Category: Record Reviews

By the Way

The Red Hot Chili Peppers

(Warner Bros.)

The Red Hot Chili Peppers occupy a strange place in popular music: Springing from a scene most famous for its ’70s SoCal lite-rock and ’80s El-Lay hair bands, the Peppers blend the former’s peaceful, easy feelings with the latter’s party vibe. But Anthony Kiedis’ staccato-rap delivery and the band’s Bad Brains-style funk have influenced numerous rap-rock and nü-metal bands — such as Crazytown and Korn — who cribbed the Red Hot sound without thinking to build on it.

On their eighth album, By the Way, the Peppers shift the balance between rock and funk, favoring catchy rock choruses and tuneful verses over mad grooves to create a more mature sound. More important, these Los Angelenos have looked beyond their immediate forebears to earlier, slightly less mainstream influences, especially Brian Wilson.

Almost every song on By the Way has harmonies: bassist Flea and guitarist John Frusciante oooh and aaah behind Kiedis’ vocals, which, as ever, are a little flat in pitch yet endearing and vulnerable. And tracks like “Can’t Stop” and “The Zephyr Song” are built around catchy hooks that continually fold in on themselves.

For California pop breeziness, “Tear” stands out: Its Mellotron intro gives way to an easy vibe and a heraldic chorus punctuated by a concise, note-perfect solo by Frusciante, which is repeated by Flea on trumpet. It’s not only the album’s finest moment but also one of the best updates on Wilson’s signature orchestral pop, all the more moving for being so unexpected.

Such a sunny surface hides typically dark subject matter, specifically drugs and death — twin demons that have haunted just about everything the band has done since the overdose death of founding member Hillel Slovak. The album’s more expansive, more adventurous sound lends gravity to such fears, making songs like “This Is the Place” and “Dosed” all the more devastating.

Simultaneously haunted and hopeful, By the Way is not only the Peppers’ best effort to date, it’s also one of the best mainstream rock albums in ages.

— Stephen Deusner

Grade: A-

The History Of Township Music

Various Artists

(Wrasse import)

After years of housecleaning the vaults of U.S. record companies, we now have access to everything you could possibly hope to know about the history of American pop. So it’s about damn time it started happening with Africa too, and, lo and behold, it has. There may be no better example than this more-or-less chronological 28-song compilation of classic South African singles — a great history lesson, especially if you read the liner notes, and, even more importantly, a cavalcade of pleasure.

The disc opens with three important pre-’50s songs. Thomas Mabiletsa’s 1944 “Zulu Piano Melody No. 1, Pt. 1” looks back (already) at marabi, South Africa’s indigenous early take on ragtime, which had been steadfastly ignored by record companies that hated its lowbrow origins. It’s followed by the minstrel-show tune “Rea Gae” by the Pietersburg Melodians and Solomon Linda’s Original Evening Birds’ “Mbube,” the first incarnation of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and Africa’s most famous melody, both from 1939.

But it’s with the Royal Players’ “Khala Zo°Me,” from 1954, that the disc really picks up speed, introducing the township jazz style that dominates the disc’s middle tracks. Sweet but not treacly cuts like the Young Stars’ jazzy girl-group “Ulova” and the cotton-candy melody of the Solven Whistlers’ “Something New in Africa” achieve a grace that, as the disc progresses, gives way to the grittier sound of mbaqanga, or township jive. The guitar rhythms jump harder and weirder on Big Four’s 1966 “Mr. Music” and the Mahotella Queens’ 1967 “Mama Thula.” By the time the disc reaches the Boyoyo Boys’ 1975 “Tsotsi” and Izintombi Zesi Manje Manje’s 1977 “Omzala Bakho,” the lithe beat of old has been upended and hardened.

History ends in 1981, the same year the earliest tracks from the classic 1985 compilation The Indestructible Beat Of Soweto were cut, and it’s a hell of an efficient map of Indestructible Beat‘s lineage. — Michaelangelo Matos

Grade: A

Romantica

Luna

(Jetset)

Alt-rock perennials Luna have managed to fashion a (semi)profitable career building mid-tempo guitarchitecture leavened with the occasional dumb joke. But this isn’t a glib dismissal of a band and a subculture: Consistent success within a genre is a remarkable accomplishment, even if it eventually puts the band in a no-win position. Veer off the path with too much noise or percussion or story songs or whatever and the band has “lost the magic”; stay the same and risk permanent irrelevance to lovesick kids and wistful art fascists alike.

Besides, when a band does what it does as well as Luna, demands for evolution seem hasty and infantile. They make rock-and-roll comfort food for at least a couple thousand folks out there, and Romantica is more of the same: 12 tunes with a cumulative know-where-when-we-get-there attitude so palpable, it’s downright seasonal. The songs about girls and crushes and “the agony of love” suck you in, but my favorite line comes from “Black Postcards,” in which Dean Wareham sings, “If I had to do it all again/I wouldn’t/Throw it all away/Throw it all away.” Aw, c’mon: Throwaways (and repetition) have lit up his albums for as long as he’s been making them.

A timeless band if you’re not in a hurry.

— Addison Engelking

Grade: A-

On

Imperial Teen

(Merge)

How many perfect pop records does the world need? For what it’s worth, here’s one more. Yes, another of those vexing recordings that does everything right from start to finish. And Imperial Teen has produced two such albums already.

Formed by Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum in 1994 as an alternative to the “heavy band” stuff he was mired in at the time, Imperial Teen signed with Slash very quickly and churned out a great first record, Seasick, in 1996 and an even better second record, What Is Not To Love, for the label in 1999. Then they got dropped in an artist purge by Slash’s parent company, Universal. Now they’re on the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, indie Merge with their best record yet. Sound familiar? Getting dropped by a pseudo-major label and getting picked up by an indie label is becoming the rule rather than the exception for a lot of bands these days. But, in Imperial Teen’s case, it’s a good thing.

So what does the band offer us with this third trip to the alt-pop well? Twelve great originals, subtle production by Redd Kross’ Steven McDonald, good guitar and keyboard work, and hooks, choruses, and melodies that just keep churning around in your noggin’ — in other words, just what fans have come to expect from this underrated band. Consider your purchase an investment in a culture that can keep on producing minor gems like this. n — Ross Johnson

Grade: A-

Murray Street

Sonic Youth

(Geffen)

Rock-and-roll is just full of surprises, isn’t it? Just when I thought it was safe to assume that avant-garde avatars Sonic Youth would age nobly and ease (relatively) quietly into some songless netherworld — where guitar tunings, dreamy vocals, and amplified buzz and percussion were the only virtues worth pursuing, with an LP every 18 months or so — they return with a new record that reconnects their signature noise with some long-lost signature riffs in a compact, endlessly listenable package. Rock-and-roll is a renewable power source after all.

Most music fans know who Sonic Youth is and what they “stand” for in the indie-rock community. Following that, you probably fall into one of two broad categories: You’re a lifelong fan who already owns the new album and loves it to pieces, or you’re a pop generalist who has Daydream Nation and possibly Goo but really doesn’t feel the need to seek out other Sonic Youth product since they seem to do the same thing over and over.

Okay, it’s true you can break every Sonic Youth album of the last decade into its constituent parts: the enveloping feedback, the alienating feedback, the snarling Kim Gordon vocal, the meandering, “quiet” part of the album (lasting anywhere from five to 40 minutes), the flirtation with pop melodies, the light stomping of drummer Steve Shelley somewhere beneath the waves of lilting skronk. But will it make a difference if I say there’s less noise-as-noise-and-music and more music-with-noise-as-noise-and-music this time around, and while all the parts are on the new record, the bracing, clear-eyed result begins with the best 25 minutes of music I’ve heard all year on this band’s best record in 10 years?

Because Murray Street really is all that, and the opening four songs — “The Empty Page,” “Disconnection Notice,” “Rain On Tim,” and “Karen Revisited” — show off a sweet lyricism and brute riff-rock power that only bands like the late-model live Velvet Underground and the late-model live Miles Davis space-funk confederacy ever approached. Sonic Youth’s considerable accomplishment deserves mention alongside those rock-and-roll legends now more than ever: All three showed the ability to inspect and rework their sound to suit their own creative impulses. But as geniuses, they don’t owe anything like this to you or me. Take a chance. Who knows how long it will be before Sonic Youth accidentally step in sync with contemporary pop demands again? — Addison Engelking

Grade: A

Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape

Me’Shell NdegéOcello

(Maverick)

On her fourth release, Me’Shell NdegéOcello embarks on an intimate musical odyssey, taking the old axiom “The personal is political” to new heights of awareness. Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape is all about how NdegéOcello came to be the person she is today — a bisexual black female and mother as well as a musician with outspoken views on some rather taboo subjects. In particular, she addresses the way traditional roles and beliefs regarding race, sex, and religion have warped our self-images.

Daughter of jazz saxophonist Jacques Johnson (she adopted her Swahili surname, which means “free like a bird,” as a teen), NdegéOcello earned her chops on the D.C. go-go circuit in the ’80s. She’s done session work with everyone from the Stones to Herbie Hancock to Madonna and is the first female to grace the cover of Bass Guitar Magazine. She describes her music as “improvisational hip-hop-based R&B,” but soul, blues, and rock-and-roll feature in her mixtape as well.

True to form, Cookie contains some controversial material. She rants about everything from the complacency and materialism of some African Americans (she lists “priorities 1 through 6” as “gaudy jewelry; sneakers made for $1.08 but bought for $150; wasted weed, wasted high; the belief that we are legendary underworld figures being chased; sex like in the movies; a mate to pay bills, bills, and automobills”) to Christianity and its links to corporate sponsorship (“If Jesus Christ was alive today, he’d be incarcerated like the rest of the brothers, while the Devil would have a great apartment on the Upper East Side and be a guest VJ on Total Request Live“). She also celebrates loving women in sexually explicit detail framed by sweet soul music.

NdegéOcello has put together a hypnotic musical collage interspersed with words of wisdom from black activists and poets. “Akel Dama (Field Of Blood)” is a beautiful piece — sheer poetry set to a pulsating heartbeat rhythm. “Earth” is a dreamy paean to Mother Earth with a signature Stevie Wonder harmonica riff, while the remix of “Pocketbook” by Missy Elliott and Rockwilder features a guest rap by Redman and background vocals by newcomer Tweet for some seriously righteous in-ya-face funk.

In a sense, the music here is more a soundtrack to NdegéOcello’s search for selfhood than a cohesive musical statement. Her last two albums flowed better musically than this work. Yet Cookie is still a mesmerizing glimpse into the psyche of a woman struggling to break through the artificial boundaries of race, sex, politics, and religion. As she sums it up so beautifully in her liner notes, “No longer do I search for a messiah. I believe salvation and truth will come in the form of Spirit, not in flesh, not with melanin, not man or woman, from east or west, neither great nor powerful. Freedom is not given or taken, it is realized.” Amen! — Lisa Lumb

Grade: B+

Young Criminals’ Starvation League

Bobby Bare Jr.

(Bloodshot)

Named for his country-music mainstay father, Bobby Bare Jr. continued the family’s musical-outlaw tradition when he scandalized Nashville with his hard-rockin’ outfit Bare Jr. a few years back. With his latest release — a solo album — Bare nearly burns down the house, pointedly addressing has-been rock stars, eccentric local characters, and even himself on occasion. He’s a clown but a soulful, sad-faced one, tripping over oversized shoes as his own teardrops obscure his vision. “Good news sounds better while I’m falling down,” he sings on the folky acoustic number “Mehan.” Bare’s voice, rusty as an old screen door, matches his soul-baring mood, apathetic lyrics contradicting his underlying tenderness.

A 21st-century variation on Townes Van Zandt’s gut-wrenching ’70s masterpieces, Young Criminals’ Starvation League manages to simultaneously deliver scathing diatribes and loving tributes — often within the same song. Fire up “Dig Down,” a talking-blues number directed at Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix, and others. “Thanks for nothing,” Bare Jr. tells Townshend, “your generation used up all the feelings/If we rock, it looks like we’re ripping you off.” Yet, a few verses later, he comes to his own conclusion: “I do the best with the leftovers that I’ve got.” Cynicism never sounded so good. — Andria Lisle

Grade: A-

Bare Jr. will be at the Hi-Tone Café on Thursday, July 18th, with the Drive-By Truckers.

18 Again

Amy Rigby

(Koch)

Rock critics get (most of) their records free and, as a result, have a responsibility to tell people about them. I’ve always believed this to be an important service, especially with major-label control of radio and MTV putting a serious limit on information music consumers have to draw from. Long before I ever wrote a word about popular music, it’s how I discovered most of the records I cared deepest about.

And along with this service is the advocacy function of trying to convince readers to take a chance on music they’ve never heard. I go into all of this because I can’t think of a single contemporary pop-music artist I want to turn readers on to as much as Nashville-via-New York singer-songwriter Amy Rigby: In Rigby’s case, it isn’t a matter of her merely deserving a wider audience; it’s the certainty that the audience is out there and just hasn’t discovered her yet. Apparently, her record label feels the same way. Why else release an anthology of previously released material (with two exceptions) after only three solo albums?

A post-punk grad (the ex-wife of dB’s drummer Will Rigby and member of a band, the Shams, who released a couple of records for indie-rock label Matador in the early ’90s), a former temp worker, and a single mom, Rigby made her bid to be American music’s poet laureate of structural underemployment and bohemian domesticity with her 1996 debut Diary Of a Mod Housewife. A much-cherished cult item that became an unlikely critical smash, Diary was Exile In Guyville for grown-ups. But if Diary Of a Mod Housewife was about saving a life, subsequent efforts (1998’s Middlescene and 2000’s The Sugar Tree) were merely about living one.

18 Again taps six songs from Diary but holds off introducing them until track five, with her definitive anthem “Beer and Kisses.” And while the considerable triumph of 18 Again may be how it integrates flawlessly chosen highlights from Middlescene and The Sugar Tree into the ubernarrative of Rigby’s career album, you can hear the difference immediately. “Beer and Kisses” sounds like a standard now, a (tough)love song that begins “We met in the supermarket” and somehow turns “Get home from work/Turn on the light (Get in a fight/Make it alright)/Sit on the couch/Spend the whole night there” into one of the decade’s great sing-along choruses.

Musically, Rigby works in a residual-culture milieu that anyone but the most tight-assed avant-gardist should be able to feel: sturdy bar-band rock-and-roll occasionally spiked with sharp flourishes, like the subtle Spectorisms of “All I Want,” the Chuck Berry moves of “20 Questions,” and the steel-guitar accents on “Beer and Kisses.”

And in the course of finding the right balance between “All I Want” and “What I Need,” Rigby traces what happens when urban daydreams of art and freedom dissolve into workweek monotony and how relationships take a hit along the way. If you’ve ever had a day job that subsidized a dream and felt the dream slipping away, put your liberal-arts degree to work in the service industry, felt adulthood and domesticity creep in on your fantasy of never-ending nightlife, tried to patch together a marriage that’s falling apart, or just felt like stopping in the middle of your daily routine to shout something like “I’m not just some soulless jerk/Hey, I got a band/I know what life is for!” then Amy Rigby writes songs for you. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A

Title TK

The Breeders

(4AD/Elektra)

It probably wouldn’t have mattered if the Breeders had waited one year or nine to release a follow-up to their popular 1993 career album Last Splash. It was destined to live up to its name, at least commercially: Despite its kick-ass attitude and crunchy guitar pop, it was the single “Cannonball” — a novelty hit from a serious band — that put twins Kim and Kelley Deal on the pop-culture map. And novelty songs have little return value careerwise, so any subsequent release from the sisters was likely to garner critical praise but sell only to diehards.

So don’t expect that long-long-awaited follow-up, Title TK, to fly off the shelves. It may not prove as popular as its predecessor, but in place of commercial success comes invigorated artistry. Instead of updating their sound to the Noughts or reliving their glory days of the Nineties, the Breeders find a place somewhere in between: The new album is somber, more mature, but no less alive. It’s as if they traveled back to ’93 and imagined what sort of album they might make nine years later, if things had gone a bit differently.

The Deals were never afraid of a pop hook or a catchy guitar riff, and Title TK is full of both, from the instantly memorable choruses of “London Song” and “Son Of Three” to the countryesque angularities of “Full On Idle.” But it’s “Off You” that leaves its mark on the few of us left listening; it’s a disarmingly quiet moment, all gently strummed guitar and harsh vocals. “I am the autumn in the scarlet,” Kim sings almost tenderly, “I am the makeup on your eyes.” Time has ravaged her voice, which sounds torn with sandpaper, but it is all the more evocative and vulnerable for its imperfections.

If nothing else, Title TK shares with its predecessor a loose spontaneity and a musical adventurousness that ensure surprises, one of which will hopefully be a quick follow-up. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: A-

The Land Beyond the Mountains

Don Howland

(Birdman Records)

Ever wonder where the White Stripes got a big chunk of their stripped-down blues-skronk approach? Chances are Jack White’s record collection contains more than one title by Don Howland’s rockin’ guitar and drums duo the Bassholes. If you were being particularly uncharitable, you might say that the White Stripes completely co-opted the Bassholes’ sound and turned it into dollars and sex in much the same way Jon Spencer used his experience playing with the Gibson Brothers (an influential band Howland formed with transplanted Memphian Jeff Evans) into something eminently marketable in the form of his Blues Explosion.

By now, Howland and Evans are probably resigned to their roles as crud-rock pioneers ripe for plunder as source music. Too bad there’s no copyright law covering musical-style infringement, because Howland and Evans might have a pretty good case against pretty boys White and Spencer.

Such legal action ain’t likely to happen anytime soon, so Evans and Howland just keeping making darn fine records that deserve a wider audience. Now, it’s Howland’s turn to make another good ‘un, and he does with The Land Beyond the Mountains. It’s just Howland on guitar, bass, and organ and in spooky voice (he sounds a lot like Iggy Pop on “Gimme Danger” on several tracks here — nothing wrong with that). Funny thing is … Howland sounds like a full band because he uses a kind of layered lo-fi production approach that is amazingly rich and horribly distorted at the same time — a Southern gothic Pet Sounds for the four-track home-recording set. n — Ross Johnson

Grade: A-

The Private Press

DJ Shadow

(MCA)

I have heard the future … and — go figure — it sounds like the past.

That’s because DJ Shadow, six long years after his debut LP Endtroducing…, has returned with his second proper release, another brilliantly produced pastiche of past and present, the sample-heavy The Private Press. Again defying categorization, Shadow harmoniously fuses elements that naturally repel one another, delivering a record of pure scratch-and-mix fun and aural pleasure. It’s an echoing yet wholly distinctive confirmation of the found-art aesthetic he espoused with Endtroducing.

On The Private Press, Shadow shows that he’s still a crafty turntablist focused on traversing the spectrum of musical genres and creating his own kind of jazz — to use the word’s original connotation of free musical improvisation. A suburban white kid from California, he seems to be drawn to just about everything but hair metal (thank God). His projects up to now include playing DJ as a member of U.N.K.L.E. on the electronica-rock experiment Psyence Fiction and backing up old Solesides labelmates Blackalicious and Lyrics Born and other rappers on Quannum Spectrum.

Here, though, he’s the star. On the 14 “tunes” making up this disc, Shadow continues to draw from the vast collection of lost albums no one ever even thought to go looking for. Sampling the combined esoterica of ’60s/’70s one-shots Saint Steven (?) and Phluph (??), “Fixed Income” sounds the depths before breaking into patent hip-hop beats punctuated by tricked-out guitar flourishes, meandering, drawn-out jams, and some anachronistic harpsichord dredged up from the psychedelic past. The laughable boast of some unimaginative DJ on “Walkie Talkie” break-beats into inspired scratching backed up by obese, blown-speaker, beyond-fuzzy bass licks. Following that hyperactive display, “Giving Up the Ghost” pauses for some ethereal, Eastern-influenced trance. Strings lovingly present “Six Days,” its beatnik bongos and effects-laden organ sampled from another ‘delic relic, Colonel Bagshot (???), whose lament “Six Day War” is sampled pretty straight-up. “Right Thing/GDMFSOB” throws the now-famous Leonard Nimoy/Mr. Spock “pure energy” sample into what sounds like a virtual melee of house DJs, and “Monosylabik,” in which you can actually hear the trip-hop mothership land, is one of the toughest, tightest tracks on the disc. It’s like a dizzy, worshipful compilation from the Atari sound-effects lab circa 1983 — which, of course, makes it almost supernaturally cool.

— Jeremy Spencer

Grade: A-

And the Surrounding Mountains

Radar Brothers

(Merge)

In writing about the Radar Brothers, the biggest challenge, one that I am about to muff splendidly in this very sentence, is to avoid comparing them to Pink Floyd. But to deny the inflatable pig that hovers in your consciousness as you listen to And the Surrounding Mountains would be knavish. Now I know that “progressive rock” has gained a little credibility in the last couple of years, but no one, not even the proggiest of proglodytes, lauds poor Floyd. In fact, it is hard to understate the achievement of the Radar Brothers: They are an extremely listenable, inspirational, and, most of all, guilt-free updating of Pink Floyd. Gone are the Orwellian harangues, the study-hall antiestablishmentarianism, and the bloated arrangements. And I’m not even going to mention the dismal dregs that were Floyd’s releases in the late ’80s and early ’90s — The Division Bell and The Delicate Sound of Phoning It In. The Radar Brothers’ And the Surrounding Mountains retains the mournful majesty, the spacebound introspection, and those amazing songs that imperceptibly swell with grandeur.

It’s been three years since the Radar Brothers’ last album, The Singing Hatchet, and the most obvious improvement has been in the production, all of which was overseen by lead brother Jim Putnam in his renovated home studio. The amount of time put into this endeavor is easy to discern. And the Surrounding Mountains is an incredibly lush recording; its sonic strata recall the neutral-hued layers of the desertscapes that adorn the front cover. With song titles populated by so many family members — “You and the Father,” “Sisters,” “Uncles,” and “Mothers” — the album has the mood of a trip home for the holidays — only without the esophagus-clogging shame and self-loathing.

The Radar Brothers, due to their somnambulatory gait, also get lumped in with bands like Low and Codeine in the unfortunately titled “slowcore” genre. I prefer the term used by the Radar Brothers themselves — “sophisticated minimalism.” Imagine if Neil Young’s Crazy Horse got all sophisticatedly minimal and sent all of their chunky riffs to a rich-kid fat camp to slim down. Well, for one thing, they’d have to change their name to Fancy White Pony or something, but they would also sound a little like the Radar Brothers. — David L. Dunlap Jr.

Grade: A

December’s Child

Mark Olson and The Creekdippers

(Dualtone)

With his last major release, the excellent My Own Jo Ellen, Mark Olson and his band of merry men (plus wife Victoria Williams) seemed to have finally found a balance between spontaneity and the focused songwriting he had previously lacked. But with this disappointing new album, Olson flops right back into his old bad habits. The opening cut galumphs into the piano-thumping gospel style that’s Olson’s trademark sound. It’s great stuff, but unfortunately it sounds almost exactly like songs he’s done before. His songwriting is stale, and attempts to orchestrate some numbers just sound amateurish. Olson was obviously going for a Neil Young Harvest effect, but he couldn’t pull it off. Despite all this, December’s Child does contain a few very good songs, including the delicate title cut.

The best tune on the whole release is, ironically enough, his first collaboration with former Jayhawks songwriting partner Gary Louris since Olson left the group. “Say You’ll Be Mine” is a sweet slice of alt-country that possesses all the magic and spark that made those first two Jayhawks albums so special. The chemistry between these two songwriters is stronger than ever.

And on the closing cut, “One-Eyed Black Dog Moses,” a longtime live favorite, they pull out all the stops and do a funkified blues thing with some great psychedelic-metal touches. I love the way that Williams finds her inner bluesmama growl on this one. Of his recent material at least, I think Olson’s heavier stuff is more multidimensional. Writing in this genre seems to make him stretch more, and he would do well to keep exploring this path. — Lisa Lumb

Grade: B

Veni Vidi Vicious

The Hives

(Sire/Burning Heart/Epitaph)

The subject of some pretty breathless hype over the last few months, Sweden’s the Hives, with their minimalist matching outfits (black suits with white ties and white shoes) and carefully determined retro sound, are self-constructed garage-rock heroes on a par with unlikely American stars the White Stripes: From a distance, skeptics might think the group was concocted in a lab somewhere, like a hipper version of the boy-band phenomenon. But, as with fellow buzz bands such as the Stripes and the Strokes, listening is believing.

The band’s American debut, Veni Vidi Vicious (released overseas back in 1999), is a breathless, amateurish, 12-song, 28-minute barrage of joyful noise that must be confusing a lot of big-money modern-rock producers and commercial-radio types (“This is what kids are getting excited about? But it sounds so cheap and unprofessional“). On first blush, it sounds more like an ace genre record à la the Strokes’ Is This It than a sui generis masterwork à la the White Stripes’ more idiosyncratic White Blood Cells. For all the fuss, you wonder if this band is any better than Memphis’ own Oblivians were? Well, the answer is that they probably aren’t, but the Oblivians were pretty great, and so are the Hives, in a more calculating way.

Veni Vidi Vicious draws on the wilder side of ’60s and ’70s protopunk — more Sonics, MC5, and early Kinks than Count Five or Standells. The opening track, “The Hives –Declare Guerre Nucleaire,” is a galvanizing statement of purpose, a short, sharp, shrieking introduction that amounts to a “Kick Out the Jams” for the new garage-rock revival, only better. Lead singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist delivers some delicious sloganeering (“Had an atomic bore –in 2004/Did some atomic tricks — in 2006,” etc.) over detonating guitars then earns his moniker by telling the listener that, as for the odd-numbered years, “THE GUESS IS YOURS.” That’s when the true guitar meltdown occurs, and a more invigorating minute and 35 seconds of pure chaos you won’t hear anytime soon.

The “epics” here are the singles “Main Offender” and “Hate To Say I Told You So” and the anthemic “Die, All Right!” On “Main Offender,” an unaccompanied riff explodes into infernal noise like a messier update of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” while Almqvist’s broken-English invocation of shiftless teenage kicks manages a combination of vague and incendiary that rivals Kurt Cobain’s menacing gibberish. And “Die, All Right!” is about as punk a song as you could imagine about signing a big-money deal with a corporate record company: “Hey! I got some money, and tonight I’m gonna spend it/Yeah! They gave me a paper, and I went ahead and penned it/And I say, Thank you, Mr. CEO/I filled my pockets, now I might as well/Die!”

But the band is just as powerful when sticking to the loud/fast-rules ethos: A tossed-off number like the middle-finger-flaunting “A Get Together To Tear It Apart” has some of the land-speed-record locomotion of post-hardcore Hüsker Dü. The Charles Atlas revenge fantasy of “Outsmarted” is a snotty, breakneck shout-along gem. And the bass-drum beat and strangled guitars of “Supply and Demand” (opening line: “My boss is a probable bore/Put me hands and knees on scrub-able floor”) earn it a spot in the rock-and-roll “work sucks” pantheon alongside Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and punk-era touchstones like the Clash’s “Clampdown” and the Replacements’ “God Damn Job.”

Only once over 28 minutes that feel more like 12 does this band vary from their go-for-the-jugular pace. And “Find Another Girl,” a faithful cover of an old Jerry Butler chestnut, is charming (how many young American bands would actually know a song like this?) but a little awkward. It shows that Howlin’ Pelle is more screamer than singer and the band is better at dive-bombing than nuance.

And if the sound of white garage bands playing mid-tempo, soulful numbers is really a commercially viable thing, Memphis’ Reigning Sound might get rich. But don’t bet on it.

Grade: A-

God Loves Ugly

Atmosphere

(Fat Beats)

On last year’s Lucy Ford, Minneapolis hip-hop duo Atmosphere (producer Ant and MC Slug) produced an underground masterpiece, its gulf between groundbreaking artistry and commercial marginality maybe the greatest in the genre’s history. As a follow-up, the new God Loves Ugly is a minor disappointment and an intentional left turn.

Multiracial mouthpiece Slug has emerged over the last few years as a hip-hop hero of choice among the eggheads and introverts who make up so-called indie rap’s backpacker/rock critic bohemian fringe. But on God Loves Ugly, Slug intentionally downplays the gifts upon which he’s built much of his audience: The epiphany-laden, unprecedentedly empathetic, carefully constructed story-songs that littered Lucy Ford have been replaced by an increased emphasis on off-the-dome stream of consciousness, the keenly observant character sketches replaced by more conventional first-person. The result is plenty of memorable moments and hip-hop quotables but far fewer memorable songs.

The album’s second song, “The Bass and the Movement,” is a declaration of independence disguised as a battle rhyme. Slug confronts preconceptions that his “emo” rap style (which he actually traces back to 2Pac) is as good for you as granola by unleashing some unlikely thug life then, Eminem-style, slips into a sotto voce aside that imagines what the reaction from old fans might be: “Oh, my goodness, Sluggo went and flipped his style/We haven’t really heard him act like this in a while.” And he expresses a similar rejection of expectations on “One of a Kind,” chastising his core audience: “One little, two little, three little indie rap/Headphones, backpack/Watch ’em all piggyback/Switched up my styles, they all complain.”

But as much as Slug may purposefully tweak his persona by making noise “for the women who swallow stuff,” he’s still a deep-thinking charmer who expresses his love for sparring with girls who “give good brain,” still the same doleful, anxiety-laden agonizer who practices hip hop as “therapy on top of turntable riffs.”

“Hair” is a classic Slug narrative, a tale of meeting a “groupie” (“Bands like us don’t have groupies. Haven’t you ever heard our music?”) after a show — flirtatious, nuanced, tense, and surprising — and then denying the expected payoff by having him and his lady friend die in a car crash on the way to her place. Elsewhere, songs such as “Give Me,” “Lovelife,” and “Godlovesugly” may lack the focus of Lucy Ford‘s best songs but are verbal and philosophical tours de force nonetheless. “The first rule is to make the verse true/Even if it hurts you/You have to wear the pain like a stain,” he raps on “Give Me.” He lives up to the promise throughout the album.

There’s a glimpse of Slug talking to a fan after a show about “that world you envision through the layers of tears/The ones you choke and keep hidden when the players are near.” There’s the kind of self-deprecating anti-braggadocio that’s at the core of his persona, opening one song: “I wear my scars like the rings on a pimp/I live life like the captain of a sinking ship.” There’s his penchant for community-building sloganeering that still never rescues him from his curse as terminally lonely outsider, as on the “Shrapnel” boast “My posse’s full of women, computer nerds, and thugs/Much to my dismay, I’m none of the above.” And, of course, there’s simple rhyme for rhyme’s sake (one of my faves: “From the top of Fiji/To the bottom of Christina Ricci/Big ups if you bought my CD!”).

And if God Loves Ugly is an album about independence, it’s one that cuts in more ways than one. After repeatedly tweaking alt-rap convention and establishing his allegiance to hip hop writ large, Slug opts out of that game too, setting off for a land of his mind’s design with “Breathing”‘s more subtle declaration of freedom: “Do you carry a gun?/I guess it all depends on where you come from/Surroundings are gonna dictate the needs/I’m out, I wanna live around lakes and trees.”

Grade: A-

Maladroit

Weezer

(Interscope)

In the past decade, Weezer have made only three albums, each one catchy and memorable — despite the long gap between numbers two and three — and each one with its own distinct formula. The band’s eponymous debut (the blue album) melded pop hooks to the polite sounds of mid-’90s alternative radio. The follow-up, 1996’s Pinkerton, welded similar pop hooks to punk snottiness, its looser yet more accomplished sound almost unanimously maligned by critics. And the much-hyped, long-awaited, eponymous third album (the green album) took Rivers Cuomo’s by-now signature pop hooks and pasted them onto heavy-metal riffs, raising eyebrows and sending those very same critics down to the corner used-CD store to find out what those meddling emo fans had known all along.

So Maladroit, Weezer’s fourth album but only its second with a damn title, marks a momentous point in the group’s career: Not only is it the first time the band has used the same formula to make two albums, it’s also the first album on which pop is not the foundation.

Like its bright-green predecessor, Maladroit is full of hard-rock riffage and angsty snarl, but there’s little here that is memorable. Cuomo & Co. seem to have used most of the good riffs and all the catchy hooks on the green album. Songs like “Take Control,” “Dope Nose,” and the strangely aggressive “Slob” rock without any real urgency and fall out of memory with the final strained chord. Slower numbers like “Death and Destruction” and the lame “December,” which even Cuomo’s unrelenting irony can’t redeem, slow to a crawl before anything memorable happens. “Burnt Jamb” attempts to re-create the idyllic offhandedness of “Island In the Sun,” but Cuomo inserts an uninspired, unrelated guitar riff in place of a chorus.

Without pop hooks as anchors, Cuomo’s emotionally unraveled persona is surprisingly hard to take. It was endearing on blue and green, and on Pinkerton, his emotional pain was well-matched only by his candid expressiveness. But on Maladroit, his lyrics are whiny, self-absorbed, grating, and not the least bit sympathetic.

By now, Weezer’s rock-and-roll equations have been recalculated by scores of artists, often with better results. Compared to Maladroit, Phantom Planet’s The Guest is catchier, and Andrew W.K.’s debut is loads more fun. Too bad nothing on this ho-hum album adds up so well.

Then again, maybe time will be good to this one too. Give Maladroit five years to marinate and it could become another cult fave. But not for now. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: C

New Connection

Todd Snider

(Oh Boy Records)

The problem with most singer-songwriters is that one side of the hyphen always outweighs the other: They’re either gifted singers who can’t write an honest, original song to save their lives or they’re fluent lyricists who can’t sing their own songs persuasively. With his insightful lyrics and well-meaning but white-bread voice, former Memphian Todd Snider once landed squarely in the latter camp, but on his fifth album, New Connection, he unexpectedly blurs the line between his strengths and weaknesses.

The best moments on New Connection are those when his voice — which has assumed an evocative rasp over time — contains enough emotion to match his lyrics. On “Rose City,” for instance, he inflects the last note of each line to perfectly capture his feelings of dislocation and longing.

In this regard, “Anywhere” might just be the highlight of his career. He builds the song around what would be a throwaway line for most other singer-songwriters: “Let’s get out of here/I’ll go anywhere/With you.” But he sings it in a fragile, broken whisper, his understated delivery making the words all the more direct and startling.

Alas, Snider the songwriter is also clever — too clever. On “Vinyl Records” (note the redundancy), he rambles on and on about the artists in his record collection, sounding like Billy Joel teaching American history. Snider’s keen enough to poke fun at himself for having “piles and piles and piiiles of Tom Petty,” but there’s little point to the song beyond revealing his own cleverness. And on “Beer Run,” which is set at a Robert Earl Keen concert, he tells us about “a couple of frat guys from Abilene” who get duped with a marijuana cigarette. Not to generalize, but I find that really hard to believe.

Despite his tenure as a singer-songwriter, Snider still sounds like he’s learning the ropes and paying his dues, which aren’t necessarily bad things. Once he gets a better grasp of his own strengths and weaknesses, he’ll give us his breakthrough album full of heartbreakers. —SD

Grade: B

You Can’t Fight What You Can’t See

Girls Against Boys

(Jade Tree)

Yes, but who is really looking? I don’t think anyone was too jarred when Girls Against Boys’ last album, the inappropriately named Freak*on*ica (if it’s a joke, GVSB, try to make your next one funny) failed as both major-label debut and artistic statement. Bidding war + a now-defunct major label + previously established indie band = Surprise! The album sucked! The music biz has boiled this particular equation into vapors for the past 10 years, and GVSB have spent the past four removing themselves from it and reentering the world of the independent label. The label in question is Jade Tree, the imprint that has literally birthed, nurtured, and destroyed the “emo” genre.

GVSB are relocated stalwarts of DisChord Records, with three of the static members coming out of DisChord’s overlooked band Soul Side. Because I like to do my research, I exhumed GVSB’s 1995 release Cruise Yourself from my record shelf and immediately understood why this 7-year-old piece maintains its mint condition. GVSB have always been good at one thing that is not a good thing. They mix three variables to poor ends: the Fall, the thankfully forgotten swagger of the Cocktail Nation movement, and the early ’90s aggro-rock usually associated with their onetime label Touch and Go. That combo sounds just as ill-conceived coming out of the speakers as it looks on paper. After the major-label jaunt that produced the Garbage-flavored (no jokes, please) electro-metal of the record I refuse to mention again, GVSB 2002 are making some middle-of-the-road, post-wallet-chain rock that should appeal to the cerebral Queens of the Stone Age fan who’s not afraid to let the term “badass” enter his/her vernacular every so often. A top-down, crotch-grabbing summertime ride for the sensitive, aging indie rocker, You Can’t Fight has GVSB falling out of the unoriginality tree and finally hitting every branch. — Andrew Earles

Grade: D+

Down the Road

Van Morrison

(Universal Records)

With his trademark transatlantic growl and impeccable sense of timing, Van Morrison is the stuff of legend. As has so often been noted, this guy could sing the proverbial phone book and still keep an audience enraptured, and his live recordings always have magical moments. Despite this, Morrison’s propensity to dabble has made some of his latest studio recordings rather hit-or-miss.

Morrison’s often idiosyncratic taste in music and collaborators sometimes works wonderfully well and produces classics. (His work with John Lee Hooker and the Chieftains being good examples.) But sometimes these experiments just leave you wondering what the appeal was in the first place. Remember that weird skiffle album from a few years back? For those of us who came to know and love Van the Man as the quintessential R&B-bred rock-and-roller, however, Down the Road is a sterling treat, his most accessible and consistent album in years.

The record is a sort of primer on American roots music, the raw gristle that Morrison first cut his teeth on as a lad while still begging for bootleg American blues and R&B albums from merchant seamen who smuggled them into the Belfast docks. Down the Road touches on virtually every genre that has informed Morrison’s career, from doo wop to boogie woogie to country blues, and, of course, straight-up rock-and-roll. It’s gritty, no-nonsense, back-to-basics stuff, and it’s great. Morrison is still on that never-ending spiritual search, exploring the myriad ways that music can trigger the ultimate transcendental mindset. As an added treat, the album features a cover of “Georgia On My Mind,” a classic staple of his live shows and almost a religious experience in itself. To me, it’s astounding that this stout, middle-aged Irishman can open his mouth and still command such raw power. Sure to restore your faith in rock-and-roll. — Lisa Lumb

Grade: A-

Time

Richard Hell

(Matador)

If there is such a thing as a punk pedigree then surely Richard Hell has one of the purest ones extant. The history may be familiar but bears repeating here: a founding member of New York’s first punk band, Television; a co-founder with Johnny Thunders of NYC’s rockin’ junkie band the Heartbreakers; the leader of Richard Hell & the Voidoids, which featured the guitar talent of Robert Quine; and the visual inspiration for the look that Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren codified into punk. (The spiked hair, ripped clothes, vacant stare, and sneering attitude all came from Hell and looked pretty good on Johnny Rotten.)

Perhaps the coolest thing about Hell (born Richard Meyers in Lexington, Kentucky) is that he got out of the music game in 1984, for the most part. Junk-sick and tired of watching others imitate his style, Hell released a retrospective set, R.I.P., on R.O.I.R. (the New York-based cassette-tape-only label; remember when indie-label cassettes were cool?) in late ’84. After that, he returned to his first passion, writing. Basically, Time is a rerelease of R.I.P. with an added live disc and funny liner notes by Hell. It’s thrown together and scrappy as hell (pardon the pun, or don’t) but still sounds current and coherent.

Disc one is essentially R.I.P. with some extra tracks: a demo version of “Chinese Rocks” done by the Heartbreakers with Hell singing, a cover of Fats Domino’s “I Live My Life” that sounds almost soulful, a manic version of the MC5’s “I Can Only Give You Everything,” and, from a 1984 New Orleans session, a version of Allen Toussaint’s “Cruel Way To Go Down” (possibly Hell’s best vocal performance to date). Disc two is live stuff from 1977 and ’78 that confirms the Voidoids’ reputation as a great live band. Recorded at London’s Music Machine in ’77 and at NYC’s CBGB in ’78, Hell and his band run through the songs on their debut LP Blank Generation but with a noisy abandon that their official release never displayed.

People still like to squawk that the dual-guitar interplay of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in Television has seldom been topped. Well, a brief listen to what Robert Quine and Ivan Julian got up to live with the Voidoids puts that overstated myth to rest. Verlaine may have chucked Hell out of Television for being an incompetent bass player (and a junkie, okay), but by doing so, he missed out on working with a collaborator who might have pulled the skull-faced one out of his solipsistic slide into the hall of memories. Context is everything, and Richard Hell got out when his was gone. — Ross Johnson

Grade: A-

This Is Where I Belong:

The Songs of Ray Davies & The Kinks

Various Artists

(Rykodisc)

The Kinks were arguably the most British of all the major bands to emerge from the U.K. during the ’60s — more than the Beatles or the Who, definitely more than the Stones. Though their music revealed a true understanding of American rock-and-roll, and despite Ray Davies’ identification with American redneck culture (“Muswell Hillbilly”), the band’s songs were full of ironic Brit humor and odes to country villages overrun by American tourists. So it’s a little surprising that the lineup for This Is Where I Belong is made up almost entirely of Yanks, some of whom actually have a cracking-good grasp of the band’s quirks.

Steve Forbert and Fountains of Wayne have a blast with their romping versions of “Starstruck” and “Better Things,” respectively, and Nashville art-rock combo Lambchop turn in a pervy take on “Art Lover.” With scorched-earth guitar and bitter, ballsy vocals, Queens of the Stone Age perfectly capture all the male rancor of “Who’ll Be the Next in Line?” but still manage to make it sound fun and danceable.

As with most tribute albums, however, half the songs are mere retreads of the originals: Fastball takes on “Till the End of the Day” and loses; tribute-album staple Matthew Sweet does a note-for-note take on “Big Sky.” Worse than a retread, however, is blind misinterpretation, such as folk boy Josh Rouse’s inappropriately sincere “A Well Respected Man,” which neuters the sharp satire of the original. He just didn’t get it.

Unlike their contemporaries, the Kinks never achieved lasting success overseas, most likely because they were so relentlessly British in sound and lyric. But This Is Where I Belong proves that their legacy lives on in America, in some form or another.

— Stephen Deusner

Grade: B

Universal Truths and Cycles, Guided By Voices (Matador)

In the midst of the musically crippled 1980s, Bob Pollard and Guided By Voices, armed only with an unshakable faith in John Lennon, the potent jargon of war, and an abiding love of flying machines, got stewed as bats and sloppily set about the task of remapping the rock-and-roll genome. Obsessively mixing and matching so many disparate sonic elements, GBV developed a brand of arena-ready bubblegum that can only be described as short-form prog. The ease with which GBV tossed off complex two-minute anthems (not to mention their heroic onstage drinking) made them the darlings of true punks and frat boys alike, and Pollard gave voice to this odd appeal in “Quality of Armor,” a Beatles-flavored beauty from Propeller. “The worst offense is intelligence,” Pollard wailed. “The best defense is belligerence.” Lyrically speaking, songs like “Game of Pricks” from Alien Lanes rivaled Dylan at his finest, while tunes like “Radio Show (Trust the Wizard)” managed to both poke fun at and pay homage to drive-time radio and its requisite doses of Pink Floyd and Rush.

But beginning with Under the Bushes Under the Stars, it started to look like the absurdly prolific Pollard had run out of things to say, and keeper singles like Do the Collapse‘s wickedly catchy “Teenage F.B.I.” aside, they were never able to put together an album as complete and cohesive as Bee Thousand. Last year’s critically lauded Isolation Drills seemed neither intelligent nor belligerent. In fact, Pollard’s lyrics had become decidedly smug. GBV’s latest offering, Universal Truths and Cycles, is the closest the steadily shifting lineup of musicians has come to making a front-to-back brilliant LP in a long time. It’s almost like a guided tour through the group’s discography, beginning with Devil Between My Toes and ending somewhere around Mag Earwig. As usual, this disc finds Pollard sloshed and staring at the stars, and, thanks to the mad guitar skills of Doug Gillard, it has all the monstrous hooks and civilized aggression these self-proclaimed soft-rock renegades are famous for.

Frequent GBV flyers, however, will recognize recycled lyrical material that never quite measures up to vintage Pollard. Occasionally, his lyrics even lapse into the kind of accidental self-parody only Lou Reed can rival. On the other hand, rockers like the disc’s first single, “Everywhere With Helicopter,” manage to sound fresh in spite of the tried-and-true Pollardisms. “Cheyenne” comes on strong with the same bouncy pop that fueled earlier hits like “The Closer You Are (the Quicker It Hits You)” but without the ominous silliness that made that song great. In fact, all the quirkiness that made songs like “My Valuable Hunting Knife” stick in your head has been excised, making the whole affair duller than it could be and more than a little self-important. Maybe it’s finally time for Pollard, well into his 40s, to slow down just a little bit, regroup, and rediscover the wonders of robots, UFOs, and self-inflicted aerial nostalgia. Universal Truths and Cycles would be a career record for most bands, but given the legacy of GBV, it’s pretty average stuff, and maybe not even that.

— Chris Davis

Grade: B

Guided By Voices will be at the Young Avenue Deli Friday, June 7th, with My Morning Jacket and the 45’s.

Easy Now, Jeb Loy Nichols (Rykodisc Records)

A Missouri native who’s made his home in the U.K. since 1983, Jeb Loy Nichols originally worked as a designer and then fell in with the London reggae scene. His cohorts introduced him to the joys of dub and reggae, and he in turn introduced them to George Jones and Lefty Frizzell. In the ’90s, he led the politico-folksy reggae band Fellow Travelers, described by Spin as “the lonesome children of Merle, Marley, and Marx.” On his first two critically acclaimed solo outings, he swirled country, R&B, and Jamaican influences into the purest pop songs that side of the Atlantic. On this, his third release, he steps back from the country/reggae hybrid he’s renowned for to make some sweet soul music that is mellowness personified. On Easy Now, Nichols croons soul and R&B like the masters, channeling Nat King Cole, Marvin Gaye, and Hank Williams Sr. in his reedy, self-assured manner. Like Terence Trent D’Arby, another expatriate American who found his musical fortune in Europe, Nichols has the ease and confidence that make it all seem effortless. He’s a natural. Musically, too, this album reminds me of D’Arby on certain tracks in which funk melds with a soulful backbeat in an almost hypnotic ambience.

Nichols has an urban, thinking man’s J.J. Cale groove, adding subtle country and Caribbean touches to this soulful music, which makes it irresistible. (The pure country-pop of the opening track is as luscious and effervescent as strawberry wine.) Barefoot music par excellence, Easy Now gets my vote for the best laid-back listening for summertime 2002. — Lisa Lumb

Grade: A-

The Rough Guide To Bollywood, Various Artists (World Music Network)

The Very Best Bollywood Songs II, Various Artists (Outcaste)

The most outré sonic adventure wouldn’t make the composers of Indian film music blink. Churning out songs for the hundreds of musicals that appear every year, these music teams run through more styles per minute than even the headiest mixmaster, so you might want to sample this pair of compilations selectively: The stuff collected herein can make even jaded eardrums do backflips.

The Very Best Bollywood Songs II, with selections ranging from 1949 to the present, is wilder than the Rough Guide collection, with bushy-tailed beats and wigged-out strings springing from every crevice. On “Zindagi Ek Safar,” baritone Kishore Kumar even yodels. The Rough Guide To Bollywood is neater both sonically (fewer violin sections) and organizationally (it begins in the ’70s and is ordered chronologically). It’s also more tuneful: You’d likely find yourself walking around all day humming, say, Asha Bhonsle’s “Piya Tu Ab To Aaja” if it weren’t followed by Bhonsle and Kishore Kumar’s equally catchy “Pyar Diwana Hota Hai.” Both discs peak with the same song, “Yeh Dosti Hum Nahin.” This theme, from 1975’s Sholay, is a sound clash between corn-fed Oklahoma! strings, Ma-and-Pa-Kettle-style banjo-plucking, and a freaked-out synthesizer.

Two testaments to crass commercialization at its most delicious. — Michaelangelo Matos

Grades: B+ (both albums)

Tangent 2002: Disco Nouveau, Various Artists (Ghostly International)

Hey, are you all right? Gosh, that was a nasty spill you took. Really looked like it hurt. Here, let me help you up. Say, what is that you tripped over, anyway? Oh, Jesus — not another new electro compilation! I’m so sorry about that. You’ve really got to keep your eye out for those suckers, you know? They’re everywhere.

So it’s nice to find one that isn’t a mere rehash of the same handful of songs and/or artists à la the comps that have become as ubiquitous in hipster record stores as a Now disc in a Sam Goody. Tangent 2002: Disco Nouveau is a poppy, song-oriented affair, and its artists seem to regard electro with a sense of romance rather than as the hot and sleazy one-night-stand material of most dance-floor-oriented comps. Adult’s “Night Life” conveys both the giddiness of clubbing and a tongue-in-cheek distance from it, as do tracks from Susumu Yokota and Lowfish.

And “Make Me,” by veteran electro revivalists DMX Krew featuring Tracy, is great pop trash like it oughta be, the Kylie Minogue record you only wish she’d made with Stock/Aitken/Waterman. It might never get on the radio, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself falling for — or over — it anyway. — MM

Grade: B+

Downhome Sophisticate

Corey Harris

(Rounder)

Corey Harris has long been hailed as one of contemporary blues’ most promising young performers, but maybe it’s finally time to put that label to rest. After all, contemporary blues is a relatively conservative and tight-knit scene, and Harris is one remarkably expansive musician. In reality, Harris’ relationship to the blues is about the same as Los Lobos’ to East L.A. garage rock and Mexican folk or Wyclef Jean’s to hip hop — it’s a mere starting point. And Harris deserves the wider commercial audience those artists have found, not just the limited audience of self-professed blues fans.

Harris has also long been connected with Memphian Alvin Youngblood Hart, with whom he shares a blues base that expands broadly. But the differences are crucial. Hart is a great American roots artist, his tastes straying most frequently into classic rock and outsider country. Harris, obvious from his newest and best album, Downhome Sophisticate, is a different breed. Crafted out of the cultural gumbo of New Orleans (the Denver native’s adopted home) and informed by Harris’ studies in the Caribbean and West Africa, Downhome Sophisticate places Harris in the company of artists such as globe-trotting troubadour Manu Chao and Punjabi Londoner Tjinder Singh (aka Cornershop) — new-breed “world music” performers, artists who make cultural collision sound natural and inevitable, groovy and gorgeous.

With crucial help from collaborator Jamal Millner (Harris’ band, apparently called the 5×5, deserves equal billing here), Downhome Sophisticate is pan-African-diaspora pop (with Harris’ vocals occasionally venturing into French or reggae patois) rooted in the African-American blues tradition, taking sonic gambles on virtually every track and never once faltering. The opening “Frankie Doris” mixes hip-hop-bred beats, ’70s-soul background vocals, and Stax horns into a relentlessly hyped-up mix, while Harris cements the record as a sort of P-Funk version of the country blues with the political sloganeering of: “I’m gon’ takes my taxes/Buy me some axes/Drive my car up to Chocolate City/Go to the White House/Make it my house/You know my people built it for free.”

As a signature anthem, “Frankie Doris” is topped only by the title track, which sounds like Arrested Development gone avant-garde. With the concept implied by the title lending focus to the music itself, it’s as close to a statement of principles as Harris has come. Harris’ own fearlessly awkward rapped vocals rise over a bed of music containing what sounds like one of those ubiquitous Jackson Five piano samples (except, in this case, it’s played live), vintage-sounding background vocals that Moby would kill to borrow, and drum-and-bass interplay that sounds like a perpetual-motion machine. And “Fire” may be the most compelling pop moment yet to reference 9/11, reliving the scene with a biblical sense of weirdness and foreboding — like an ancient tribal version of ’60s acid-rock.

Harris also branches out with the epic calypso of “Sista Rosa” and the directly Caribbean and West African flavors of “Santora,” a song that tersely illustrates the racial tensions bound up in a chance police encounter and that makes its social critique and hip-hop influence explicit with the reprise “F’shizza (Santoro Remix),” in which Harris introduces two MCs who can actually rap.

Not that Harris doesn’t make his commitment to the blues tradition explicit as well. “Money On My Mind” is electrified Delta blues with a guitar riff and overactive rhythm that evokes the standard “Baby Please Don’t Go” — but spiked with ghostly background vocals that dredge up a haunted past (“Down in Court Square I was chained to the block,” the narrator sings). “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” is gutbucket gospel featuring rough call-and-response vocals and a piercing blues-guitar solo. “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” is punctuated by soaring leads à la Elmore James, while the instrumental “BB” is a bit of bar blues that rides along on guest Henry Butler’s barrelhouse piano.

If there’s a weakness here, it’s in the lack of full-fledged songs — lyrically, this is mostly a collection of sketches. The rootsy sound-over-sense approach and perpetual groove of this record would seem to appeal to jam-band fans, except the music is much more fierce and focused than anything you’ll find in that scene. As pure sound — and pure sound as emphatic cultural mission — it’s a tour de force. I haven’t heard anything else this year that sounds nearly as good. —Chris Herrington

Grade: A

The Soul & The Edge:

The Best of

Johnny Paycheck

Johnny Paycheck

(Columbia/Legacy)

A notable sideman for Ray Price and George Jones before going solo, Johnny Paycheck had all the skills necessary to develop into the greatest honky-tonk singer of all time. He also had a mean streak and an appetite for self-destruction that rivaled even the most notorious country-music hell-raisers, so much so that Paycheck’s personality problems, not his lack of talent, kept him from fulfilling his potential.

Paycheck is most famous for his cover of David Allen Coe’s cartoonish working man’s anthem “Take This Job and Shove It,” and, commercially speaking, precious little attention has been paid to his earlier body of work. The Real Mr. Heartache, a compilation of recordings for the Hilltop and Little Darlin’ labels, proved that Paycheck was the unquestioned king of black, sardonic country. Tracks like “He’s In a Hurry (He Has To Get Home To My Wife),” “Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone To Kill,” and “It Won’t Be Long and I’ll Be Hating You” are certainly comical in an over-the-top way, but the dark humor in no way diminishes their impact. Still, most of these recordings fell into obscurity, and Paycheck continued to work primarily as a sideman until “Take This Job and Shove It” broke in 1977.

Nothing on The Soul & The Edge, a new collection of Paycheck hits from the ’70s and ’80s, can compare to the distinctive, hard-edged whine of his earlier work. Even tracks that play into the artist’s outlaw image (“I’m the Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised” being the best and most exciting example) are broad caricatures compared to the genuine meanness he’d shown at Little Darlin’. Odd, funk-influenced arrangements, an excess of horns, and intrusive harmonica-blowing muddle many tracks. Redneck soul ballads like “Slide Off of Your Satin Sheets” and “She’s All I Got” lurch in the direction of Ray Price’s decidedly soulful country but land on the softer side of ’70s pop.

But that’s not to say The Soul & The Edge has nothing to offer. The swinging retro lament of “Barstool Mountain” is a nice reminder of just how well Paycheck once combined humorous imagery with pathos. “The Outlaw’s Prayer,” a monologue about a contrite hillbilly singer who isn’t allowed in a church because of his long beard and hair, calls to mind any number of Red Sovine’s famous talkers, while “11 Months and 29 Days” (the amount of time it’s going to take the protagonist to get sober) is a prison song worthy of Haggard or Cash.

With 23 tracks of latter-day Paycheck, The Soul & The Edge wears out its welcome long before the final notes fade. Much of the material here has been included on other compilations, and a number of tracks (notably a pair of Haggard covers and a forgettable duet with George Jones on “You Better Move On”) hardly merit rerelease. However, for newer country fans who are interested in Paycheck but aren’t interested in possessing his entire back catalog, The Soul & The Edge makes a perfect companion to the extraordinary The Real Mr. Heartache. — Chris Davis

Grade: B-

Plastic Fang

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

(Matador Records)

Blues, punk, hip hop what’s the difference? All

three genres have been around long enough for their rules to

be codified if not ossified, though discerning critics have

pointed out that the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s particular

brand of postmodern genre-mixing often blurred the lines

between parody, irony, and racial caricaturing in unsettling,

“irresponsible” fashion. Had the JSBX been a bigger mini-major

success story, questions about the rationale behind their

contemptuous hipster posturing might have been broached

with greater seriousness. Yet radio has ignored Spencer’s barks

at the moon, and the JSBX fan base probably hasn’t

bothered to really investigate when and how the aesthetic strategies

of blues, post-punk, and minstrelsy have mixed and mingled in the band’s

music. Luckily for them, it looks like they and you and me will no

longer feel compelled to work out the implications of the band’s

avant-blues phase. Plastic Fang, coming

nearly four years after 1998’s Acme, is the most straightforward record of

the band’s career.

Freed from the silly hip-hop nods and pure-noise

experimentation that have littered and bogged down previous albums for over a

decade, the dozen songs on Plastic Fang

lose none of their snarl and speed thanks to Don Smith’s

production and the unlikely rhythm section of guitarist

Judah Bauer and hulking drummer Russell Simins. Gone

also is Spencer’s faux-Mick Jagger impression (and all of

the cultural baggage that implies) in favor of jokes

about Bazooka gum, Black Flag, and the tribulations of life as

a werewolf.

Here they play “Money Rock ‘n’ Roll” shorn of

historical resonance, and they soar into power-trio heaven from

the atonal opening chord of “Sweet ‘n’ Sour” to the organ

riot that closes the record. Whether this new edition will strike

it rich is moot, which is now sort of sad. As is the fact

that principled ideologues and twentysomethings with no

sense of history or charity will probably ignore this unlikely

testimonial. Addison Engelking

Grade: A-

Keep It Coming

20 Miles

(Fat Possum)

I never was a 20 Miles fan. The band, a side project

of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion guitarist Judah Bauer, may

have had good intentions, but both their debut,

Ragged Backyard Classics, and its abortive follow-up, a North Mississippi

blues project recorded with R.L. Boyce, Othar Turner, and

Spam (T-Model Ford’s drummer), fell far short of success.

Bauer seemed unwilling to shape his own vision, and it

showed: 20 Miles came off as an amorphous stab at

self-expression destined to remain on the back burner.

But you can forget all that now. Keep It

Coming supersedes even the Blues Explosion’s new one

(Plastic Fang) as the blues-rock album of 2002. From the stripped-down

approach of “Well, Well, Well” to the album’s closer, “I Believe,” it’s

evident that Bauer has achieved the impossible: He’s concocted the perfect

combination of hill-country blues and big-city

rock. “Tear down the mountains,” he commands on “Well, Well, Well”

“Help me take down all the idols/I don’t need them/I don’t believe them,”

Bauer growls, and it’s obvious that he’s finally comfortable in his own skin.

The country twang of “Only One,” the ringing guitar rock on

“All My Brothers, Sisters Too!,” and the

jangling affirmations of “Feel Right”

make you wanna turn it up loud and boogie till you drop.

Don’t miss “Rhythm Bound,” an addictive hand-clapping

percussive romp that name-checks H.C. Speir, the Jackson,

Mississippi, talent scout who discovered Charley Patton,

Skip James, and a handful of other bluesmen in the first half

of the 20th century. “Heal myself/Help myself/Soothe

myself every day,” Bauer sings over his chunky guitar chords

with infectious enthusiasm, “I am rhythm bound.”

Elsewhere (“Fix Fences,” “Phaedo”), he plays with a tremolo style

that rivals the late great Pops Staples.

Keep It Coming is so damn good that I wonder what

it took for Bauer to finally break through. I can almost

picture him selling his soul to the devil at some desolate

Brooklyn crossroads, like an urban Robert Johnson. Stranger

things have happened. Andria Lisle

Grade: A

Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues

Charley Patton

(Revenant Records)

Charley Patton is the root of Mississippi Delta

blues. He taught Son House (who taught Robert Johnson

and Muddy Waters). He taught Howlin’ Wolf and Pops

Staples. And he has inspired blues players and fans for generations.

Patton’s life is as mysterious as his music is powerful.

He was born in 1887 and died in 1933. He was a songster

in his day, traveling widely and playing in a range of

styles. The blues was then nascent, the elements from which

it would be created swirling about the Delta like a storm

about to form. Patton played them all from the

Scots-Irish reels and jigs to the Hawaiian-style slide guitar. Patton

himself was the tornado that would be called the blues.

I’ve owned several Patton collections, but none has

been as listenable, as sonically accessible, as these. For the

first time, you can hear Patton without the hissing sound

of previous transfers but with the bass-y bottom punch of

a 78. Untrained ears will have little trouble adjusting to

the sound.

Five of the CDs on this massive collection feature

Patton’s music, including false starts, outtakes, and sessions on

which Patton was a sideman. The sixth disc, Charley’s

Orbit, demonstrates the range of his influence, with tracks by

Bukka White, Son House, Ma Rainey, Furry Lewis, Howlin’

Wolf, and several others. It’s a great compilation disc itself;

that each track can be traced to Patton makes it all the

more powerful. Disc seven features four interviews with

people who knew Patton. The Wolf snippet is incredible, and

the H.C. Speir interview is a fascinating oral history.

As important as this collection is musically, it’s also

an astounding feat of packaging. I had as much fun

opening this box set as I’ve had unwrapping any gift since I was

a child. The package is a recreation of an old 10-inch 78

RPM “album” (several 78s packaged together, like oldies at

the thrift stores). Within, there are seven CDs, a paperback

book on Patton by the late John Fahey (founder of the

reissue label behind this treat), a reproduction of liner notes to

a previous Patton reissue, 128 pages of intense liner

notes from national authorities (including the University of

Memphis’ Dr. David Evans), several reproductions of period

advertisements, and more. It’s expensive (about $175),

but for the blues fan who has everything or the designer

who’s seen it all, it’s well worth the cost.

Robert Gordon

Grade: A+