Garrett and McManus predictably migrate to another label?

—Ross Johnson

Grade: B+

Midnight and Lonesome

Buddy Miller

(HighTone)

Once again, with his fourth solo outing, Buddy Miller does country the way country should be done — with bite, intelligence, and just the right pinch of torch and twang. More steeped in country than his joint ventures with wife Julie Miller, Midnight and Lonesome boldly goes where Hank Sr., Merle Haggard, and Gram Parsons have been before and does it all without coming off as merely retro, trite, or corny. With help from Emmylou Harris and Lee Ann Womack, this release hits just the right mix of darkness and light.

The artist revs up with a barrelhouse version of an Everly Brothers tune, then slips into “Wild Card,” a Miller-penned song with enough wry swagger to satisfy even a diehard Buck Owens fan. The Dublin-via-Appalachia fiddle intro of the title cut draws the listener in, followed by a great pop shuffle co-written with pal Jim Lauderdale featuring sassy licks from an optigan (a Mattel toy “groove” machine). Miller’s trademark walking-wounded guitarwork shimmers throughout. Some thoughtfully chosen covers from Jesse Winchester and a surprisingly soulful version of Percy Mayfield’s classic “Please Send Me Someone to Love” also grace the release. Top it all off with a little Zydeco lust song, and you’ve got a well-rounded album that touches lots of musical bases without losing sight of its country core.

My only complaint is the inclusion of another one of Julie Miller’s topical but slightly sappy songs. She wrote about Columbine on their last joint effort, and Buddy covers her take on the recent Pennsylvania miners’ rescue this time around. Despite the awe factor of these events, it’s hard to write about them without coming across as maudlin. Miller’s rocker, “Water When the Well Is Dry,” written about 9/11, packs a heftier emotional punch than Julie’s miner ballad. Aside from that, this album is wonderful. —Lisa Lumb

Grade: B+

Jerusalem

Steve Earle

(Artemis/E-Squared)

Even in the beginning, back when he fooled people into believing he could compete with Clint Black and Dwight Yoakam on country radio, Steve Earle was a professional leftist rabble-rouser with lines like “I was born in the land of plenty/Now there ain’t enough” poking out of the highway honky-tonk on his 1986 debut Guitar Town.

Since returning in the mid-’90s from a heroin-addiction and imprisonment-imposed hiatus, Earle hasn’t tried to fool anyone. He’s basically Michael Moore with little sense of humor and a command of outlaw mythology. I want to abolish the death penalty and create economic justice too, but I wish I were less convinced that topic A on Earle’s records is confirming and celebrating his own righteousness.

Earle’s latest, Jerusalem, is pretty political, if overtly about 9/11 on only one track, and can’t help but be compared to other recent topical albums — most prominently, Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising and Sleater-Kinney’s One Beat — in what has become a 2002 pop subgenre. One potential flaw of The Rising (though, given the overwhelming decency of Springsteen’s mission, it’s a minor flaw at best) is its refusal to engage in politics, dissent, confusion, etc. Jerusalem has the opposite problem: There’s little acknowledgment here that the Bill of Rights wasn’t the only thing damaged on or by September 11th. When Earle writes in the liner notes that “We’ll survive this too,” it’s not that he’s talking about Ashcroft’s attack on civil liberties. It’s all he’s talking about. That’s but one of many reasons why I treasure One Beat so much more than these white-guy-authoritative takes. It feels less strategically fussed over and more spontaneous, fully lived, felt.

The attention-getter on Jerusalem is “John Walker’s Blues,” a literary stroke in which Earle imagines himself as the voice of the “American Taliban.” And if some of the liberties Earle takes are a little fishy (did Lindh really embrace Islam because he was alienated by the images of the “kids in the soda pop ads” on MTV?), it’s still a commendable and even-handed attempt to make a media symbol flesh and blood –a smart little song that blends guitar skronk with qawwali chants to arrive at its great sardonic punchline: “Allah had some other plan/Some secret not revealed/Now they’re draggin’ me back with my head in a sack/To the land of the infidel.”

But, despite the presence of “John Walker’s Blues” and the this-too-shall-pass bookends (the fatalistic “Ashes to Ashes” and the defiantly hopeful title track), Jerusalem is similar to The Rising and One Beat in yet another way: Its weighty subject matter never dominates the music. If The Rising is the most humane arena-rock this side of All That You Can’t Leave Behind and One Beat the most uplifting, unstoppable punk-rock since the heyday of the Clash, Jerusalem is smaller-sounding but no less rocking. It’s a quick, crafty roots-rock record, with session-pro drummer Will Rigby pushing a bunch of Nashville cats along and Earle as cagey a singer and songwriter (the Tex-Mex border song “What’s a Simple Man to Do?” is worthy of Los Lobos) as ever. Case in point is “Amerika V. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)”: It’s a statement of principles, but it wouldn’t work without that jumpstarting roots-rock riff and those factory-belt drums, not to mention Earle’s charismatic slurred-and-drawled vocal delivery. — Chris Herringon

Grade: A-

Demolition

Ryan Adams

(Lost Highway)

Rise

Kim Richey

(Lost Highway)

It seems like everything you read these days about Ryan Adams centers on his tortured cowboy-poet image rather than his actual talents — and that’s a shame. Adams has a lot more to offer the world than a rumpled Western shirt and a haircut that cries out for a little attention.

Adams is a fine, emotional vocalist and an ace songwriter. Last year’s Gold was so convincing and consistent over its 76-minute span that it made one wonder if Adams was even capable of penning a bad tune. Maybe not. The story goes that, during the frenetic making of Gold, Adams assembled enough material to fill four CDs –the 13 “demos” collected here are part of the leftovers. But labeling these songs “demos” is a little misleading: Fans will find that this is just the latest Ryan Adams album, full of songs as well-crafted as anything on Gold. After listening to this mostly acoustic set of tunes, it’s tempting to cast Adams in his own unique mold — that of a trouble-making purveyor of traditionalism. But you don’t have to be a country-music fan to appreciate Demolition.

Like Adams, Kim Richey is one of a small group of recording artists who may end up saving country music, and, like Adams (and Lucinda Williams and Willie Nelson and the crew behind O Brother, Where Art Thou?), she records for renegade Nashville label Lost Highway. This coterie of musicians is doing some amazing things to the country genre these days — turning it upside down, inside out, and redefining its former backwoods boundaries. As a result, the music sounds as good as it ever has: simple, fresh, and, most importantly, honest.

Rise is Richey’s fourth major-label release and her first for Lost Highway. The record kicks off with “Girl in a Car,” a song that conjures up images of some restless romantic driving down the two lanes of heartache. The lyrics here, as on so many Richey vignettes, are delivered in the voice of someone clinging in vain to some drifting memory.

Richey’s unique songwriting gift lies in taking simple lyrics and turning them into beautiful songs, but producer Bill Bottrell’s heavy-handed imprint keeps the record from being an unqualified success. Rather than leave Richey’s beautifully spare, acoustic arrangements alone, he infuses much of the album with enough studio trickery to keep any teenager happy and make any country purist shudder. The album loses something, especially on tracks where Richey shares a songwriting credit with Bottrell. Richey sounds like she’s singing someone else’s songs.

Overall, though, Richey’s songs are so sharp that the spotty production is forgivable. Hopefully, next time around, she’ll find a producer talented enough to let her music stand by itself, and she’ll realize what few country artists ever do and what every self-respecting folkie has known all along: In any art, especially songwriting, the only voice you ever need is your own. —Andy Meek

Grades: Demolition: A-; Rise: B+

A decade ago, with fancier divas like Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Janet Jackson ruling the airwaves and new jack swing’s shiny suits and shinier beats reigning supreme over R&B, acoustic-guitar-bearing plain Jane India.Arie would have been seen as an apolitical Tracy Chapman –courting (mostly white) rock and folk fans. But the emergence of the neo-soul scene in the last half-decade has opened up the R&B market for artists as unique as this arty Southern belle, so Arie became a star on her own terms and among her own demographic.

She may yet be remembered as a one-hit wonder. But, if so, that one hit will live as something more than a mere novelty. The gently confrontational “Video” was a great single –a plainspoken reaction against hip hop’s objectification of the female form and a necessary corrective to a culture that divides women into equally limiting categories (see the speech Taye Diggs’ character gives on this subject in the recent hip-hop-oriented film Brown Sugar). “Sometimes, I shave my legs, and sometimes, I don’t/Sometimes, I comb my hair, and sometimes, I won’t,” Arie sang for Everygirls everywhere. “I’m not the average girl from your video/My worth is not determined by the price of my clothes.” The song was a colossal breath of fresh air despite its self-celebrating use of third person and the “because I am a queen” refrain, and because, as music, it made good on the genre-creating claim of Arie’s debut album title: Acoustic Soul.

And so Arie carved a niche for herself in an increasingly crowded neo-soul landscape: She’s Erykah Badu’s granola sister. Where former comedy writer Badu is a little crazy and a lot idiosyncratic, Arie came across as a too-good-for-this-world messenger of positive self-esteem, all Oprah-style uplift. She’s good for you.

The image worked. Arie’s debut was lavished with seven Grammy nominations, and though it didn’t win any of them, the attention pushed her record into the multiplatinum range.

For better or worse, Arie’s latest, Voyage to India, takes dead aim at the new audience turned on to her through the Grammys. Arie’s press kit gushes about her “simply stated yet profoundly powerful message — Love yourself!” and Arie herself has said the album is about her “emotional and spiritual journey.” And so Voyage to India completes a transition from neo-soul earth mama to new-age spiritual guide. This music is more pop- and light-jazz-inflected than “acoustic soul,” and the debut’s intermittent references to a musical lineage that included Sam Cooke, Charley Patton, and Memphis Minnie have been replaced by a series of pieces with the titles “Growth,” “Healing” (“I know that spirit guides me and love lives inside me/That’s why, today, I take life as it comes”), and “Gratitude.” In other words, there’s nothing here that would deter a wandering Celine Dion fan from branching out. Which probably shouldn’t be a surprise coming from a goody-two-shoes who actually had a song titled “Strength, Courage, and Wisdom” on Acoustic Soul.

The power of positive thinking sends Voyage to India off the tracks frequently: “Get it Together” is peppered with potentially provocative lines like “No one can hurt you like your kin,” but each setup devolves into generic self-help babble like “Life is a choice that you make/You can give or you can take” and “No matter what anybody says/What matters most is what you think of yourself.” Given the musical transition away from Acoustic Soul‘s earthiness and the preponderance of names in the songwriting credits, one even wonders how much this Voyage is an extension of Arie’s own vision: For all the ubiquity of shots of her lugging around that acoustic, none of the flashier guitar parts here seems to have been played by her.

But Voyage to India isn’t a total loss. The lead single “Little Things” is a “Video” retread but does a solid job reestablishing Arie as an unpretentious voice of reason. And “Talk to Her” confirms that Arie’s great subject is forcing her male contemporaries to treat women with dignity. (“Talk to her like you want somebody to talk to your mama/Don’t get smart with her/Have a heart-to-heart with her/Just like you would with your daughter.”) “Beautiful Surprise” and “The Truth” are engaging love songs, the latter taking the spiritualism and twisting it in unexpected ways –into a celebration of a gap-toothed man who treats his mama right. And most promising of all is the fact that one of the few sole Arie copyrights here, “Complicated Melody,” is also the most interesting and unpredictable track on the record, a hymn to a love actually marked by a little idiosyncrasy. (“If he were an animal, he’d be an ass/’Cause he’s so stubborn sometimes.”)

If Arie might be a little too stuffy sometimes, the passel of opening acts scheduled to appear on her tour promise to be a bit more lively: British duo Floetry — singer Marsha Ambrosius and rapper Natalie Stewart –have penned songs for the likes of Jill Scott, Bilal, Michael Jackson, and Glenn Lewis. They step out strongly on their recent debut, Floetic, which brings a bit more hip-hop flair to the neo-soul sound than Arie. Detroit’s Slum Village hasn’t made much of a commercial dent on the hip-hop scene yet but is recognized as a worthy inheritor of the Native Tongues mantle passed down from A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul.

India.Arie

with Floetry and Slum Village

The Orpheum

Wednesday, November 13th

Giants of East Africa

Orchestra Super Mazembe

(Earthworks)

In 1991, Earthworks released the compilation Guitar Paradise of East Africa, a title that was less hyperbole than a plain statement of fact. One of the disc’s highlights was “Shauri Yako,” an early-’80s number from the Kenyan-out-of-the-Congo 13-piece Orchestra Super Mazembe that lasted nine and a half minutes yet ended way too soon. Length aside, there’s nothing particularly grandiose about “Shauri Yako” at first. The vocals are nasal and a little homely, the interweaving guitars aren’t nearly as showy as those of OSM’s neighbors in Kinshasa would be a little later in the decade (compare the slick fretwork of Diblo Dibala on Kanda Bongo Man’s and Loketo’s albums), and the dynamics are subtle enough to pass you by the first couple times. It’s pretty hypnotic, though. Soon, you find both the vocal melody and the guitar breaks stuck in your head. After a while, it’s hard not to want to hear it again. And then again. And again after that.

Giants of East Africa, OSM’s new greatest-hits collection, achieves the same effect, only a lot faster and more frequently. “Shauri Yako” is still the highlight, but, surrounded by such strong material, such distinctions seem trivial. The hypnotic grace notes that kick off “Kassongo,” the group’s first single, announce the record’s m.o.: paradise found again. Like much of the set, “Kassongo” starts off as a mesmerizing shuffle before the guitars (led by Bukasa wa Bukasa “Bukalos” and supported by riffers Loboko Bua Mangala and Komba Kassongo Songoley) shed their shackles and segue into a kicky little groove, over which lead vocalist Lovy Longomba (aka “Ya Mama”) shouts his pleasure. Throughout Giants of East Africa, it’s hard not to identify with him. — Michaelangelo Matos

Grade: A

Going Driftless: An Artist’s Tribute to Greg Brown

Various Artists

(Red House Records)

Just who is Greg Brown? you might ask. If you aren’t a folk-hound, a native Midwesterner, or a fan of Prairie Home Companion, you probably don’t know. Brown is a veteran singer-songwriter from Iowa who’s put out 19 or so solo albums and whose songs — quintessentially American, poignant, and cutting at the same time — have been covered by everyone from Carlos Santana to Willie Nelson to Shawn Colvin. Brown’s mama played electric guitar, his father was a Pentecostal preacher, and his discovery of Mississippi bluesman Big Bill Broonzy at the tender age of 10 sealed his fate as a future roots-music man. His music is intensely personal, whether dealing with big issues like the struggle to keep small towns alive or the hassles involved in the minutiae of everyday life and relationships. Brown’s tunes are firmly rooted to a place: the heart of the American Midwest. He worked for years doing music for Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion on NPR and is the founder of Red House Records, an indie label known for its roster of cutting-edge folk artists.

What a feast of artists come to this table. Many stellar female singer-songwriters make appearances here, including Lucinda Williams, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Victoria Williams. Royalties from this tribute album go the Breast Cancer Fund of San Francisco (hence the all-female cast), and what a change it is from the usual charity platter, which is often cobbled together and features MOR artists like Celine Dion to appeal to mass tastes. Finally, here’s a charity/tribute album for thinking people that’s actually very good. Highlights include Gillian Welch doing the lazy “Summer Evening,” Ani DiFranco’s chilling interpretation of “The Poet Game,” and Iris Dement’s high-lonesome yodeling on “The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home.” The lesser-known artists here give excellent performances too, especially Karen Savoca’s sassy rendering of “Two Little Feet” and the lovely, translucent voice of Leandra Peak, who closes the album. In fact, there are no snoozers here at all — a minor miracle given that 14 artists are involved. —Lisa Lumb

Grade: A-

Black Letter Days/Devil’s Workshop

Frank Black and the Catholics

(spinART)

Being the next writer to blow smoke up Frank Black’s arse for his work with the Pixies is not a prospect I’m too jazzed about, nor is it a particularly engaging place to start a review of his two new albums, especially on the cusp of his solo career’s 10th year. But what shape would Black’s solo career have taken if his 1993 solo debut hadn’t come on the heels of his ground-breaking run with the Pixies?

Chances are we wouldn’t be hearing anything from Black. He would have given up without that extra push and label attention that come standard with the Previously Fronted Extremely Influential Band package.

But Black shines supreme when placed within the context of the Cue Ball Triumvirate: Black, David Thomas, and Bob Mould. Besides the unifying baldness, all three led phenomenal bands — Thomas’ Pere Ubu and Mould’s Hüsker Dü (and, perhaps, Sugar) — and have tackled lengthy solo careers. Thomas’ has been “difficult,” which, for our purposes, is another word for “bad,” and Mould’s has had its ups, downs, and unflattering oddities (see this year’s Modulate). Black, if not just plain good, has at least made interesting music worth the attention of an open ear.

And now Black’s unexpectedly prolific stretch of post-Pixies albums reaches numbers eight and nine with the simultaneously released Black Letter Days and Devil’s Workshop. That spokesperson for AA rock, former Replacement Paul Westerberg, pulled this same stunt earlier in the year. What’s with these guys? Is it a secret society? The We Fronted Post-punk Bands of Holy Grail Status So Let’s Go Drive Some Golf Balls Club? But perhaps that’s a little unfair to Black, because, however improbably, both of these new albums are keepers.

The logic behind the split is clear: This music wouldn’t work as a sprawling double CD; listeners need a choice, and they get one. You want no filler in short order? Go with Devil’s Workshop, crooked pop finished in 30-something minutes. Black’s shameless but workable Stones rips are omnipresent throughout both records, and the numerous phases within the Stones’ oeuvre that are worthy of pilfering certainly hold a lot more staying power than the Pere Ubu and Velvets reference points prominent on Black’s earlier work, Pixies included. (You go through Pere Ubu and Velvet Underground phases; there should be no Rolling Stones “phase” — the love should last.) Devil’s Workshop is like Some Girls with a Pixies twist. It’s a big shot of aging Jagger Swagger administered right into Black’s mildly slanted pop musings and yammering acoustic rave-ups.

Conversely, Black Letter Days will require a little more homework. For starters, it’s epic, as much music as one CD will hold. The cover art: black-and-white photos of industrial chain-link fences and concrete drainage ditches. Some songs are long; most are nasty and dark, with a touch of faux blues, making Black Letter Days‘ probable sonic antecedent the drugs-coming-out-of-our-ears ’69-’73 Stones. But it’s not just plagiarism. Gifted songwriters like Black make their pickings sound new. The moving or catchy air of the songs will strike you long before their blueprints do. — Andrew Earles

Grades: Black Letter Days: B; Devil’s Workshop: B+

Original Pirate Material

The Streets

(Vice/Atlantic)

If hip hop is about representing your local culture on a global scale — something it’s become over the course of its 25-year journey from New York block-party entertainment to the dominant form of pop music — then Original Pirate Material, the debut album from the Streets, aka 23-year-old British MC and producer Mike Skinner, is true hip hop.

Original Pirate Material doesn’t sound much like American hip hop. Skinner’s competent vocals are generally a flat, deadpan brogue, with little of the playful or complex technique that marks the best American rappers. The music has more in common with Euro-identified techno subgenres such as jungle, garage, and drum ‘n’ bass than with the more assertively funky boom-bap of African-American music-makers. And Skinner seems even less concerned about appropriating the attitude and style of American hip hop than he does about copying the sound. “I’m just spitting,” Skinner raps on “Has It Come to This?” “Think I’m ghetto?/Stop dreaming.” Everyone’s calling him the “British Eminem,” but skin color seems to be about the only thing Skinner and Marshall Mathers have in common.

The differences between the two are telling: Eminem’s subject matter is either intensely private or mass-cultural –taking on either a relative or personal enemy or a music, a media culture, a nation. By contrast, Original Pirate Material is all subcultural ethnography — “a day in the life of a geezer,” a guided tour of a British youth cult consumed with “sex, drugs, and on the dole” (in ascending order of importance), a “local city poet” negotiating a landscape of “deep-seated urban decay.”

Skinner’s world is so thoroughly explored and feels so intensely lived-in that the album should come with its own for Dummies guide — more than a dozen listens in and there’s still plenty of local color I can’t quite parse. “Has It Come to This?” maps out a lifestyle: “Cos this is our zone/Videos, televisions, 64s, PlayStations/We’re pairing with precision/Few herbs and a bit of Benson.” “Same Old Thing” tracks the circularity of flat-rat lifestyle: “Football and smut daily as I ponder winning the lottery.” Call it Trainspotting hip hop.

In the true tradition of hip-hop regionalism, Skinner embraces his Britishness (“Around ‘ere, we say birds/Not bitches,” he raps, offering a helpful distinction for Yank tourists). He elucidates his sexual prowess in tennis metaphors and imagines himself as “U.K.’s ambassador/Holding up Excaliber.” And though there’s plenty of standard hip-hop braggadocio and dozens-playing here, the essential Englishness changes the tenor of Skinner’s barbs. He dismisses one sucker MC with “You can’t do half/My crew laughs/At yer rhubarb-and-custard verses,” while my fave dis is the oh-so-polite “Your beats are inferior/Don’t want to embarrass ya/So call your solicitor/The jury voted unanimously against ya!”

The record’s first four tracks are brags, the best being the audacious anthem “Let’s Push Things Forward” (though Skinner says it’s not an anthem but a “banger”), in which Skinner makes good on claims like “This ain’t a track/It’s a movement” and offers images like “As London Bridge burns down/Brixton’s burning up!” But after that, the album’s finest songs are more thematically focused. “Geezers Need Excitement” offers a series of vignettes where macho violence erupts in public places, most vividly in a concluding verse set in an after-hours club in which the narrator, cheating on his girlfriend, discovers his girlfriend cheating on him and attacks her guy pal “football-fan style.” With bittersweet synthesizers and a sung chorus, “It’s Too Late” is a regretful relationship song with an insight and sensitivity that compares favorably with underground American MCs such as Aesop Rock and Atmosphere’s Slug.

“The Irony of It All” is the record’s most playful track, Skinner playing both roles in an argument between beer-swilling lad “Terry” and herb-smoking student “Tim” that is a very funny, sharp, and pointed consideration of the legal and public attitudes toward alcohol and other drugs and their respective users. This is then followed by the jazzy “Weak Become Heroes,” a lovely and seductively nostalgic memory of a first Ecstasy hit.

In its ambitious sweep and confident execution, Original Pirate Material is that rarest of contemporary creations, a Great Album — a definitive slice of pop culture with tangible literary value. That’s one more thing that distinguishes Skinner from Eminem: In 2002, the Brit has made the better record. It’s the most important British debut album since Tricky’s Maxinquaye back in 1995 and a massive success in its homeland, even if, stateside, it’s more liable to confirm Skinner’s own prognosis on “Let’s Push Things Forward”: “Cult classic, not bestseller.”

— Chris Herrington

Grade: A

Close Cover Before Striking

Luna

(Jetset)

Guestroom

Ivy

(Minty Fresh)

New York dream-rock quartet Luna has always been one hell of a cover band. With classic renditions of Beat Happening’s “Indian Summer,” Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (with Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier singing Bardot’s part), and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” under their belt, it was probably only a matter of time before the band dove all the way in with an album entirely composed of other artists’ material. The wryly titled Close Cover Before Striking doesn’t go quite that far. Sure, each song originated with someone else, but its seven selections last a mere half-hour, meaning it falls somewhere between an EP and an LP. (The preferred terminology for these things lately seems to be “mini-album.” Whatever you say.) Nevertheless, CCBS rolls along as smoothly as anything the band has recorded. Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights,” originally a 1999 b-side, is given perhaps the most ingenious overhaul, with guitarists Dean Wareham and Sean Eden rendering the original moot.

Ivy, on the other hand, tends to step other folks’ material up a notch. Appropriately, the NYC trio fronted by Paris-born singer Dominique Durand recycles about half of Guestroom, its 10-song covers collection, from previous albums, usually compilations, though its version of the Blow Monkeys’ “Digging Your Scene” can also be found on last year’s Long Distance. It sounds better here, though, probably because it’s in such close proximity to Ivy’s gorgeous rendition of the Go-Betweens’ “Streets of Your Town” — two songs Ivy was, from the sound of it, born to perform. Apart from a draggy “Be My Baby,” the rest is as lithe as you might hope.

— Michaelangelo Matos

Grade (both albums): A-

Wiretap Scars

Sparta

(Dreamworks)

On the one hand, thank God this album comes with a lyrics sheet. For much of Wiretap Scars, Jim Ward’s vocals scour his words beyond recognition as he howls and shouts his way across some of the most compelling punk-flavored noise this side of Kill Rock Stars. On songs like “Mye” and “Rx Coup,” Sparta — spun off from one-time buzz band At The Drive In — rocks with a precision that sounds like absolute abandon, and they craft bring-it-all-back-home hooks better than anyone since the Archers Of Loaf. This record is damn exciting, and you never know where the songs are headed, even after you’ve heard them all a dozen times. It’s only natural to want to know what all that fuss is about.

On the other hand, even the most charitable fan of populist poetry has to admit that the lyrics are the kind of noble drivel best glimpsed in shards buried under mountains of reverb and feedback. For instance, I really love the one-two-three punch of “Light Burns Clear,” but I work just as hard to ignore the chorus — “Fan the flames in the landslide/Crown yourself in the wake/We play the disaster/Fanfare, fanfare, liar.” Huh? Wha?

If you examine the words, especially ones like “faux obsolete,” “arsenals,” and “monovision,” it seems that Sparta wants to use their rock muscle to articulate the links between love, surveillance, technological failure, and natural disaster. But like most propagandists and all but a handful of rock songwriters, Sparta’s strength lies in their catchphrases rather than their prolix and convoluted doomsday scenarios. They can write ’em too: Two thorny phrases from two of the best songs on the record — “How can you sleep at night?” and “This time, I’ll get it right” — say more about resistance and resilience than the rest of the album.

Man, you know an art form’s been around a while when you start to preach incoherence. — Addison Engelking

Grade: A-

A New Commotion, A Delicate Tension

Viva L’American Death Ray Music

(Jeweled Red Tiger)

A no-filler 25 minutes of comeuppance to armchair whiners and the lazy cattle call of “Memphis doesn’t have any good bands,” A New Commotion, A Delicate Tension is exactly the type of fine-tuned document that could push these locals out of the circular constraints and figurative glass ceiling that ail all tireless and talented bands working a moderately sized city. They’ve toured, sure, but now, with the ammunition of a solid full-length and this arguably great EP, discerning ears everywhere should take notice of this band. This six-song EP is also the perfect medicine for both rock-and-roll’s naysayers and the trend-spotters who were listening to rave music last year but are now all “rocked-out” via Spin and Rolling Stone.

The Velvet Underground is a lazy reference seemingly hemorrhaged by everyone who hears Viva L’American Death Ray Music for the first time, but their sound, and, more importantly, the sound of this EP, is informed the heaviest by early Roxy Music — a wonderful stepping stone since, any way you slice it, Roxy Music was sexier, less constrictive, and much more fun than VU. Displaying a range only previously hinted at, A New Commotion contains at least two certifiably great rock-and-roll songs. That’s two more than 99 percent of the albums by the Hives/Strokes/Vines/(insert another innocuous plural noun here). “Sycophant” catapults the best of Iggy Pop’s late-’70s Berlin/Bowie into our world, and “Oh! Libertine” uses a wormy Eno keyboard to assign a menacing atmosphere to its golden swagger.

Go see this band. Buy this EP. Do what you need to do before their name changes (yet again) to a 30-word, garbled mouthful of non sequiturs or they become something that you can’t walk down the street to see. — Andrew Earles

Grade: A-

Viva L’American Death Ray Music will be at the Young Avenue Deli Friday, October 18th, with the High Strung and the Dearest Darlings.

Rough Guide to Youssou N’Dour & Etoile de Dakar

Youssou N’Dour & Etoile de Dakar

(World Music Network)

Before he became Peter Gabriel’s aide-de-camp or Africa’s biggest international pop star, Youssou N’Dour was a Senegalese cross between the young Michael Jackson and the pre-funk James Brown: an unholy charismatic, a freak-voiced teenager who intensified local rhythms until they nearly snapped apart. Paradoxically, the problem with the Rough Guide compilation of his first band, Etoile de Dakar, is that it isn’t nearly as rough as it could be. The album glosses over some of the singer’s most severe work (where, for instance, is the astoundingly intense “Thiely,” possibly N’Dour’s greatest recorded moment?) in favor of an almost folky flow.

Regardless, little about these 11 songs could be called polished. The 12-minute “Thiapathioly” from 1983 is typical, starting subdued and working itself into a lather, with coruscating tama drums hyping the beat and horns shouting more and more urgently with every reiteration. “Diokhama Say Ne Ne” moves fast from the jump, its goosed-up rhythm guitar holding the center of what sounds like a shambolic party. Loose and beautiful, it’s village music on the cusp of transforming a large portion of the world. And if it leaves you hungry for more, four excellent volumes of Etoile de Dakar’s work on the Stern’s African Classics label remain in print. — Michaelangelo Matos

Grade: A-

Lost in the Lonesome Pines

Jim Lauderdale and

Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys

(Dualtone)

This is the second collaboration between Jim Lauderdale and Ralph Stanley and his fine band. The first, 1999’s I Feel Like Singing, was nominated for a Grammy as best bluegrass recording of the year. This new release deserves similar kudos. Jim Lauderdale is a singer-songwriter who’s been responsible for some of the more intelligent material coming out of Nashville in the last decade. In addition to penning hits for George Strait, Patty Loveless, Vince Gill, and many others, he’s put out many superb albums that have gone mostly unnoticed by the public. A devotee of Gram Parsons, he’s a genre-jumper par excellence, and he was creating alt-country music long before it became a hot category.

Lauderdale was raised in North Carolina as the son of a preacher, and gospel and other roots music are a constant source of inspiration for his work. One of his early loves is bluegrass, so he jumped at the chance to collaborate with one of his heroes, Ralph Stanley, whose voice Lauderdale credits with making him want to sing in the first place. Stanley is probably most known in the pop world for singing the unforgettable “O Death” on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. He’s a bluegrass legend and the undisputed patriarch of the genre since the passing of Bill Monroe. A virtuoso banjo-picker, he’s been playing this music for over half a century, penning classics with his late brother Carter and inspiring countless generations of musicians. To hear Stanley’s nasal Virginia vocals entwined with Lauderdale’s Carolina drawl is pure bluegrass bliss.

As on their previous collaboration, there’s a plethora of Lauderdale-penned tunes that sound like they came straight out of the Stanley Brothers songbook, including two more collaborations with Robert Hunter (lyricist for the Grateful Dead). It’s scary how authentically old and grounded these tunes sound, especially the anthem-like “Zacchaeus,” with its blistering harmonies and holler-back choruses. And you couldn’t ask for a more sizzling house band than the Clinch Mountain Boys, some of them fine artists in their own right. It’s little wonder that country mavericks like Steve Earle and Lauderdale are paying homage to their roots by collaborating with legendary bluegrass figures like Stanley and Del McCoury or that those collaborations are respectfully traditional. Why tamper with such a good, pure thing? — Lisa Lumb

Grade: B+