Category: Record Reviews

Songs for the Deaf

Queens Of The Stone Age

(Interscope)

Spiced throughout with satirical DJ chatter and radio announcements à la The Who Sell Out, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf is an attack on rigid radio formats that also serves as a quasi-ironic survey course on all permutations of hard, fast, and heavy music. It includes high-octane punk-pop, Zeppelinesque tales of ancient woe, psychotic mid-’60s garage romps, sing-along stadium chants, at least two epochal power ballads, at least one jokey goof-nut ballad, and a few indescribable fusions of “metal heavy, soft at the core” (like the mechanical two-step single “No One Knows”) that take hard rock closer to and farther away from its sources than anyone thought possible.

Sadly, it is also an album with reach and grasp that might never be approached again, for Queens Of The Stone Age is a kind of rotating hard-rock supergroup: Founders Josh Homme and Nick Olivieri are the only permanent members, and they form new editions of the band with anyone who has the talent and interest to play along for an album and tour. The first new member on Songs for the Deaf is guest vocalist and former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, who is one of the only grunge singers who never fell prey to the vocal hysterics of Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell. But the biggest difference between this edition of the band and previous incarnations is the presence of second new (and since departed) member Dave Grohl, who took much-needed time off from fighting foo to play some drums.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the album hinges on his performance, and, gamer that he is, Grohl does not disappoint. I’ve been waiting for Grohl to play drums for eight or nine years now, and he gives the QOTSA rhythm section more flexibility, muscle, and unpredictability than ever before. On “Song for the Dead,” Grohl rolls and rumbles his way into the best solo I’ve heard in years, nearly reversing the rock hierarchy by turning the song into a drum showcase that also includes the obligatory guitar riff.

My only qualm is the way the record sounds. I want this snarling, circular music to appropriate the high gloss and polish of a Nevermind or even an Ænima, and when it doesn’t, I keep reaching for the volume knob to add more definition to the guitars and, especially, the bass lines, which are catchy in a Paul McCartney-in-a-lake-of-fire sort of way whenever they can be heard. As a result, this is an album that simply cannot be played loud enough — if you can call that a criticism.

— Addison Engelking

Grade: A

Blacklisted

Neko Case

(Bloodshot)

Death certainly becomes Neko Case; the Grim One lurks menacingly on her third album, the forceful Blacklisted (the first without backing band Her Boyfriends). Crows flock around her, Hitchcock-style, on the leadoff track, “Things That Scare Me,” portending some future tragedy, while on “Tightly,” she seemingly pleads for mercy, singing, “I cling tightly to this life.”

Death-wise, the penultimate track is “Deep Red Bells.” A “handprint on the driver’s side” marks the car of a lover (presumably) who was “murdered on the interstate.” Death’s calling card “looks a lot like engine oil and tastes like being poor and small and popsicles in summer.” Case isn’t just summoning death, she’s creating her own mythology of it, fashioning it from the same Northwestern soil that David Lynch used to form the White and Black Lodges.

The songs on Blacklisted, which can be awkward in their wording, are full of fleeting imagery and fragmented narratives. They whisper their meanings rather than reveal them outright, as if Case wants to protect herself and her emotions.

She offsets such spooked desolation with her expansive, expressive voice, which can convey immensely complex fears and emotions. While her cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Runnin’ Out of Fools” is a showcase for her powerhouse vocals, she is at her best when she holds back: Her subdued version of Sarah Vaughn’s “Look for Me (I’ll Be Around)” captures the sad resignation of the lyrics, and “I Wish I Were the Moon” glides along on a fragile melody that would shatter under too much singing.

Case’s mortal dread — a distillation of the paranoia that has haunted country music for almost a century — threatens to overwhelm much of Blacklisted, but she balances the strange restraint of her songwriting with the authority in her voice. Adding light and air to what could have been a dark and claustrophobic record, she ultimately sounds triumphant, if not over death, then at least over her own fears. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: A-

Total Lee!

The Songs of Lee Hazelwood

Various Artists

(Astralwerks)

Not all tribute albums are nightmarish messes. The second volume of the Rolling Stones tribute series, Uncut, had some good stuff by Lambchop and the MC5. And there was that version of Springsteen’s Nebraska a couple of years ago on Sub Pop that featured great covers of “Highway Patrolman” and “Downbound Train” by Dar Williams and Raul Malo of the Mavericks, respectively. That record also featured some embarrassing denture whistle from Johnny Cash on “I’m on Fire.” (Yes, he’s an icon and very ill, but a little Poli-Grip would affix that upper plate securely.)

Lee Hazelwood has always been a storyteller in his songs, kind of like a non-redneck Tom T. Hall with a functioning neocortex. (Hazelwood has lived rough, but he’s never been as scary-looking as Hall, who resembles a golem at times.) And in recent years, he has experienced a resurgence in popularity. The stuff he recorded with Nancy Sinatra and on his own 30-plus years ago now sounds cool and ironic instead of corny and overblown (as his material did to this reviewer at the time).

So it was inevitable that a Lee Hazelwood tribute record would eventually appear. Several of these remakes best the Hazelwood originals, which is not that difficult a task, considering how tame and dated much of Hazelwood’s recorded work sounds today. Tribute compiler Wyndham Wallace deserves credit for picking mainly moody and somewhat obscure Hazelwood tunes to redo here. The matching of contributors with songs is mostly genius, particularly professional Southern geek Johnny Dowd’s take on Hazelwood’s California hippie-lifestyle anthem “Sleep in the Grass.” Dowd’s “I’m gonna cut you” shtick finds its proper application on this grotesque remake.

However, K Records majordomo/head doofus Calvin Johnson stinks up the joint with a truly horrific reading of “Sand,” on which he adopts an affected baritone croak (as bad as Cash’s denture whistle). Not too many big names here (unless you count Evan Dando and Jarvis Crocker as biz heavyweights), but the use of less well known artists emphasizes the songs over big-name singers. Total Lee is that rarest of creatures, a tribute record that improves on the originals. — Ross Johnson

Grade: B+

Turn on the Bright Lights

Interpol

(Matador)

Because they draw from pretty obvious sources in pretty obvious ways, a band like Interpol is waiting to be dissed by a dude like me. They sound like the Strokes played at half-speed and mixed with some of the contrapuntal skyscraper guitars of Television and grounded by the occasional near-perfect off-tink of a Feelies percussionist. The vocalist sounds like a more ethereal, less suicidal, and half-poetic Ian Curtis singing through that famous distorted Strokes-aphone. The band is from New York, a place I love but one that seems really into the cannibalization of its musical past right now. And still they do not move me.

The problem for any music fan is that while listening to Interpol’s record, the pedigree of the music and the rampant copycatting force a never-ending game of spot-the-influence every time you listen to it: It’s like being forced to read Lolita only for the number of times Nabokov mentions “Annabel Lee” or watching Goodfellas just to spot the allusions to B-Westerns and Abraham Polonsky movies. Leave that shit to devotees with more time and money. Interpol does not repay such efforts.

If you’re not a serious music fan or an idiot or buying your first Matador record, you might love these guys without question. If you’re human, you will be amused and mildly entertained by three or four tracks because they steal from the best. If you’re me, you’ll keep wondering why Turn on the Bright Lights sounds like one of the longest 49-minute albums in history. —AE

Grade: B-

Honey in the Hive

The Bigger Lovers

(Yep Roc)

The Bigger Lovers’ second album, Honey in the Hive, may not be the best album of the year, but it is perhaps the most surprisingly consistent. Listening to these 11 songs, you continually expect the band to falter; at least one song will surely fail to live up to the others or will lack a smart melodic hook or a catchy lyric. But, track for track, Honey in the Hive is an unexpectedly solid album, an out-of-nowhere charmer that will hopefully gain this Philadelphia quartet a respectable audience.

The Lovers uphold the fine tradition of post-REM college pop — jangly guitars, wry and occasionally obscure lyrics, highly hummable melodies — that put them in rank with the dBs, Toad the Wet Sprocket, the Caulfields, and the Connells. Power chords and drumrolls propel the opener, “Half Richard’s,” while “Make Your Day” gets high on Skylarking-era XTC.

But the album’s high point is “A Simple ‘How Are You?'” — one of the best, most addictive pop songs I’ve heard all year. As Scott Jefferson croons an unassumingly catchy chorus (“A simple ‘How are you?’/Makes me want you in so many ways”), Ed Hogarty earns an MVP award for the keyboard riffs that gleefully bounce through the song.

The Lovers are aware of and not entirely comfortable with their college origins: “Haunts Me Still” recalls the nights “hanging out with Meg and Billy” in the dorm room with shaky regret: “Sometimes, the bile makes it easier to live.” It’s this uneasiness that motivates the Lovers to sharpen the hooks in these songs, and it raises them above many of their post-college pop forebears. — SD

Grade: A-

Sea Change

Beck

(Geffen/Interscope)

Poor Beck. He sounds like a walking existential crisis.

Sort of a less funky Mutations, the folky, bluesy Sea Change is arguably his best album to date — certainly his most mature — the very introspective, cathectic work of an artist distancing himself from the clumsy kid he once was. Mutations‘ wonderfully evocative “newfangled wasteland” is now a dark and stormy sea fraught with allusions to Shakespeare’s Tempest: “Drown, drown/Sailors run aground/In the sea change/Nothing is safe/Strange waves/Push us every way/In a stone boat/We’re thrown away,” Beck mournfully intones on “Little One” while haunting voices and military drums augur a watery grave — but that saltwater taste is only from the tears he doesn’t want to cry anymore.

In truth, the comparison to Mutations doesn’t do the new album justice. It’s a different, more ruminative animal: the record of a Beck besieged — and coming out of it as sound as a bomb shelter, albeit scarred, rattled, and relying on well-worn phrases to express the devastation of lost love. The wildly creative, sometimes nonsensical lyrics of the past are not here. They can’t be. With Beck so subdued, they would not ring true.

The rich acoustic, countryish sound that prevails throughout Sea Change is a perfect landscape for the melancholy message being telegraphed across it. Layers of sound, beguilingly atmospheric, hover over each tune like supernatural influences. Nigel Godrich — who also produced Mutations, worked on Radiohead’s OK Computer and Amnesiac, and engineered Carnival Of Light, the third LP from once-glorious shoegazers Ride — is an excellent match for Beck’s deeply personal work, not afraid to add a little swooning orchestration and dabs of electronica sure to be criticized as pretentious “overproduction” by some. The killer, funk-lite “Paper Tiger” is bolstered by vaguely East Indian strings reminiscent of those on Elton John’s Madman Across the Water, while “Lost Cause” rides an infectious yet simple dual-guitar melody. Beck’s subtle baritone is stronger than expected on such lingeringly sad ballads as “All In Your Mind,” in which he laments, “I cannot believe/You got a devil up your sleeve/And he’s talking to me … And I wanted to be/A good friend.” Ouch: You can feel the knife in his back. One of the songs in which drums break up the plaintive weariness is “Already Dead,” a gorgeous little dirge. “Sunday Sun” warps the predominant sobriety back toward the trash-culture musical appropriation of Beck’s earlier work, ending in a collision of feedback and effects after some of the album’s more soaring, cock-strong vocals.

Sea Change‘s cloak of sadness may be a little restricting for some on the first listen, especially the Odelay addicts out there, but persevere: It would be a much sadder day if Beck were to repeat himself. Exploration of self is one of the keys to making irreproachable art, and you can’t blame a man for looking inward … and showing you what he found there.

An instant classic. — Jeremy Spencer

Grade: A

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

(Touch & Go)

Music writers frequently substitute the term “rawk” for “rock” to differentiate the heaving behemoth of the music at its most physically assertive from the umbrella term for the genre and overall culture — to separate the men from the boys and the women from the girls, as it were. In the case of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, though, I tend to think of the neologism as a combination of “rock” and “awkward.” There’s an innate gawkiness about both guitarist Nick Zinner’s spiky riffs and Karen O’s shaky vocals, and that’s both the most appealing thing about them and the most suspect.

What’s appealing is also what’s immediate. Yeah Yeah Yeahs is formally punk: five songs in 14 minutes, rama-lama guitar/drums, yelped vox, “gimme, gimme, I wanna do stuff” lyrics. But unlike neo-garage bands like the Strokes or the Hives, there’s little chewy center to their rock candy. A bootlegger can mount Christina Aguilera’s vocals atop the Strokes’ backing melody because they’re every bit as pop as she is. Try that with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and they’d throw Aguilera off and break her collarbone.

Which means that we’ll be spared the spectacle of Karen O collaborating with Desmond Child on theme songs for Spider-Man sequels; wish I could predict the same for Julian Casablancas. But when she squeals, “What I need tonight’s the real thing/I need the real thing tonight/Yeah, yeah, yeah” on “Bang,” are we supposed to burst into applause at her self-conscious primitivism? Or should we merely suspect she’ll be going back to art school soon enough — that she doesn’t have nearly as much invested in this as she says she does? Maybe I’m just being an overintellectual churl. Maybe Karen O really does just want to rawk. Incontestably, for these five songs and 14 minutes, she does. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she never does it again, nor would I feel all that betrayed.

— Michaelangelo Matos

Grade: B+

Listening Log

Call and Response — Bangs (Kill Rock Stars): The Bangles go garage on a quick-and-dirty EP from the Olympia scene’s most straightforward rockers. It’s 16 minutes of sludge on first listen, but rad tunes soon emerge from the grease and grime. (“New Scars,” “Kinda Good,” “Dirty Knives”)

Grade: B+

I, John — John Forte (Transparent Music): Recorded on the quick before heading up for a 14-year drug-trafficking bid and faced with a crushing but far from unprecedented fate (see Slick Rick, among others), this onetime mediocre-rapping Fugees protégé embraces soul and reggae and makes a record of redemption and farewell songs worthy of the gravity of his situation. (“What a Difference,” “Reunion,” “Harmonize”)

Grade: B+

All Of the Above — J-Live (Coup d’Etat): This underground hype/middle school teacher isn’t a backpacker or gangsta, b-boy or thug — just your average, everyday MC kicking (agreeable) rhymes over (laid-back) beats. (“Satisfied,” “How Real It Is,” “MCee”)

Grade: B+

I Phantom — Mr. Lif (Def Jux): Hip hop goes to college, with only the best results. Whether outlining the perils of wage slavery, ballin’ on a budget at the club down the street, or revealing that “underground rapper” wasn’t the career choice his parents had in mind, this Beantown-based rookie-of-the-year contender paints a realistic portrait of how hip hop’s overeducated, underemployed other half lives. His flow evokes Native Tongues; his music rocks harder. (“Live From the Plantation,” “New Man’s Theme,” “Status”)

Grade: A-

Highly Evolved — The Vines (Capitol): Rock is back? If this retread of tired-on-contact “modern rock” tropes is the future, come back, Britney; all is forgiven. Did white guitar rock really get so bad that nostalgia for post-Nirvana product like Bush and Stone Temple Pilots could be mistaken for “evolution”? When it explodes, it’s more pipe bomb than “The Hives Declare Guerre Nucleaire.” And when it drags? Oh, boy And their Brit-rock/Beatles impressions suck. As Australian imports go, more listenable than Silverchair but no match for Kylie Minogue. (“Outtathaway,” “Get Free”) —Chris Herrington

Grade: C

The Best Bootlegs In the World Ever!

Various Artists

(no label)

The Best Of Boom Selector, Vol. 2

Various Artists

(no label)

If you’re much of a serious music fan, you’ve probably read about them. And if you’re less of a Luddite than I am, you’ve probably heard plenty of them. They’re mash-ups or blends or bootlegs: the practice of blending two (or sometimes more) different songs into one new creation, usually adding the vocals from song A to the instrumental track from song B. This practice, made possible by home-computing technology and easily distributable via file-sharing programs, has turned any music fan with the right equipment and a little imagination into a remixer. The results of this democratic revolution can be found all over the Internet, with some of the more infamous mash-ups (such as “A Stroke Of Genie-us,” which blends Christina Aguilera’s vocal from “Genie In a Bottle” with the music from the Strokes’ “Hard To Explain”) crossing over to radio and mainstream magazine exposure and some of the more successful sonic architects (such as “Stroke” creator Freelance Hellraiser) becoming actual stars in some locales and circles (especially Europe).

Luckily, for those of us more comfortable with traditionally packaged music, someone has bootlegged the bootlegs. A 17-song collection of some of the best of the boots, The Best Bootlegs In the World Ever!, began popping up in independent record stores in New York and London earlier this year. A seemingly unconnected sequel, The Best Of Boom Selector, Vol. 2, showed up a few months later — though there is no Volume 1 and the set doesn’t seem to have any affiliation with the Boom Selection Web site, which has become the definitive chronicler of the phenomenon (at BoomSelection.net, where you can purchase a three-disc mp3 set of this stuff that’s over 30 hours long).

Taken as albums, these records are sort of like K-Tel collections of online music culture, where trademark artists such as Soulwax (who seems to get off on the pure sound of the form) and Freelance Hellraiser (a brilliant recontextualizer) share space with one-shots and more “minor” artists. Some source material keeps reappearing: Missy Elliott, Eminem, Destiny’s Child, and Fatboy Slim seem to make up the Mount Rushmore of mash-ups. And one of the consistent cultural outcomes of the music is to unite styles that may seem opposed, melding “black” hip hop and R&B and “white” punk and hard rock (though, too often, it’s vocals from the former with music from the latter, hardly ever the other way around).

The best of these culture clashes can be divided into three categories: good jokes, great grooves, and (pardon the pun) strokes of genius.

Some of the jokes are funny in concept but don’t really hold up to repeated listens — for example, Evolution Control Committee’s “Rebel Without a Pause,” which lays Public Enemy vocals over a Herb Alpert instrumental, and DJ French Bloke’s “Destiny’s Kennedys,” which matches “Jumpin’ Jumpin'” with “Holiday In Cambodia.” Others are funny in concept only (and with Sealion Dion vs. Cigar Ros’ “Bium Bium Bambalo,” which proves that the atmospheric soundscapes of highbrow Icelandic rockers Sigur Ros are every bit as much of a snore as the new-age overemoting of middlebrow diva Celine Dion, concept is plenty).

But other jokes are deeply, wonderfully hilarious. Picasio’s “Craig the Survivor” has Survivor’s macho “Eye Of the Tiger” power chords driving a vocal from wispy British slow-jam singer Craig David. On Kurtis Rush’s “Enter the Bitch,” the ominous rumble of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” gives way to the sassy braggadocio of Missy Elliott’s “She’s a Bitch.” (I’ve heard this at least two dozen times now, and I still chuckle every time.) Best of all is Mighty Lord Fenn’s “The Power Of Bizkit,” which drains all the machismo from Fred Durst’s embarrassing “Rollin'” vocals by laying them atop the eternally square synth rock of Huey Lewis & the News’ “The Power Of Love.” It seems safe to say that there will never, ever be an official Limp Bizkit song half as fun as this.

Even better than the jokes are mash-ups as how’d-they-do-that groove music: DJ EZG’s “Rockerfaction” makes history by intertwining two of rock-and-roll’s greatest blasts of noise –“Satisfaction” and “The Rockafeller Skank” — into a groove that, like prime James Brown, could extend to infinity without losing its physical pull. Similarly thrilling is Freelance Hellraiser’s “Public Prince,” which unites the two greatest rhythm artists of the ’80s by putting the vocals from Public Enemy’s “Nighttrain” atop the keyboard-and-drum vamp of Prince’s “1999.” And Soulwax’s “Push It/No Fun” is a hip-hop/punk shoutalong that imagines Salt-N-Pepa fronting the Stooges.

Others flow so smooth that cultural collision is beside the point. On “Dreadlock Child,” Soulwax (a duo that has released some of its mash-ups legally in its native Belgium under the moniker 2 Many DJs) uses a reggae track I can’t ID to skank along perfectly with Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women, Pt. 1.” And who knew the Clash was one of the great disco bands? Ultra 396 and Basement Clash did, apparently. The former’s “Rock the Party” segues the vocals from Pink’s “Get the Party Started” onto the band’s “Rock the Casbah,” while the latter puts the vocal from Basement Jaxx’s “Romeo” over the music from “The Magnificent Clash” to create “The Magnificent Romeo,” in both cases creating flawless mixes that transcend any of the source material.

Actually, “The Magnificent Romeo” is so perfect that it qualifies as one of the genius cuts, a title it’ll have to share with three Freelance Hellraiser mixes, all, along with “Romeo,” found on Best Bootlegs. “A Stroke of Genie-us” earns its reputation: By divorcing the yearning of Aguilera’s vocal from its standard bubblegum-R&B backing track and the crisp coolness of the Strokes’ guitar-bass-drums from lead singer Julian Casablancas’ bored-boy whine and then combining them, Hellraiser humanizes both. And by doing it so assuredly, he (I’m assuming) creates a brand-new song that, if only legal, would probably be a massive hit. Hellraiser also gives these records their most priceless joke: Depeche Mode’s bouncy synth-pop “I Just Can’t Get Enough” + Eminem side project D-12’s drug-abuse-celebrating “Purple Pills” = “I Just Can’t Get Enough Pills.” Don’t tell Lynn Cheney about this one. Then there’s Freelance Hellraiser’s (and from what I’ve heard, the form itself’s) grand achievement, “Smells Like Booty,” a mash-up that layers Beyoncé & company’s “Bootylicious” vocals over Kurt Cobain & company’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” musical assault, resulting in a record that, however seemingly impossible it may be, is actually better than its title. The first 25 seconds of “Smells Like Booty” may be the most undeniable, giddily rapturous music produced this year.

Judging these of-the-moment pop artifacts as competing objects with any album listed in Billboard or reviewed in Rolling Stone requires traditionalists to come to grips with the notion that, outside of post-9/11-oriented albums from Bruce Springsteen, Wilco, and Sleater-Kinney, the records that most crucially define the current state of pop music are not available commercially — at least, not legally. I got mine through back channels, and the only advice I can give is to hunt around — that or download them and burn your own. This music’s worth whatever detective work it requires.

Grades: Best Bootlegs — A; Boom Selector –A-

Unleashed

Toby Keith

(Dreamworks)

As useless as Toby Keith’s last album was, one almost wishes he’d just kept on “rapping” about himself on Unleashed. While there is some guilty pleasure to be taken from “Beer For My Horses (Whiskey For My Men),” a swaggering duet with Willie Nelson, the remaining dozen tracks are forgettable at best. It’s all slick Southern rocky-tonk, and not one of the songs could compare favorably with the brilliant Nelson’s most hastily scribbled grocery list. “Who’s Your Daddy” is as muscle-headed as it sounds, and “Good To Go To Mexico” is like some forgotten Jimmy Buffet tune the Coral Reefer band dropped their veto on. Keith’s reactionary, supremely juvenile response to 9/11, “Courtesy Of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” is, of course, included on the lackluster Unleashed. Here’s a little country tune I wrote in reaction to it. It’s called “How Toby Keith Made Me an Angrier American.” It goes like this:

On the 12th day of September in the year 2001,

The sun came up like thunder just like it had always done,

And America awoke and hoped it was an awful dream,

When those jets brought down the towers, right there on the TV screen.

When they turned lower Manhattan into a smoking ditch,

A lot of folks fell down and prayed,

And a lot of folks got rich.

It struck us dumb and somber, it cut us to the core.

We cried out, Give us justice, but we wanted something more.

There’s a dirty little secret in this land of the free:

We’ve even learned to turn our dead

Into commodities.

Yippie-yi-oh,

Yippie-yi-ay.

That’s the American way.

— Chris Davis

Grade: D-

The Very Best Of Césaria Évora

Césaria Évora

(Bluebird/Heritage)

As self-insulated as America insists on being from the music of the rest of the world — not counting England and Ireland — and as virtually nonexistent as radio exposure for foreign music is here, we naturally miss out on some pretty great stuff. Scaling the fortress of the mainstream U.S. music industry, the sole focus of which is the quick million, is a formidable gig, and as devoid of anything resembling soul or intellect as most that darkens its drawbridge is, it’s a wonder any of the rest of the world’s brilliant musicians are even remotely interested in this market and its glut of Insipid Pop.

With no pesky foreign language to alienate the listener, nonvocal international music (read: jazz and its hybrids) will sometimes find a mass audience. But rare is the foreign artist who, like Edith Piaf or Jean Sablon, sings in his or her native tongue and still garners widespread recognition in America. With huge sales stateside and five Grammy nominations, West African archipelago Cape Verde’s “barefoot diva” Césaria Évora is a rare bird indeed.

Évora didn’t really hit the world’s radar until the mid-’80s, when she traveled to Portugal to record two songs for an anthology of female Cape Verdean singers, but she had been singing throughout her island home since she was 16. Making a family and not much money interrupted that first career, but she’s been recording regularly since her return to music at the age of 45. Known primarily for her bluesy mornas, postcolonial tunes blending African beats and Portuguese fado, Évora sings in a Creole dialect that makes her extremely accessible in Portugal, specifically, and Spain and France, and this is probably what we have to thank for the worldwide dissemination of her beautiful music.

The Very Best Of Césaria Évora is composed of tracks — some bluesy, some inflected with Brazilian samba — from the albums she released between 1991 and 2001, with three previously unreleased songs, the best of which is a new version of her ’92 hit “Sodade” recorded with Angolan vocalist Bonga Kuenda. “Sodade” is the lead track and rightly so. The marriage of Évora’s soft, melancholy utterances and Kuenda’s anguished, broken tenor is positively sublime. The rest is far from silence.

— Jeremy Spencer

Grade: B+

Kill the Moonlight

Spoon

(Merge)

The pressure of the indie-rock game must be getting to Spoon frontman Brett Daniels. “Small Stakes,” the lead track on the Austin band’s fourth album, Kill the Moonlight, is an ode to obscurity: “Small stakes leave you with the minimum blues/Can’t think big/Can’t think past one or two.” Built on a simple keyboard riff and a tambourine, the song conveys the frustration of trying to build a career out of music (or out of art in general).

But songs about lack of fame are just as boring and grating as songs about fame, even if the singer is justified in his disenchantment: Spoon’s major-label debut, A Series Of Sneaks, should have been a breakout, and the follow-up, Girls Can Tell, was similarly sadly overlooked. But “Small Stakes” is still a misstep, especially at the start of a crucial album in the band’s career, and Kill the Moonlight takes a while to recover. The first single, “The Way We Get By,” sounds like an anthem of teen rebellion (“We get high in backseats of cars/We break into mobile homes”), but it gets bogged down in pretentiously abstract lyrics (“We rarely practice discern we seek out the taciturn”).

Fortunately, the album has enough highlights to maintain Spoon’s rising career arc, which is modest but steady. “Stay Don’t Go” builds its beat on a percussive exhalation that sounds almost like a human beatbox; it’s easily the most surprising element on the album and suggests these guys have a few Prince albums in their collection. Elsewhere, “Jonathan Fisk” works the classic Spoon formula (straightforward guitar riff + propulsive drum beat = elemental, frictional pop), and Daniels gets extra points for rhyming “Jonathan Fisk” with “speaks with his fists.”

Moments like these make you wish Daniels would stop bemoaning his career woes and concentrate on making good, distinctive pop music. It’s what he does best.

—Stephen Deusner

Grade: B

Home

The Dixie Chicks

(Columbia)

It may not be hip, but I’d gladly trade Gillian Welch’s (not to mention Ryan Adams’) entire recorded output for one good Dixie Chicks single. With their bluegrass roots (and bluegrass chops), the Chicks may be the rare mainstream country act poised to get respect from the legions who have bought into the O Brother fetishization of “old-timey” music, but they’re better than that. Rather than pine for a world that no longer exists, the Dixie Chicks make music that speaks — with wit, heart, and smarts — to a contemporary reality. Theirs is music made by and for the Suburban Cowgirls who make up the largest segment of the country music audience, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Bluegrass-bred sisters Emily Robison and Martie Maguire may provide the acoustic grounding that allows the band to come off as more than just the rootsy pop band that they mostly are, but it’s lead singer Natalie Maines who closes the deal. Maines may be a pedestrian vocalist by the high standards of country music, but she’s also a positively era-defining bundle of energy and attitude, her unabashed, guilt- and defiance-free expressions of feminism and sexuality, her tomboy playfulness and everygirl enthusiasm striking just the right tone for a country music audience mostly a generation or two removed from rural roots.

Home is the Chicks’ third album and marks the third straight time the lead single has come on like a nonchalant cultural manifesto. “Long Time Gone” expresses the demographic shift that the band rides atop even more directly than either “Wide Open Spaces” or (still my fave Chicks single) “Ready To Run,” melding bluegrass inflections with let-‘er-rip, rock-schooled propulsion. The lyric, penned by a guy named Darrell Scott, may familiarly yearn for a more “authentic” country music past, but the gals’ performance springs eternally forward. When they leap into the final line of the chorus — “and it ain’t coming back again” –it’s neither lament nor exultation. Just a fact to be dealt with and moved past.

After opening with this, Home dips into a cover of “Landslide,” a move that may sound unduly crass for honky-tonk diehards, but I say if you’re gonna make modern country’s connection to El Lay soft rock explicit, better Fleetwood Mac than the dread Eagles.

But the limitations hinted at in the “Landslide” lyrics are instructive. Home backs away from the ace pop move of their 1999 album Fly, instead embracing two predictable and decidedly less exciting musical directions: getting serious with some slow songs and focusing more on their bluegrass roots.

This means a bluegrass instrumental (“Lil’ Jack Spade”), a downbeat, orchestral closer (“Top Of the World”), and a song about the Vietnam War, of all things (“Travelin’ Soldier,” as effectively tearjerking and devoid of political perspective as you’d expect from Nashville). And though they make the formula work most of the time (“More Love,” the quietly moving “A Home,” and the would-be bluegrass standard “Tortured, Tangled Hearts” are standouts), the record just doesn’t have the spark that made Fly live up to its title.

The light moments here fall short. The too-easy one-note joke “White Trash Wedding” has none of the daring of Fly‘s “Goodbye Earl” or “Sin Wagon,” though, as a bluegrass showcase, they have plenty of fun with it. By contrast, the O Brother divas (even good sport Alison Krauss) would probably be mortified to bite into something so silly and undignified.

In the end, the titles tell the story: Wide Open Spaces yearned for more than three cute blondes in a country-pop band are expected to want. The simple, expansive Fly tossed self-consciousness out the window and pursued complicated fun at all costs. The comfortable Home is a bit of a retrenchment. Here’s hoping the Dixie Chicks are merely preparing for another takeoff the next time out. — Chris Herrington

Grade: B+

Le Funk

VHS or Beta

(On!)

Credibility has always been a problem for the dance music left in disco’s wake. You know: It’s soulless; it’s just a bunch of machines; it takes no talent to make. So it’s somewhat ironic to find bands of live instrumentalists making or approximating house music. But while live instruments can give the illusion of spontaneity, they can also run the risk of being merely gimmicky.

But VHS or Beta does more than just replicate machine-tooled precision. They may combine vintage disco with contemporary house, but they also add a loose, improvisatory feel that’s pitched somewhere between post-rave and post-Dead camps. Granted, that could just be the resemblance between Zeke Buck’s guitar tone and Jerry Garcia’s, but the group’s grassroots live following has something to do with it as well, as does the fact that there’s something genuinely shambolic about Le Funk, the Louisville quartet’s debut album. The beat is frequently loose enough to threaten to come apart entirely, and the best moments are filled with an interactive friction that recalls the Dead at their most responsive — only even the aimless stretches have a beat pumping away in the background to keep them from drifting off altogether.

Though Le Funk closes out with a pair of tracks performed in concert, VHS or Beta gets just as much of the gristle of live performance on the studio cuts as well. “Disco Paradise” layers robotic voices over analog synth lines like a Daft Punk song, but the fallible rhythms make it human-scale rather than overwhelming. “Solid Gold” opens with the sound of waves lapping ashore before breaking into a cool piano groove buttressed by congas and an echoed siren guitar, just like a real Ibiza anthem. And Buck turns “On & On” into a nasty wah-wah shred-fest. Pity the club kids who find it insufficiently credible. — Michaelangelo Matos

Grade: B+

VHS or Beta will play Young Avenue Deli Tuesday, September 17th.

Mali Music

Mali Music

(Astralwerks)

Most people take their cameras on vacation, but Blur frontman and erstwhile Gorillaz vocalist Damon Albarn takes along his Samick melodica and his tape recorder. During a recent trek through the African country of Mali, he sat in with and recorded native musicians playing in nightclubs and on street corners. When he returned to England, he transformed the fragments into song collages and sent them back to the Malian musicians, who recorded their own parts over Albarn’s tracks. The resulting album is simply called Mali Music.

While Albarn gets songwriting credit on almost every track, the album is neither vanity nor side project. In fact, the two vying traditions on the album are fairly well balanced, an equal cross-pollination of styles and influences. The laid-back “Spoons” and the upbeat “Makelekele” both thrum with westernized beats and samples, which are delivered with hand drums and a njurka (a traditional violin). Afel Boucom’s vocals perfectly evoke the haze and bustle of “Bamako City,” while singer Ko Kan Ko Sata Doumbia’s dusky syllables illuminate the too-short “Ko Kan Ko Sata Doumbia On River.”

What could have easily been an exploitive or imperialist effort is instead an enthusiastic undertaking by musicians from two very different camps. What’s more, it’s all for a good cause: Proceeds from Mali Music will benefit humanitarian organization Oxfam’s efforts in rural regions of Mali. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: B+

Lord Willin’, Clipse (Star Trak/Arista)

Eve-olution, Eve (Interscope)

Normally, I dismiss sky-is-falling protestations from other music critics, but there’s no way around the conclusion that 2002 thus far has been the worst year for pop music in recent memory, and perhaps no corner of the pop landscape is as in the doldrums as hip hop, the locus of so much of the action for the past 20 years.

One can make the case that the dearth of good hip-hop albums this year is no cause for alarm, that the fact that the best rap records have largely come from indie/boho types and white people is no big deal. After all, though the ’90s produced several great mainstream hip-hop album artists — Outkast, Eminem, Jay-Z, Prince Paul, the Fugees, the Wu-Tang Clan, and their assorted spinoffs — it’s still primarily a singles form, best consumed one song at a time.

But now, even the singles well is running dry. If the chart action is still there, there’s a decided lack of artistic excitement. Most of the year’s high-profile hip-hop singles sound like generic product even when they sound good.

One problem is the producer as auteur, which has had the effect of elevating form over content –great sounds without meaning or personality. That’s one of the reasons I like Lord Willin’ by Neptunes protégés Clipse a little better than the production team’s own far more celebrated “solo” effort, N.E.R.D.’s In Search Of … . The Neptunes may rival Timbaland as the most exciting and ubiquitous of contemporary hip-hop producers, but In Search Of only showed that they lack the persona to put over their own best soundscapes. With Virginia-based brothers Pusha T. and Malice, the Neptunes have found a couple of mouthpieces with a worldview.

Unfortunately, this worldview consists of familiar gangsta tales of drug-selling, which make for some (guilty) pleasurable pulp fiction for a few tracks but wear out real fast. On Lord Willin’, Pusha T. and Malice come off like onetime Queensbridge hard-asses Mobb Deep with better beats, their strong, sure, articulate flows riding easy over the Neptunes’ abrasively funky sonic architecture. But though tracks like the swaggering “Young Blood” and the distortedly percussive “Ego” can be exhilarating, the sharp edge gets dull after a while.

Another promising recent mainstream hip-hop album that falls short is Eve’s Eve-olution. Rather than the vision of one production team, Eve-olution uses an army of A-list hip-hop producers (Dr. Dre, Irv Gotti, and Swizz Beats, among others), along with the familiar framework of guest stars (Snoop Dogg, Alicia Keys, Jadakiss), skits, and braggadocio broken up by token romantic songs.

In fairness, Eve has always been a singles artist, but the lead single here, “Gangsta Lovin’,” is generic and calculating, falling far short of the standard set by her previous records’ lead singles, the infectiously playful “Gotta Man” and the forcefully sexy Gwen Stefani duet “Let Me Blow Your Mind.” And there don’t seem to be any future ace singles lurking among the album tracks.

Eve is a solid if unspectacular MC and — given her preeminence among female MCs without coming across as just another boy-toy — a powerful cultural figure. She’s even likable. But she’s a marginal artist, and Eve-olution doesn’t change that.

So the search for a great major-label hip-hop record in 2002 continues. Jay-Z and Outkast are on deck. We need them now more than ever.

— Chris Herrington

Grades: B (both records)

Fashionably Late, Linda Thompson (Rounder Records)

This is the record that I thought would never be made. After starting out on the British folk circuit, Linda Thompson made a series of excellent albums in the ’70s with her then-husband, folk-guitar god Richard Thompson. She was named female singer of the year in 1982 by Rolling Stone with the release of her and Richard’s masterpiece Shoot Out the Lights. That classic album of dark, introspective songs (Richard’s specialty) chronicled the breakup of their marriage in harrowing detail. Shortly after its release, Richard left Linda and their three children to start a new life in America with a new woman. Unfortunately, the Thompsons had already contracted to do an American tour together, and it was pure drama. Linda kicked Richard in the shins during his solos and trashed many a dressing room but still gave the best performances of her life. She went on to make a mostly mediocre pop album, overloaded with synthesizers and slickness. Then, in the mid-’80s, she developed a rare anxiety disorder — she literally could not sing. (Now, what would Freud say about that?)

Fans like me grieved over this development — in a sense, it was worse than a death, for the purveyor of those wondrous but silenced pipes was still alive and kicking. I think Linda Thompson has one of the best voices in folk, by turns brassy or sensitive. But her talent transcends that genre, as her sense of timing and her interpretive skills allow her to sing pop, swing, folk, or rock with equal ease. Aside from the astounding fact that this record was made at all, another miracle: Lo and behold, who’s that singing and playing guitar on the opening track but Richard Thompson himself! I never thought I’d see a musical reconciliation between these two in my lifetime. Alongside Richard, two of their children, Kamila and Teddy, add vocals and guitar to this and several other tracks, so it’s truly a family affair.

Fashionably Late is the album Thompson fans all hoped she would make after the breakup. Living in the shadow of her ex all these years has not been easy, but she’s finally come into her own as a songwriter as well. (Richard wrote most of their songs, so she was often dismissed as “just the singer.”) She’s co-written a ’40s-style ballroom number with pal Rufus Wainwright, but her collaborations with son Teddy are among the best here, including the haunting “Nine Stone Rig.” On “Evona Darling,” Teddy does a melt-in-your-mouth harmony with his mum that recalls some of the seamless duets that his ma and pa are famous for, with Van Dyke Parks happily noodling away on Hammond organ and accordion in the background.

As this is primarily a folk album, sorrow, betrayal, and regret are major themes here, but underlying it all is a sense of joy in making music again and a wicked, defiant sense of humor. Linda has recruited many of her old folk stalwarts, including Martin Carthy, to play with her, as well as some of the new mavericks, including fiddler Eliza Carthy (Martin’s daughter) and Kate Rusby, the twentysomething reigning queen of the English folk-music scene. What a treasure this release is! May there be many more to come. —Lisa Lumb

Grade: A-

We Love Life, Pulp (Island)

Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker knows how to do one thing really, really well: be Jarvis Cocker. This is the public agitator who made world news (and secured a hell of a lot of press for his band) by attempting to physically attack Michael Jackson during a British awards ceremony and then made some of us jealous by courting actress Chloe Sevigny. But for all the tabloid fodder he provides, Cocker is no less a singular figure when tending to his day job as the glue that holds the good ship Pulp together, something he’s shown a fair amount of dedication to over the past 23 years. Absurdly young, in 1978, when he launched Pulp into the years of obscurity that preceded their gradual late-’80s ascent up the Brit-pop ladder, by the early ’90s, Cocker and his ever-changing lineup of bandmates were superstars in the U.K., though they never really matched the popularity of Oasis or Blur in the U.S. The 1991 single “Babies” was the first in a string of mild-to-massive hits Pulp had on the other side of the Atlantic throughout the decade, and Jarvis’ status as a sex symbol and television staple rubbed conversely against the darker material the band began to explore. Pulp’s last album, 1999’s This Is Hardcore, was a culmination of several years of negativity and working-class satire communicated through just about every pop genre this side of well, hardcore.

We Love Life was three years in the making and actually lives up to its title. Its celebratory airiness and orchestration mix well with such stalwart Pulp qualities as unapologetic Bryan Ferry worship and too-clever-for-its-own-good art pop. Much of it will be juicy fodder for those hungry for a smart-ass take on the Tindersticks or Nick Cave, as the words “grand” and “epic” apply, but Cocker’s take on this grandeur is more tongue-in-cheek. And the music’s hero-pandering transcends mere sonic influences once you take a gander at who produced We Love Life: recently unearthed cult figure Scott Walker. The ’60s luminary does a surprisingly fine job not making this Pulp record sound like a Scott Walker record but more like an attractively sophisticated Berlin-era Bowie/Eno collaboration (see the album’s centerpiece, “Trees”). There’s also a song titled “Bob Lind” after a forgotten L.A. folkie of the ’60s. After a quarter century on the pop margins, Cocker shows that he just might carry on his agenda for another decade without looking silly or contrived. Kudos to that. — Andrew Earles

Grade: B+

Daybreaker, Beth Orton (Heavenly/Astralwerks)

Beth Orton’s third album, Daybreaker, is neither as trippy as her debut, Trailer Park, nor as straightforwardly folky as her follow-up, Central Reservation. Instead, with its bizarre Barry Manilow-ish title (are the Brits even aware of Manilow’s existence?), Daybreaker is a hybrid of her two previous records, its acoustic guitars nicely balanced against synthetic beats and sound effects.

While she may not be the best songwriter to emerge from the post-Lilith landscape, Orton does have the good sense to emphasize lyrics and melody over sound. The music on Daybreaker is arranged to complement the songs — not just the lyrics but also her interpretation of them — rather than have the songs act as vehicles for the electro-folky sonics.

Fortunately, the songs on Daybreaker are among the most confessional and accomplished of Orton’s career. Most fit well into the framework she has already established but are unbound by any obligation to a verse-chorus-verse formula. Tracks like “Paris Train” and the gloomy “Mount Washington” seem to float more freely and spontaneously, which seems appropriate to her ethereal voice.

Some of the album’s more structured tracks, however, are also its most experimental — at least for Orton. The first single, “Concrete Sky,” marries a rainy-day chorus to a jangly guitar-piano sound. It’s one of the most memorable moments of her career. And “God Song,” with backup vocals by Emmylou Harris, has the simplicity and emotional force of classic country music, ending with a sha-la-la coda that could close a Down From the Mountain Tour concert.

The upside to this song-over-sound approach is that Orton always seems sincere. The downside is that the production is so precisely premeditated that it squeezes the life out of everything but Orton’s voice. As a result, Daybreaker is simultaneously idiosyncratic and anonymous, a highly personal record that occasionally sounds highly impersonal. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: B+

Humpty Dumpty LSD, Butthole Surfers (Latino Buggerveil/Revolver)

Michael Azerrad’s chapter on the Butthole Surfers in his book Our Band Could Be Your Life is one of the saddest, scariest, funniest, and best pieces of nonfiction writing I’ve ever read. Composed largely of interviews with band members Paul Leary and King Coffey, this anecdotal history of the Band That Dare Not Speak Its Name charts their rise from staggering, dumpster-diving poverty to relatively uncompromised major-label success. The level and extent of antisocial behavior, sonic terrorism, and truly perverse onstage antics Azerrad records for posterity inspires fear and awe.

But does the music measure up? Not this time. Humpty Dumpty LSD, a massive 17-song, 70-minute smorgasbord of alternate takes and outtakes from the band’s 20-year career, only hints at the Surfers’ commitment to hypnotic tribal guitarmageddon. Maybe a third of the tracks have vocals, and half of those have lyrics, so the emphasis is on the type of distorted drone that might begin to play over and over in the heads of disgruntled industrial workers everywhere. But aside from the semitraditional kicks of “All Day” and the Roky Erickson cover “Earthquake,” Humpty Dumpty LSD sounds like a fans-only deal. And if you ever meet a genuine hardcore Butthole Surfers fan, run for it. — Addison Engelking

Grade: B-

Charango, Morcheeba (London/Sire)

Morcheeba releases a new album and the world stifles a yawn.

After their 2000 flop, the gaudy, disco-lite Fragments Of Freedom, the English trip-hop trio returns with Charango, named after a style of Brazilian music the band discovered during a South American tour. The album doesn’t sound much like Fragments, but it doesn’t exactly sound Brazilian either. Instead, it picks up where Big Calm left off, indulging in the same mid-tempo grooves and singer Skye Edwards’ liquid coo.

There are some bright spots on Charango, though. In perhaps the year’s most unexpected collaboration, Kurt Wagner, frontman for Nashville indie orchestra Lambchop, appears on “What New York Couples Fight About,” which he co-wrote with Edwards. That song is the album’s highlight and a must-have for diehard Lambchop fans (all two of you), but Wagner’s other contribution, “Undress Me Now,” doesn’t quite achieve the ’70s seductiveness he intended.

The album’s other two collaborators don’t fare nearly as well: Pace Won of Tha Outsidaz lends his unimaginative skills to the title track and “Get Along,” and Slick Rick’s “Women Lose Weight,” which tries to be over-the-top ironic, is so insulting, the rapper should be deported.

And yet the band does have its own collaboration-free moments: “Way Beyond” has an effortlessly breezy hook that’ll blow through your mind all afternoon, and “The Great London Traffic Warden Massacre,” an experimental instrumental that closes the album, sounds like a long-lost blaxploitation theme.

Next time around, Morcheeba should indulge this experimental jones and choose their collaborators more carefully. That’ll wipe those yawns off our faces. — SD

Grade: B-

Invoke

Arto Lindsay

(Righteous Babe)

If you consider the pleasures to be found among the numberless

strains, variations, and sub-genres of

“American music,” it’s hard to look at the

term “world music” without a raised

eyebrow. For a genre that allegedly covers

every other kind of music outside of the United

States (but usually ignores a country’s successful local sub-genres, like

Scandinavian death metal or Japanese hip hop), a

reasonable definition of world music for sale in this country sounds both

irritatingly vague and rigidly stereotypical. To

many minds, world music consists of swarthy folk or folk playing cultural

dress-up, crafting music with weird drums and vocals that aim to be more pretty than

forceful. Not only is this definition narrow and ethnocentric and a perfect example of

the way Americans look at the rest of the world, it leaves little room for folk

like Arto Lindsay, a Brazilian-born New York No Wave alumnus who has been

crafting pretty-to-breathtaking Southern-hemisphere pop for nearly 10 years.

If they sound like anything, the 12 songs on

Invoke are reminiscent of the late-afternoon groove on Lindsay’s

much-praised 1997 album Mundo

Civilizado. Lindsay’s main gifts are subtle and

mature, and his greatest one may be the way in which he covers up his most

overwrought lyrics with a voice that sounds like a

gentle, melodic combination of sighing and daydreaming. He may write

something like “All those hidden

variables/Make my life terrible/Dexterity itself

yields/All those numbers,” but when he sings

the words in either English or Portuguese, the supple waves of percussion and guitar

wash all the pretensions away.

So is he “world music” too? Naw.

He’s more like a nerdy, bespectacled solo traveler trying to carve out a tiny niche in

a crowded Third World cathedral so he can marvel at the wonder of the angels in

the architecture. For not much effort at all, you can share some of this peculiarly

private beauty that is, if you can figure out where it’s kept at your record store.

Addison Engelking

Grade: B+

Heathen Chemistry

Oasis

(Epic)

In 1995, Oasis was the reason so many Americans started listening to

British bands like the Verve and Blur. The band grafted Liam Gallagher’s punk sneer

onto Beatles-esque pop songs to create arena-ready rock that didn’t skimp on melody.

In 2002, Oasis is the reason so many Brits are listening to American bands

like the White Stripes and the Strokes. By beating us over the head

with Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, the brothers Gallagher Liam

and Noel have descended to the depths of self-parody. Copies of

their albums should come with ironic detachment free with purchase.

Oasis’ joyless sixth album, Heathen

Chemistry, sounds identical to its three previous

albums. The only discernible difference here is that

Liam, perhaps on a dare, has decided to sing

everything through his nose, which makes his tracks

sound like late John Lennon er, later John Lennon.

But he fares better than his brother Noel, once the brains (I use this

term loosely) of the outfit. His bland vocals sound like a cross between Andy

Partridge of XTC and Billy Bragg but with a

strange inflection that would sound right at home on Top 40 Country radio.

And then there are the songs, which might be the brothers’ weakest batch

yet and that’s saying a lot. Lyrics range from the asinine to the stupid. The

first line of “Little By Little,” which

might be about 9/11 or about, um, relationships, goes “We the people fight for

our existence.” And from “She Is

Love,” which isn’t about 9/11 but rather

about the personification of love in a woman with great hooters: “And she is love,

and her ways are high and steep.”

Perhaps we have been indulging these two boobs their Beatles fixation for

far too long. Perhaps it’s time, my fellow countrymen and -women, to take

up arms against our common enemy. We can start by throwing boxes of

Heathen Chemistry into Boston Harbor. Who’s with me?

Stephen Deusner

Grade: D

In the Morning

Joe Louis Walker

(Telarc)

Joe Louis Walker knows how to work a song. He’s been playing

guitar since he was 14, honed his talent under Mike Bloomfield’s

tutelage, fronted some of the best blues bands on the San Francisco

scene, got involved with gospel along the way, and has more than 10

albums to his credit. But nothing can prepare you for the opening riffs

of “You’re Just About To Lose Your Clown,” the first track off

In the Morning, Walker’s latest, where

he sets an instant groove with chunky guitar riffs, then soars

Carlos Santana-style backed by a sultry Latin beat. Walker stretches

the number for more than five minutes, taking so many

musical twists and turns that your head will spin

long before the final fade.

Walker ably switches gears for the gospel-tinged title track then gets

the party moving again on “Joe’s Jump,” a real foot-stompin’ and

hip-shakin’ blues tune. Fresh and inventive, his licks cut through the shuffling

beat like a well-aimed whiplash. Walker shines the brightest, however, on

a frenzied take on the Rolling Stones’ “2120 South Michigan Avenue.”

He exchanges gritty guitar riffs with an unnamed organist, while his

formidable rhythm section (G.E. Smith on rhythm guitar, T-Bone Wolk on

bass, and drummer Steve Holley) hold down the backbeat. Their

six-minute jam, which veers from hard-driving rock to dirty, funky R&B, is

utterly transcendent. Andria Lisle

Grade: B+

St. Arkansas

Pere Ubu

(SpinART)

One of the great contributions that

rock-and-roll has made to world culture has been the way its

practitioners have demolished a homogenous definition of “vocal talent.”

From Tom Waits’ shots-of-gravel-with-Pennzoil-chasers croak to Liz

Phair’s cool, thin girltalk monotone, rock artists have changed the

qualifications for melodic vocal communication to prize above all the ability to sing

or say what you need to say however you need to sing or say it.

Therefore, it could be argued that esteemed postpunk futurists Pere

Ubu will be remembered more for lead singer David Thomas’ genial,

quivering friendliness than for their initial late-’70s outbursts of synthesized

industrial racket. Though he’s mellowed, Thomas’ voice is still as

alien as his band’s music, but it also continues to humanize their sound.

Embrace his yips and quirks, and you’ll discover one of the most

intriguing frontmen around.

St. Arkansas is easier listening

than touchstones like Dub Housing or The Modern

Dance, but the music remains thunderous and disjunctive,

mixing up Mission Of Burma squeal and whine with Gang Of Four

rhythms and stray sound effects telephones, radio tunings, maybe even

photocopiers. Through it all, Thomas exults in the joys of wearing a suit,

watching the river, and hearing himself sing or say what he needs to say however

he needs to sing or say it. AE

Grade: B+

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

The Flaming Lips

(Warner Bros.)

“Do you realize that happiness will make you cry?” Wayne Coyne asks on “Do You Realize??,” the first single from the Flaming Lips’ new album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. It’s a typical Lips line, simple on the surface but complex, literally mixing happiness and sadness, hope and despair into one idea. This approach gave the band’s previous album, the commercial and critical breakthrough The Soft Bulletin, its warmth and quirky soul, and despite its cartoonish, anime-inspired subject matter, Yoshimi is marked by these same qualities.

The title character of this concept album is “a black belt in karate working for the city.” She has been picked to save the world from the Pink Robots, which can replicate human emotions to an alarming degree. During the first half of the album, she trains for the confrontation (“Fight Test” and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1”) while the robots roll off the assembly line (“One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21”), building up to the big showdown (“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 2”).

The second half of Yoshimi examines the fight’s aftermath, as the hero is plagued by doubts over the validity and usefulness of human emotions. Emotions are messy and painful (“Do you realize that everyone you know will someday die?”), but, ultimately, they’re what make us human. The album ends with the somberly triumphant instrumental “Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia).”

If all this sounds silly, it is: The childish subject matter underscores the enormity of the message. If it sounds like it might be commenting on politics or cloning or bad Steven Spielberg movies like A.I., it’s not: Coyne’s approach is resoundingly personal, never political. He is fascinated with the spectrum of human emotions, even the extremes: “What is love and what is hate and why does it matter?” he asks on “In the Morning Of the Magicians.” His scope is too broad and entirely too idiosyncratic for the merely topical.

In rock, such grave whimsy demands sonic support to match. Fortunately, the music on Yoshimi is exuberant, inventive, and — despite its studio origins — organic. The album continues the Lips’ steady progression away from the guitar-based psychedelic rock of early albums like Now Hear This and Transmissions From the Satellite Heart to a freer, looser, more evocative sound. A few songs forgo Steve Drozd’s signature fuzzed-out drums for computerized beats and keyboard squiggles appropriate to the subject matter. But the music is always anchored in live instrumentation, from Michael Ivins’ free-floating bass line on “In the Morning Of the Magicians” to the simple, gently strummed acoustic guitar on “Do You Realize??”

Otherworldly yet earthy, spacey yet folksy, Yoshimi invokes intimate emotions with far-out imagery. It’s this sensibility that gives the album its unique spark, making these songs devastating as well as uplifting. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: A

Arkansas Heat

The Gossip

(Kill Rock Stars)

A punk-rock three-piece who relocated from small-town Arkansas to the more congenial Olympia, Washington, the Gossip aren’t prolific, following last year’s rousing half-hour debut That’s Not What I Heard with this six-song, 19-minute return. But that modest discography may still be enough to mark them as the most singular-sounding band to emerge from Olympia’s rich rock scene since Sleater-Kinney.

Like the punk they were born from and the Delta blues they evoke, so much of the Gossip’s appeal derives from the music’s D.I.Y. freedom — the sense that anyone could do this. But like so much of the great punk and Delta blues they, during their finest moments, earn comparisons with, what sets them apart from most of their colleagues is the reality that not everyone can do it this well. Lead singer Beth Ditto’s righteous blues-mama howl isn’t the kind of sound you’d expect to hear fronting an indie-rock or punk band: It isn’t an Everygirl voice; it’s a gift. And her band’s musical appropriation of the blues tradition is natural and unadorned in a manner that countless hipper punk bands have never been able to touch.

The Gossip only hit that kind of peak once here, but the lead/title song is some kind of great anthem: “Arkansas Heat” opens with a big, lumbering guitar riff soon doubled by the bass, the same kind of intro trick –one that says, Something big is about to happen — as “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Then Ditto makes her appearance, recounting the band’s rather mundane origin as if it were some kind of Steinbeckian journey with “Two hours south of Memphis, y’all/From a little town in Arkansas/Where the people haven’t changed at all since 1965” before making her move with “Well, you sell off everything you own/Just to make it all on your own/I ain’t a child, I ain’t full-grown/But I’ll prove to you.” The rest is all sass and relief, from the insouciant “Got my whole town sweatin’ me” to the delighted “Tell the preacher just in case he asks/That we ain’t never never comin’ back” to a hopeful closing-credits salute to all their hometown girls “in Memphis now.”

After that, the rest of the record consists of roughly recorded rave-ups, the sound of a band finding a distinct sound and playing around with it — scruffed-up, juke-ready riffs, drum kits bashed as if by Animal from The Muppets, and Ditto’s lost-in-time deep-soul vocals delivering the message, culminating in the 10-minute tent meeting “(Take Back) The Revolution.” — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Stab the Unstoppable Hero

Arlo

(Sub Pop)

Will power pop be the next rock bandwagon after we get the ’80s out of our system? Probably not. Power pop is notoriously maligned, and it’s more stubbornly resistant to change than any other rock subgenre, evolving little since Big Star, Badfinger, and the Raspberries elaborated on the teachings of the Byrds, the Beatles, and the Nazz. It also tends to be geek fodder on a par with prog rock or Monty Python (the Frank Zappa of humor). And this is what makes the genre a little puzzling. After all, the well-written hook is the world’s most underrated aphrodisiac, right? The perfect pop song has a strange and disturbing power over human impulsiveness, causing all kinds of wonderful things to align and catch fire.

Unfortunately, for power-pop band Arlo, the perfect pop song seems unobtainable. They try, and they try hard. They know where their roots lie — late-’70s L.A. power pop — but haven’t managed to locate the perfect hook. This flaw is compounded by big-and-loud alternative-rock radio production, an attempt to make the band the next Foo Fighters or Weezer if only they can catch the ears of the right million people. The dichotomy of the reedy vocals and poor man’s Cheap Trick choruses sharing space with these unrealistic cover-of-Spin aspirations makes for an unfocused effort: This is one would-be power-pop gem that won’t have you whistling as you walk down the street. — Andrew Earles

Grade: C+

Heathen

David Bowie

(ISO/Columbia)

David Bowie hasn’t sounded quite like this in over 20 years. On Heathen, his new album, it’s not that he’s revisiting his old sounds and styles, as the hype has it, but he does more closely resemble the artist as a young man, his creations purer and less tempered by trends — whether he’s starting them or buying into them — than most of his work from the last two decades. Subdued craftsmanship marks this album. Co-produced and engineered by Tony Visconti, who also plays guitar and bass here, Heathen gives us a mature, meditative Bowie/Visconti production reminiscent of yet unlike Bowie’s best work, which, tellingly, was made with Visconti (1980’s Scary Monsters was the last they co-produced).

With covers of the Pixies’ “Cactus” and Neil Young’s “I’ve Been Waiting For You,” Bowie gives a lesson in making someone else’s song your own, inflecting each with his own emotional perspective and time signature. Still a chameleon, he channels contemporary Peter Gabriel (or perhaps Gabriel channeling Bowie circa ’71) on the “Biko” doppelganger “5:15 the Angels Have Gone,” and, to give some idea of the range, sections of the album evoke the Stooges and Lou Reed, both of whom Bowie produced in the past. Serving as guest guitarists are minor deity and Scary Monsters backer Pete Townshend and Nirvana alum and current Foo Fighter Dave Grohl.

Unlike the intimation of its title, which sounds like the name of some laughably awful death-metal band, Heathen is actually a very pretty, pleasant collection of songs. But the first tune, “Sunday,” sets the tone for some other album. Though, according to Bowie, it was written before 9/11, “Sunday” opens into a weighty, otherworldly darkness punctuated by electronic dots and dashes and ominous, ambient humming before delivering some frighteningly clairvoyant lines: “Nothing remains”; “Look for … signs of life”; “Look for the drifters”; “It’s the beginning of nothing/And nothing has changed”; “It’s the beginning of an end/And … everything has changed”; “Now we must burn … /Rise together/Through these clouds/As on wings”; “This is our number/All my trials, Lord/Will be remembered.” — Jeremy Spencer

Grade: B+

The Peer Sessions

Merle Haggard

(Audium)

“Stand up and meet the real Merle Haggard” boasts Roy Horton in the liner notes to The Peer Sessions, the seventh Haggard-related release of 2002. Then Horton goes on to write how great Hag is at mimicking other singers, as if imitation were synonymous with interpretation and the sacred nature of the dozen “classic” songs on the album inspired, perhaps demanded, faithful recreation instead of risky reinvention. Now, country music has always prospered in spite of its conservatism, but anyone can see that this is probably not the best strategy for a cover album.

Think of the exemplary cover albums of the past decades, such as John Prine’s In Spite Of Ourselves or Bob Dylan’s Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong. Both artists took chances with older material and brought out either its commonness or its strangeness. It’s not unreasonable to expect the same thing from Merle Haggard. His singing and writing can rival both Prine’s and Dylan’s, he’s already got a couple of good tribute records under his belt, and as 2000’s If I Could Only Fly showed, his voice is still capable of a rugged, bellicose grandeur. But on The Peer Sessions, security and comfort are the order of the day. The ease of the armada of session musicians and Haggard’s own nonchalance ensure the uniformity and anonymity of the performances. The closest thing to a memorable track is the opener, Jimmie Rodgers’ “Peach Pickin’ Time In Georgia,” mainly because Haggard’s off-pitch crooning makes him sound like Kirk Douglas. At other times, the laid-back odes to women and the South flit through the breeze on their way to oblivion, just a ripple in a long and winding career that’s not half as dead as this release indicates. — Addison Engelking

Grade: C+

Sharpen Your Teeth

Ugly Casanova

(Sub Pop)

Okay, I’ll play along. Who is Ugly Casanova?

According to the press release accompanying Ugly Casanova’s debut album, Sharpen Your Teeth, he’s Edgar Graham, a “mentally unstable” fan of Washington state’s existential art-rock trio Modest Mouse. He allegedly wrote all the songs on Sharpen Your Teeth, sent the demo to Sub Pop Records, and promptly disappeared.

The production notes credit him with most of the guitar parts and vocals, but he sounds suspiciously like Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock (except for lines like “all the government workers heading south,” when he sounds like Beck). He’s got the same high-pitched, hysterical voice, and his lyrics are similarly cracked and metaphysically minded. So either the Notorious E.G.’s obsession has graduated to perfect mimicry, or Brock has resorted to that age-old rock-and-roll cliché, the alter ego.

The songs on Sharpen Your Teeth reveal a lot. While Modest Mouse songs traffic in a bizarre brand of metaphor — “My brain’s the weak heart and my heart’s the long stairs” or “You’re the extra ton of cash in my sinking life raft” — Sharpen Your Teeth‘s emphasis is on metaphor’s little brother, simile: “We clung like barnacles to the hull” goes the lead track, “Barnacles.” The comparison is telling: The difference between metaphor and simile mirrors the difference between these two indie entities. But Ugly Casanova is the weaker of the two — unfocused and lacking the reckless daring, lyrically and musically, that enlivens Modest Mouse albums.

Buried in the back of the CD booklet, the songwriting credits reveal the truth. Brock and his collaborators are listed for each track, dispelling any doubts about who’s really behind Ugly Casanova. It’s a disappointment, especially coming from the man behind the Mouse. Chalking your eccentricities and neuroses up to mental illness is a lot less interesting (and uncomfortably exploitative) than claiming them as your own. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: B-

Try Again

Mike Ireland and Holler

(Ashmont)

For the last decade, Mike Ireland’s life has read like a bad country song: His wife left him for his guitar player, destroying his marriage, his home, and his band, the Starkweathers. Fueled by his broken heart, Ireland launched Holler, built from the remnants of the Starkweathers, in the mid-’90s. A rootsy outfit in the vein of Conway Twitty and Charlie Rich, Holler is more countrypolitan, with its sophisticated instrumentation and traditional song structures, than alt-country. Take, for instance, the weeper “Mr. Rain” on Holler’s latest, Try Again. A string section gracefully anchors the song, bringing to mind Chet Atkins’ saccharine-sweet country of the late ’60s. It’s your grandparents’ music but better: Ireland’s gritty tenor overrides the syrupyness, while guitarist John Horton’s leads keep the orchestration on terra firma.

Jim Reeves would’ve killed for a song as good as “Right Back Where I Started,” a delicate, acoustic-driven ballad that could flatten Nashville’s current country scene like a steamroller. “I just tried to leave this place,” Ireland croons, “Thinking I’d erase my sorrow with the miles/But you don’t outrun a broken heart/You just put it off awhile.”

Like its predecessor (1998’s Learning How To Live), Try Again is an autobiographical song cycle — this time about the pains of starting life over. The album’s opener, “Welcome Back,” finds Ireland visiting his hometown (“Damned if I can find/A single thing that looks the same”), a journey that’s spiritual as well as physical. He addresses nostalgia, reconciliation, and, finally, renewal in under four minutes, heady topics for a country song. These themes run throughout the album, underscored by enough bitterness to keep Ireland in therapy for years. Yet Try Again is ultimately a redemptive effort — 12 beautiful songs that will keep you thinking long after they’re over. — Andria Lisle

Grade: B+