MUSIC 2008: A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield

June 21, 2009


GENERAL COMMENTS


For a second straight year, circumstances and my own fastidious obsessiveness did not permit me to finish the survey until long after everyone else had done their 2008 year-end reviews. For those (few) of you who were actually waiting for this to be published, I again offer my apology for the long delay; I found myself with nearly as many albums (51) as last year’s record total of 58 and, until April/May, depressingly little time available to work on reviewing them.

In a first for me, this year I will list my top ten pop/rock records (original releases) here in order of preference. Please note that the list would look somewhat different if I included the Latin/”world” and jazz categories, not to mention the classical. With an absurd amount of the public’s attention focused on Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and American Idol, it was not a terrific year for pop music; after a strong 2007, some of the groups I most respect that had issued records then took 2008 off.

1. (tie) Juana Molina – Un Día
1. (tie) Portishead – Third
3. Aterciopelados – Río
4. Palms – It’s Midnight in Honolulu
5. School of Seven Bells – Alpinisms
6. M83 – Saturdays = Youth
7. Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna
8. Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair
9. Squarepusher – Just a Souvenir
10. Hot Chip – Made in the Dark

As for the others in the survey, perhaps the biggest disappointment for me was TV on the Radio. I know that Dear Science made the top of all sorts of best-of lists, but I found it unremarkable and verbose, and, having heard the best cuts from the band’s previous record, Return to Cookie Mountain, I know that it can do better (and perhaps will before long). Stephen Malkmus’s record with the Jicks was also a letdown, while Brazilian Girls, Deerhunter and Dungen put out albums that were hit or miss. Santogold (Santi White) showed some songwriting talent on her debut but needs voice lessons badly. Sigur Rós mildly underperformed expectations, while Stereolab just about hit a mark that has been lowered progressively as the band runs of out interesting ideas. Both Sigur Rós and Stereolab tried lightening up for their current releases, with mixed success. The Vivian Girls’ debut was abysmal.

Beyond mainstream pop music, David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label put out an interesting (though not truly current) compilation from Northeastern Brazil called What’s Happening in Pernambuco? Melissa and I were in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco state, in December but did not see any live music there beyond the carnaval bands that march nightly in the streets of neighboring Olinda. Quasi-Brazilian Zuco 103 decided to move closer to its inspiration by recording its new record partly in Rio de Janeiro. The resulting After the Carnaval was not as good as their previous Whaa! but still a solid and enjoyable disc. Sidestepper, from Colombia, mainly rehashed and remixed old material on its Buena Vibra Sound System. And Sonantes, a new group featuring the Brazilian pop chanteuse CéU, put out a record that was decent but not spectacular. Two records from Mali made favorable impressions: from the more traditional side, Toumani Diabaté’s The Mandé Variations was masterly, while Issa Bagayogo’s more urbanized Mali Koura was only slightly less so. Israel’s Le Trio Joubran, Palestinian Arab brothers who play the oud, put out a terrific disc called Majâz. In jazz, standout recordings included Flood, the second volume from trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s Big Rain Trilogy; pianist and singer Guillermo Klein and his big band, Los Guachos, on Filtros; and saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, dueting with Indian sax master Kadri Gopalnath on Kinsmen. The classical realm saw new releases from two Finnish composers, Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho, plus a tribute to Olivier Messaien on the centenary of his birth by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a grouping of the four string quartets of Leon Kirchner by the Orion String Quartet, and a delightful and amusing compilation by French-Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin titled In a State of Jazz.

Notes from live performances this past year: For a second summer running, there was little to make note of at Celebrate Brooklyn! I skipped the Coney Island Siren festival this time around. Melissa and I went to the newish Greenwich Village performance space Le Poisson Rouge and thoroughly enjoyed They Might Be Giants’ re-creation of the band’s fourth album, Apollo 18, played in order from beginning to end, including the twenty-one-songs-in-one “Fingertips.” Memorable for the wrong reasons was the Menudo “concert” I witnessed (yes, I stayed for all four songs) following the first-ever outdoor WNBA game, between the New York Liberty and the Indiana Fever, at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in July. On the road, in Montreal in early August, Melissa and I spent a night at a jazz club, seeing a (very) young saxophonist named Mike Ruby and his group, fellow jazz cats barely out of their teens, notably brothers with the unforgettable names Pascal and Remy LeBoeuf. In December, in Buenos Aires, we took in a tango performance, although that was more about the dancing than the music, and in Rio de Janeiro, at a club called Vinicius, named for the legendary bossa nova songwriter Vinicius de Moraes, we listened to a singer/guitarist named Toni Barreto reinterpreting the old 1950s/1960s chestnuts that help define Rio’s modern character. Then we ended up having to pay for what was plunked down on our table and presented as a “promotional” CD (not in the survey because it went to Melissa). In more highbrow fare, at Carnegie Hall in the fall, we saw a performance of the Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht Seven Deadly Sins, with Ute Lemper and the vocal group Hudson Shad performing in front of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, followed by Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, with encores that included “Nimrod” from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Not really coming under the heading of music but of performance, in April, we saw a live broadcast from the Beacon Theatre of Comedy Central’s A Night of Too Many Stars, featuring a wide range of comedians and hosted by Jon Stewart, with the “virtual” presence of Stephen Colbert. And, speaking of Colbert, his end-of-year Christmas special on Comedy Central was memorable in particular for the duet he performed with John Legend about the necessity of eggnog for the holiday.

Passings: Notable among those in the music world who left us for good in 2008: Bo Diddley; Eartha Kitt (who died on Christmas Day); South African legend Miriam Makeba; master Cuban mambo bassist and composer Israel “Cachao” López; folk singer Odetta; Isaac Hayes, who not only wrote and recorded the theme from Shaft but took on a second career as the voice of Chef in South Park; Brazilian singer/songwriter Dorival Caymmi; Levi Stubbs, the lead singer of the Four Tops; Danny Federici, keyboard player for Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band; Richard Wright, keyboardist and a founding member of Pink Floyd; Mike Smith, singer/songwriter of the Dave Clark Five; both Nick Reynolds and John Stewart of the folk/pop Kingston Trio (Reynolds was a founding member); Andy Palacio, the leading exponent of punta music from the Garifuna regions of Central America’s Caribbean coast; Roger Voisin, trumpeter with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Canadian singer/guitarist Jeff Healey (“Angel Eyes”); continuing with the Canadian theme, John Rutsey, the original drummer for Rush; rhythm and blues singer Al Wilson (“Show and Tell”); record producer Jerry Wexler, who coined the term “rhythm and blues”; singer Jo Stafford, popular in the 1940s (“I’ll Be Seeing You”); country and Western singers Eddy Arnold (“Make the World Go Away”) and Jerry Reed (“When You’re Hot, You’re Hot”); and Alexander Courage, who composed the original Star Trek theme. While we are on the subject of Star Trek, also breathing her last in 2008 was Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who played Nurse Christine Chapel in the original series and was the only actor to be involved (in later years, only in voiceover work) in every incarnation of Star Trek, right up to the 2009 movie.

As usual, I would like to thank Steve Holtje for sharing advice and musical opinions over the course of the year, as well as the helpful staff at Sound Fix Records in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Finally, thanks to Melissa for her encouragement, patience, and understanding.

Some may consider it a cop-out, but for the first time ever, this year I decided to go with co-Albums of the Year, so for 2008, there are two instead of one: Portishead, Third, and Juana Molina, Un Día. Aside from Aterciopelados’s Río, no other record in the pop/rock category merited a pure A grade, though there were several near misses.


ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR:

JUANA MOLINA, Un Día—This is an exquisite recording of subtle artistry, dreamy, murmuring, and inward-looking. It is the kind of music that grows on you and haunts you the more you listen. Juana Molina has been around longer than I might have anticipated; she is nearly my age. But she is a relative newcomer to music, having turned to it in 1996, following a career as a television actress, for which she is reputedly still better known in Latin America. Melissa and I were in her native Buenos Aires in December, and when I mentioned Juana Molina to our hosts, it provoked unexpected laughter; apparently, she had recently acted like a sulky diva while being interviewed on Argentine television. No matter; she has released five records since launching her musical career, gradually building a dedicated fan core in the United States (she has been basing herself in California in recent years, alas), including Jon Pareles of The New York Times, who named her third album, Tres Cosas (Three Things), as the sixth-best pop record of 2004, and most of the disc jockeys at WFMU. Un Día (One Day) is densely textured, layered, deeply electronic but with an overlay of Molina’s acoustic guitar, which she sometimes taps for percussive effect. The artist herself has wondered publicly about the impossibility of re-creating the sound in live performances. There are no conventional song structures; the eight tracks are free-form and swept along by the groove. The result is atmospheric and intoxicating, conjuring a musical analogue to magic realism. What words there are are sung in Spanish but are sometimes difficult even for a Spanish speaker to parse; otherwise, we get gentle scatting, humming, or susurrant nonsense syllables. No lyrics were printed with the CD jacket, and none are really needed. With the exception of a couple of brief guitar liaisons between songs by Gareth Dickson, Molina is the source of all the words and music, both composition and performance. There is a thematic unity to the songs on Un Día; its seamlessness makes it pointless to single out tracks. But I will go so far as to point to the final number, “Dar (Qué Difícil)” (To Give [How Difficult]), as representative of the wonder of this CD. It has an almost stupefyingly monotonous bass line—just two tones played in alternating patterns of long and short. Yet, there is so much going on atop that, from stealthy scatting to breathy, spectral, almost mournful singing of mumbled and slurred lyrics, from guitar counterpart matching the bass rhythm to metallic chiming to harplike glissandos—and, at its peak, all of these elements at once—that boredom never crosses the mind. I was surprised—and pleased—when, in an interview, Molina cited the King Crimson album Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (1973) as one of her chief inspirations, along with Uruguayan popular music. With such eclectic tastes, is it any wonder she could produce something as darkly glittering and keenly affecting as this disc? A


ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR:

PORTISHEAD, Third—Rumors had been circulating for several years that a new Portishead record was in the works—surely one of the most anticipated albums of recent times, given the band’s decade-plus hiatus from recording. None of that would have mattered except that Dummy (1994) and Portishead (1997) were stunning tours de force, landmarks in the trip hop genre: moody, brooding works that shone a faint light into dark corners of the soul. So, was it worth the wait? Most certainly, even if Third does not quite manage to reach the heights (or depths) of the two 1990s recordings. There is no shortage of dusky moments on the new release, but it is more akin to walking through an apartment in which the blinds are half-drawn. There is even a genuinely sunny moment, on the uncharacterisitcally folky “Deep Water,” just Beth Gibbons’s voice and an uncredited ukulele or mandolin, presumably played by guitarist Adrian Utley, backed by some mellow vocals from the Somerfield Workers Choir and a guy calling himself Team Brick. It is a sweet little piece, but the spare setting shows up the weaknesses in Gibbons’s singing; she is good at what she usually does, which is conveying anguish, quavering despair, a quiet vulnerability, but she is not blessed with a strong voice or purity of tone. The song is followed up by the diametrically opposed “Machine Gun,” which delivers sonically on the expectations summoned by the title, punctuating a typically self-doubting or even self-lacerating theme from Gibbons with a constant rat-a-tat assault from Geoff Barrow’s synthesizers and drum machine; it is designed to be gut busting and succeeds. “Small,” which follows “Machine Gun,” fires its own rounds of automatic bursts, but not until late in a song that goes through several changes prior to that and that is, in spite of its name, the most sprawling and ungainly on the disc. Starting as a simple, heartfelt ballad for voice and solo acoustic guitar, it segues into a section of breathy vocals over sustained synthetic string tones, then runs headlong into electronic bleeps and heavy percussion—Barrow’s territory—pausing for a resumption of the string section as the chorus repeats (this time with the electronic squeals), before a double round of that thudding attack brings the song to an abrupt end. While not leaving trip hop behind entirely, Third branches into other avenues. There is no record scratching on this disc, and breakbeats are kept to a minimum. The pacing remains customarily languid on “Hunter” (which features Beth Gibbons at her breathiest and torchiest best), “Plastic,” and “Threads,” but other compositions are taken at midtempo or even uptempo. “We Carry On” is fast and carries a relentlessly driving beat; at times, it really does sound like Portishead is channeling Joy Division, particularly when Utley’s bass kicks in against drum patterns laid down for the dance floor. The opening number, “Silence,” has a spoken intro by Claudio Campos, a capoeira instructor in Bristol, England, where Portishead is based, in which he admonishes in Portuguese to “be aware of the rule of threes: what you give is what you get back. This lesson you have to learn: you gain [only] what you deserve.” The tune is filled with Gibbons’s usual tormented introversion, yet it is set to a brisk and lively beat that counteracts any suicidal tendencies. “The Rip” moves moderately fast through lyrics that respond to the Rolling Stones with “Wild, white horses/They will take me away,” setting out simply with Gibbons singing over gentle guitar arpeggios before the electronics kick in midway to add heft and oomph to what had been a wispy piece. A hint of exoticism (a beat with the timbre of a tabla drum in “Nylon Smile”; the hurdy gurdy played by Stu Barker on “Magic Doors”) pervades a couple of tracks, while the enervated and disconsolate closing number “Threads” ends with some industrial noise like a ship’s alarm, worthy of an early Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark album. “Magic Doors,” which also features the saxophone wailings of fellow Bristolian Will Gregory, who is one half of the electronica/trip hop group Goldfrapp, contains the record’s most heart-rending melody. The song that could most easily be taken for something off the previous release, Portishead, all those years ago, is “Plastic”; in that piece, we are transported back to the funereal tempos, stop times, electronic effects (here approximating helicopter blades), Gibbons’s wounded, anguished voice, and generally bleak mood of the earlier recording. Not that that is a bad thing! A


And the rest . . .

ATERCIOPELADOS, Río—My initial skepticism about “rock en español” has been eroded over time by the appearance of acts not named Santana that do not embarrass themselves on the rock circuit. Mexico’s Café Tacuba has gained a substantial following, but their retro doo-wop stylings have never appealed to me. Aterciopelados, from Colombia, on the other hand, is a band to which I have gradually warmed since seeing a live performance by lead singer Andrea Echeverri several years back in Prospect Park. Río is the product of a band in full creative stride. It is also decidedly political, though it treats with its subjects on a universalist plane rather than delving into specifics. The husky-voiced Echeverri has always been something of an earth mother type, Ceres spreading her bounty or Aphrodite celebrating fecundity, and her prime concerns are environmentalism, antiviolence, and immigrants’ rights. The most pointed song, “Bandera” (Flag), is a call for free movement of people across frontiers—even if you do not agree wholeheartedly with its message, you may be swept along by the poetry and passion of its presentation. For those who do not read or speak the language, it is a pity that the lyrics are printed only in Spanish. (“Who says that a piece of cloth closes doors and borders?” is a small sampling of the verse in translation.) This is followed up by the silliest tune on the album, “Ataque de Risa” (Fit of Laughter), in which Echeverri’s young daughter, Milagros, joins her in chanting the words. Yet, its singsong idealism is drolly infectious; in that sense, it succeeds on its own terms, and its child’s-eye worldview is far more grown up than the juvenilia spewed by Echeverri’s compatriot Shakira. Following up with the nonviolence theme is “Hijos de Tigre” (Children of the Tiger), deploring the “law of the strongest.” Concern for the environment shows up in the title track, which opens the record, and in “Día Paranormal” (Paranormal Day), the second-most political number, while several other tracks are more in the spirit of revering nature. The song “Río” is appealingly light and breezy, yet the lyric is close to despair about the state of the polluted Bogotá River, which flows along the western edge of the capital city. The other “message” songs tend to be straightforward rockers, but not everything on the album is. For example, “Vals” (Waltz), is a dreamy spectrally romantic composition, gliding softly through its triplet figurations, though it might have benefited from tenderer vocal treatment than Echeverri’s steely semi-yodeling. Credit for the album’s texture goes to Echeverri’s creative partner, Hector Buitrago; who plays bass and guitar and provides some backing vocals; he is responsible for arranging and fleshing out the songs for which she writes the voice and guitar parts. Other band members play guitar, drums, and percussion. On “28,” Gloria “Goyo” Martínez, a Colombian rapper from a group called Chocquibtown (see the Sidestepper review in the Latin section), bangs out staccato lyrics toward the song’s end, against Echeverri’s smooth lead on a song about the wonder and emotion of pregnancy, a theme Echeverri chose to revisit as she prepared to bear her second child. And throughout the record, an Andean band called Kapary Walka contributes traditional flutes, drums, and chanting. Otherwise, the native Colombian influences in the music are subtle, most pronounced on “No Llores” (Don’t Cry), a country song full of llantos (cries), a Colombian analogue to Mexico’s ranchera, yet with its earthiness leavened with an admixture of those ethereal Kapary Walka altiplano flutes. Río returns to its riverine source with its final song, “Agüita,” celebrating the purity and cleansing power of the waters; Echeverri, here wearing her heart on her sleeve like Lila Downs, even choking up a bit at the close, produces her purest and most powerful singing on the record. A

BRAZILIAN GIRLS, New York City—Now a threesome (formerly a foursome), Brazilian Girls is still striving to live up to the expectations raised by its fabulous self-titled debut record (see my music survey for 2005). New York City, the third release, goes considerable lengths toward redeeming the mediocrity of the band’s sophomore effort, Talk to La Bomb (see my music survey for 2006). It still falls some way short of the standard, though. There is only one true dud on the disc: “Good Time,” with its lazy refrain and dopey lyric. (“Some people have nothing and are free; some people want to burn the world with their greed,” runs one verse, “We just want to have a good time.”) Lead singer Sabina Sciubba, whose voice is naturally low and rather plain—at times even sounding a bit “butch”—eventually adopts a mincing, precious quasi-falsetto for the refrain that is singularly unsuited to her talents. “Losing Myself” is a banal dance number that the band probably intended as a single. Elsewhere, the record makes an honorable attempt to recapture the lush melodies and dreamy arrangements of the first record; especially outstanding in this regard is “Strangeboy,” which evokes the smoky cosmopolitanism of a 1950s Havana nightclub in which the house band is itself conjuring images of a Near Eastern caravansary. In a similar vein, “Internacional” is a lounge-y dance number of the sort where the singer reels off a list of exotic destinations, but the Europop-oriented Brazilian Girls pull it off more convincingly than most, and the track is enhanced by the bewitching background incantations by the legendary Senegalese master Baaba Maal. “Nouveau Américain” is compelling for its fast-pumping beats, eventually melding with some limpid sustained notes from the piano, and its woozy ambience. “I Want Out” is yet another hazy reverie, heavy on the atmosphere, somewhat lighter on the throbbing rhythms, ending with a nocturnal squealing of subway brakes. “L’interprète” is different altogether, a stab at a kind of medieval troubadour song—here, Sciubba’s voice, breathy and impassioned, comes off fairly well, over simple guitar accompaniment. These five songs are the high points of the disc, what make it worth coming back to. Distinct in a very different way is “Berlin”; Sciubba launches into chanson, replete with Edith Piaf mannerisms, but it ends up sounding stagey. The polyglot lead singer switches back and forth between three (or four) languages, none of which, interestingly, given the song’s title, is German; she saves her German, the tongue of her maternal ancestry, for “I Want Out.” On the concluding “Mano de Diós,” a reference to a handball goal scored by Diego Maradona during the 1986 World Cup quarterfinals versus England, Brazilian Girls sounds—the vocal track apart—very much like the sonically blurry, static, palpitating electronica of Boards of Canada, a Scottish group. What you will not hear is any Brazilian music, nor anything sung in Portuguese, though Sciubba reportedly speaks that language as well as Spanish, French, English, Italian, and German. B+

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE, Just Like Kicking Jesus—The primary appeal of this EP, recorded in Iceland by 12 Tónar Records, is in the irreverent names of the songs themselves. There are just three of them, though two have alternate takes, so there are five tracks in all. The Brian Jonestown Massacre has been a presence for fifteen years or so on the West Coast, with ever-shifting lineups, the one constant being frontman Anton Newcombe. The sound is uniformly muddy and grungy, which (dis)colors my view of the unremarkable tunes. The first version of “Amazing Electronic Talking Cave,” subtitled “(Learn to Speak Icelandic You Smug Sh*t Version),” which is the only truly new piece on the disc (the other two songs having appeared on 2007’s My Bloody Underground, which explains the critical indifference to the EP), is sung by Iceland’s own Unnur Andrea Einarsdottir, while Newcombe fills in for the second, or “(English Version Provided without Bravado for the Beans and Toast for 99p Set)” take. But the muddiness of the engineering means that it almost does not matter who is speaking what language. “Amazing Electronic Talking Cave” is a midtempo rocker featuring a sixteen-bar verse with minimal variation and no refrain, just white noise and some background chanting. The title track similarly consists of an unvarying verse with no refrain—it is, if anything, even more stupefyingly repetitious and worth mentioning only for the woozy sonorities that accompany the sung theme. The second version, subtitled “(Elsa Sings!),” has much more background noise than the first “(Hungover Like Jesus after Dancing at Sirkus in Iceland)” and is sung as a duet. The best track is the last one, the rudely titled (and slightly misspelled) “Bring Me the Head of Paul McCartney on Heather Mill’s Wooden Peg (Dropping Bombs on the White House).” Not only can you actually hear the lyrics clearly, but the caterwauling guitar accompaniment sounds sitar-like, lending just a bit of Asian exoticism to what is, again, a composition with an allergy to conventional song structure. (Is it all verse, no chorus? Or all chorus and no verse? Does it matter?). C+

CUT COPY, In Ghost Colours—Melbourne electropop smoothies’ sophomore effort, In Ghost Colours is like grape soda: sweet, pleasant, fizzy, lacking in substance. It aims low in terms of artistic ambition and, within those parameters, delivers well-crafted dance tunes that meld into each other as seamlessly as any disc jockey could contrive to do. Less emotionally compelling than the Rapture, lacking the political edge of Bloc Party—to name two bands of similar ilk—the music of Cut Copy certainly makes for a good aerobics workout. But the Australian trio, like Franz Ferdinand (with whom they have toured), are good enough, if predictable, tunesmiths that the enjoyment of this disc goes beyond the purely rhythmic. There are several tracks that serve as gauzy instrumental interludes sprinkled among the dance numbers. “Midnight Runner” chimes in the manner of the so-called shoegaze bands; meanwhile, “So Haunted” and “Far Away” (at least in their refrains) seem to suggest that the band members grew up listening to the Electric Light Orchestra. Pity, then, that they are taking as their model the 1980s-era E.L.O., a band that had exhausted its originality and was living off past glories. B-

DEERHUNTER, Microcastle/Weird Era Continued—Whether this double-record set merits the effusive praise it received (Brooklyn’s Sound Fix Records named it album of the year, and it made the best-of lists of several Pitchfork Media reviewers as well) is open to debate; it is nonetheless intriguing and a worthwhile listen. The second disc contains overflow material from the recording sessions of Microcastle. The Atlanta-based band has cited influences as diverse as David Bowie, the Flying Lizards, Echo and the Bunnymen, and My Bloody Valentine, and the 2-CD set sprawls across enough musical styles to make the music hard to classify. The members have defined themselves as “ambient punk,” doubtless taking pleasure in the oxymoron, but there is really nothing here that counts as punky. Ambient, to be sure, is present, along with strains of noise rock and shoegaze fuzz and reverb and the occasional overlay of psychedelia. I ought to spend more time talking about Microcastle, yet, as is frequently the case with this kind of twin-disc set, the outtakes are actually more interesting, more experimental and daring. The band is trying out various genres on Weird Era Continued, and it makes for a highly entertaining mixtape. “Operation” puts its breathy, sobering refrain through various rhythmic twists and finally a buzzy sonic filter. “Dot Gain” and the wordless “Moon Witch Cartridge” both sport heavy-footed percussion (and clapping in the latter), though the much longer “Dot Gain” morphs ultimately into something more purely “melodic,” even if the tune seems off-color, distorted and remote sounding. “VHS Dream” approximates the sound of TV on the Radio (see below), while the wordless “Slow Swords” cycles through a few elements—woodblock, fuzztone guitars, humming—making up a simple motif. The title track is a scratchy, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard exercise in white noise. The last song on the disc is a reworking of the first disc’s “Calvary Scars,” grounding the song’s ethereal theme with an insistent, pounding bass. There is some indifferent material here as well but not enough to spoil the pleasure. Microcastle, by contrast, starts off dully, as “Agoraphobia” could be a Coldplay knockoff. The title track, too, spoils a dreamy opening with an uninspired yawner of a melody. In fact, although “Little Kids” is a charming, if bass-heavy, filigree of a theme, the record does not fully hit its stride till the rousing rocker “Nothing Ever Happened.” At this stage, following several dreamy, introspective slow numbers in a row, the album really cooks, for just one song, before slowing again for the Southern-bluesy “Saved by Old Times,” which has a “Romanian sound collage” incongruously dubbed into its midsection. The disc ends with two woozy, shimmering baubles in 6/8 time: “Neither of Us, Uncertainly” and “Twilight at Carbon Lake”; the former is frothy and warmhearted; the latter is less distinctive, a quiet tune aiming for a throwback to the 1950s/1960s doo-wop sound that becomes percussion-heavy in its second half. B+ (“Microcastle”)/A- (“Weird Era Continued”)

DUNGEN, 4—Most Swedish rock acts that I know of choose to sing in English; Dungen (Swedish for “the grove”) is uncompromising. Gustav Ejstes, who is the heart and soul of this band, sings only in Swedish (only half the tracks actually have lyrics). The album was titled 4 for the obvious reason, though, by an alternative count (one that includes an initial album that had limited distribution), this is actually the band’s fifth studio album. Critics have categorized the music as pyschedelia and characterized it as retro; Ejstes himself in interviews will go along with the latter, with reservations, but says that he does not set out to create with any particular genre in mind and that he listens to a lot of hip-hop these days. There is no hip-hop in Dungen but plenty of nostalgia for long-gone eras of popular music. You hear it from the very beginning of the first song. “Sätt att Se” (Ways to See); the harmonies sound like something that might have played on the radio (AM) in the early 1970s. This vibe is pushed further in “Det Tar Tid” and “Ingenting är Sig Likt”; even the gentle percussion, graced by a touch of handclaps and tambourine Ejstes is not blessed with a terrific singing voice, but neither is it unpleasant. On two tracks, his vocals are backed up by Anna Järvinen. In addition to writing all the songs, he plays piano, organ, strings, flute, and sometimes percussion. Supporting him are Reine Fiske on guitar, Mattias Gustavsson on bass, and Johan Holmegard on drums. “Sätt att Se” is shimmering and poignant, both plaintive and sweet in its string arrangements. “Det Tar Tid” is not as compelling, sounding like something from the early days of Lite FM, with spacy electric piano flourishes. Nor is “Ingenting är Sig Likt,” in spite of some lovely harmonizing between Ejstes and Järvinen. “Finns det Någon Möjlighet” suffers from split-personality disorder: a mellow theme that is by turns snappy and almost shapelessly flaccid is bracketed guitar licks that lay on heavily some screechy feedback and reverb effects. In “Mina Damer och Fasaner” (My Ladies and Pheasants), the verse portion of the song could have used refining; it seems underdeveloped. What I love about this tune, though, are Fiske’s quasi-Arabic modal guitar line and the solid, percussive bass from Gustavsson that complements it. Of the instrumental numbers, the best is “Fredag” (Friday)—just terrific ensemble work between Ejstes’s piano and the wailing guitar and rhythm sections; it is a power pop piece that is as piquant, charming, and evocative as anything on the record, and with an unusual little keyboard digression at the end in a spirit of classical modernism that would make Erik Satie proud. Runner-up honors among the instrumentals go to the first of the two pieces titled “Samtidigt,” which means something like “together” or “at the same time,” from my pitiful efforts to track down the translation on the Web. “Samtidigt 1” is all about acid Guitar Hero riffing, rocking and wailing like nothing else on the record. “Samtidigt 2” is more jazzy in spirit, pleasant enough in an easygoing way but lacking the visceral impact of its predecessor. “Målerås Finest” and “Bandhagen” have been compared by certain critics to elevator music, which is more apt for the first of these, a jejune little piece. “Bandhagen” (the latter named after a Stockholm suburb) is certainly soft rock in nature but is too active and intelligently composed to be wallpaper; my main objection to it is that Ejstes’s flute tone slips at times, sounding coarse and amateurish. A-/B+

FRIPP & ENO, No Pussyfooting—The history of this recording is a long one, going back to its original incarnation as an LP in 1973, at a time when Brian Eno, having left Roxy Music, was just setting out on a solo career, while Robert Fripp was still leading King Crimson. It had just two long-form tracks on it: “The Heavenly Music Corporation” and “Swastika Girls,” experiments in atmospheric music that were greeted coldly by critics, fellow musicians, and the record label at the time. The fact that the music has been re-released not once but twice now shows the way it has grown in esteem since then, regarded now as pioneering work in a sort of pop analogue to minimalism. It points the way both to Eno’s subsequent work in ambient music and to Fripp’s keening tones and intricately overlaid guitar patterns, called Frippertronics, that came to characterize King Crimson after the band reconstituted itself around 1980, as well as featuring in Fripp’s solo ventures and performances with groups he assembled such as the League of Crafty Guitarists. This proved to be the first of three Fripp-Eno collaborations, the others being Evening Star (1975) and, following a long hiatus, The Equatorial Stars (2004). Fripp reissued the first joint effort in 2008 on his own Discipline Global Mobile label, remastered and expanded to a 2-CD set, which includes the original tracks together with both played with the master tape running in reverse, plus a half-speed version of “The Heavenly Music Corporation.” The overlay on No Pussyfooting was created using a system of two tape recorders that Eno developed in his studio. The drone track was created first, combining Fripp’s guitar and Eno’s synthesizer, with the aid of the twin tape recorders to extend and intertwine notes and allow them to decay. Then Fripp soloed on top of that, with Eno further using tape loops to create a multilayered effect. The almost twenty-one-minute-long “Heavenly Music Corporation” has five sections to it, while “Swastika Girls,” nearly nineteen minutes in duration, has two. The music runs continuously, and the division into sections, while not entirely arbitary, is at best approximate. “The Heavenly Music Corporation” sprawls in such a deliberate fashion that it is hard to get proper perspective on it in the course of listening; it is akin to hearing the song of a humpback whale. It has two and a half minutes of undulating drone before the appearance of any guitar overlay, like the drawn-out intro to Pink Floyd’s “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond,” except that the latter achieves an immediacy once the main theme kicks in that “The Heavenly Music Corporation” never does. The guitar part, which seems to be fighting a losing battle against the drone in the first section, achieves some thematic mastery over it in the middle sections. As Heather Mackenzie observed in her review of the piece, the improvisatory guitar solos “are very impressionistic and create a lot of drama by building into peaks, submerging back down into calm, and sometimes causing complete musical meltdowns. Throughout, a lot of interesting guitar textures are used, from laser-beam legato to heavily distorted riffing, to quiet slurred lines, to complete discordant chaos.” The swooping note bending and tremolos presage Fripp’s work with King Crimson mark two; particularly at the beginning of the fifth section, prior to the final subsidence and fadeout, which evokes “Elephant Talk” from Discipline (1981). “Swastika Girls,” which reputedly got its name from an image in a pornographic magazine that Eno found lying around a studio, of nude women giving a Nazi salute, is in some ways very different in character: the “drone” is much brighter and more metallic in timbre, like being in a tinsel factory, and strummed rather than played as long tones. The first portion of the piece is static and repetitive; its changes are subtle and truly glacial over the course of its nearly eight-minute length. The second section features guitar solos that are broadly similar to those of “The Heavenly Music Corporation” but placed on top on that buzzy, almost shrill, insect-chatter drone. The guitar part becomes active, yowling and growling and taking on overtones, displaying lesser bursts of activity even as the volume begins to wash out toward the end. Most critics consider “Swastika Girls” the lesser of the two works, but I simply regard it as distinct. I cannot say that the reversed and decelerated versions of the numbers that fill out the set offer any great insights of their own; they are just another way of listening to the music. A-

GANG GANG DANCE, Saint Dymphna—This was the best dance/electronica offering I heard in 2008, fresh, smart and innovative. St. Dymphna is described by the band as the patron saint of confusion and madness, but she is also supposed to be the patron of happy families (and mental health professionals). The band’s resort to tape looping makes for a repetitive listening experience, but it is all, together with some incantatory vocals, in service of creating a trancelike atmosphere. The group draws on a wide range of sources, from Cabaret Voltaire to Afrobeat, to create a densely layered sound that has been described as experimental or futuristic by critics. Songs are fairly free-form, not quite jams—even if track 8 is called “House Jam”—though improvisation is integral to the band’s creative process. They are also groove driven, not surprising considering that three of the four group members are percussionists in addition to their other roles. At its most intense, as in “First Communion,” the sound’s DNA snippets cohere, rising to an emotional tsunami that sweeps over you before you know what is happening; when it is more diffuse, as in “Desert Storm,” the visceral impact is a good bit weaker. Other tracks (“Inners Pace,” “Afoot”) come across as spacy (“in a land where cows are sacred” is a mantra of “Afoot”). “House Jam” is like a heavenly choir with electronic blips and flourishes and a heavy beat, while “Dust” closes the disc with a mellow and pleasant, if numbingly monotonous, benediction. The lyrics are frequently opaque but are of little consequence. Liz Bougatsos, or “LZA” in the liner notes, who doubles as a drummer, tends to declaim the words more than sing them, in a bratty voice (sometimes rising to a yelp or a screech) whose mannerisms owe much to punk/New Wave divas like Siouxsie Sioux. For “Princes,” the group brings in English “grime” rapper Tinchy Stryder for a tracky that is punchy and propulsive and also a little hard on the ears. Most eye-opening line from an interview with the group: “Eventually we met at Tower Records, where Tim [percussionist and singer Tim DeWit] was stocking shelves and I [keyboard player and percussionist Brian DeGraw] was shoplifting CDs.” Ah, so that’s why Tower went out of business! A/A-

HERCULES AND LOVE AFFAIR, Hercules and Love Affair—The debut, self-titled record from Hercules and Love Affair won critical plaudits all round. Hercules and Love Affair is perhaps better described as a “project” than a band in its formative stage; membership seems to be amorphous and fluid, and different lineups of musicians appear on various tracks. Andrew Butler, a D.J., composer, vocalist, and keyboard player, is the group’s founder and driving force, and Kim Ann Foxman and Nomi Ruiz lend their own vocals to the project. Antony Hegarty of Antony & the Johnsons was an integral part of the debut album, not only singing on about a third of the numbers but also co-composing about the same number (with heavy overlap between the two sets), but it is not apparent whether his association with Hercules will be ongoing. With at least two group members identifying as transgender, much of the singing is distinctly androgynous. Hegarty’s own voice is thick-timbred enough, and with a range that extends to fairly deep notes, to be recognizably male, but he is at home in the countertenor register. Comparisons have actually been made between his singing and that of Nina Simone. From the other side, Nomi Ruiz is deep-voiced enough to be mistaken for an eighties boy band crooner. Kim Ann Foxman’s voice is more conventionally female; while capable, her singing is emotionally flat. The music alternates between dance/funk tracks and slower, more contemplative numbers, with mythological references threaded throughout. As poetry, however, the lyrics fall short, coming across as fatuous or narcissistic. Characteristically, Hercules’ big hit “Blind” (voted best song of the year by Pitchfork Media) includes the lines, “I can’t look outside myself/ I must examine my breath and look inside ...” Apart perhaps from teenagers seeking guideposts to their own identity, though, I think few will dwell on the album’s words. “Blind,” with its deceptively perky dance beat (the words are self-doubting, almost to the point of despair) and little trumpet fanfare from Steve Bernstein of Sex Mob and the Millennium Territory Orchestra, has been overpraised; for me, the simplest songs are some of the best here, more than compensating for duller tunes like “Iris” or “This Is My Love.” “Easy” is nearly all Hegarty’s vocal—deep, rich, sensuous—limning the record’s slowest and darkest song, accompanied by just a basic keyboard sequence from Butler and programmed percussion from Tim Goldsworthy. “True False/Fake Real” is put together with much the same elements, adding a bit of bass and strings, but the quality of the vocal is very different, with Foxman keening the sketchy lyric over scatting from Butler—the song ends with the sound of a typewriter, very film noir in a sense. The final two tracks are purely dance oriented; they have a house beat and minimal lyrics and are actually among the most enjoyable: “Classique #2” and “Roar” are throwbacks to both the glam disco era and trance music, putting one in mind of the snippets of tunes parodied on Saturday Night Live’s “Deep House Dish” yet deriving their strength from hypnotic repetition and rump-shaking rhythms. “Raise Me Up,” sung by Hegarty, qualitatively similar to “Blind,” touches obliquely on the travails of growing up gay. The disc includes a video version of “Blind,” very much in classical/mythological mode but perhaps a bit too much like a Calvin Klein underwear ad. A-

HOT CHIP, Made in the Dark—As I listened to Made in the Dark, I tried thinking about the reasons why it is so superior to an electropop record of the same ilk, Cut Copy’s In Ghost Colours (see above). Hot Chip can be glib, but the fivesome’s tunes never sound prefab or formulaic. There is a playfulness to what they do, an inventiveness and willingness to experiment. That is why Hot Chip is a perennial favorite of Britain’s NME magazine, The band’s previous disc, The Warning (see my 2006 music survey) may have had more personality overall (no single track on the current disc quite measures up to the majesty of “Colours” on The Warning), but Made in the Dark is more of a full-blown, rocking dancefest. “Ready for the Floor,” “Touch Too Much” and “One Pure Thought” are tunefully vibrant, booty-twisting delights that swoop and soar and quiver, and “Don’t Dance” ends with an ecstatic burst of thumping tribal frenzy. “Shake a Fist,” the CD’s first single, has a Gumby-like elasticity, as the slinky main theme is interrupted midway through by a (distinctly American) D.J., who plays a game called “Sounds of the Studio” to manipulate a countertheme, which goes through several metamorphoses before cleverly returning to the original. In much the same spirit and character, if less of a standout performance, is the quirky, robotic “Bendable, Poseable.” Made in the Dark does slow down at times for variety’s sake: “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love” is a romantic little ballad, while the title track is gently if superficially (there are no deeply felt emotions on a record like this) bluesy; “Wrestlers” is an amusing take on love as combat, using the terminology of WWE and descending into droll silliness, and the final two tracks—the plaintive “Whistle for Will” and the wistfully gentle “In the Privacy of Our Love”—bring matters to an uncharacteristically (for this band) contemplative conclusion. Hot Chip’s next record is supposed to include collaboration by Peter Gabriel. A-

KINGS OF LEON, Only by the Night—My first exposure to Kings of Leon was their Saturday Night Live appearance a year ago. From that point forward, I have been both intrigued and repelled by the band. Three brothers named Followill from Tennessee, plus their cousin (also a Followill), all go by their middle names in the band. They are from a Pentecostal upbringing and were home-schooled, neither of which are likely to recommend them to audiences in the urban North. But while spiritual concerns are elemental to their music, they are far from being the exclusive focus. The song lyrics to Only by the Night (each song was credited to all four band members) are printed on the CD jacket but in a silvery, almost invisible ink—illegible unless you hold the thing at just the right angle to the light. The Kings of Leon’s fourth recording, Only by the Night is hard-rocking on some tracks, with strains of Southern rock, grunge and at least aspirations toward finding a following among the Starbucks set. I might like it better if I could warm more to Caleb Followill’s raspy voice; his preening poutiness might be irresistibly sexy to some but grates on me. The disc is also discouragingly inconsistent: while there are some moving tracks here, particularly in the early going, many never really go anywhere or deserve to be called anything but filler. The entire second half of the Only by the Night, from “Revelry” forward, is pretty much throwaway material. The two best songs are the album’s big single, the keening, throbbing “Sex on Fire,” and the track that precedes it, “Crawl.” The opener, called “Closer” (pronounced with a hard “s” so there’s no hidden clever wordplay here), and “Manhattan” also bear repeated listening; “Manhattan” is peculiar in being a languid theme topped by Caleb Followill’s typically overwrought vocal teapot-tempests, whereas in “Closer” the anguished vocals over a gently pulsing bass and synth overtones actually are in service of a soul-rending catharsis. “Crawl” is supposed to be the big political number; the message being that America must “learn to crawl again before it can walk again,” not necessarily what one might expect from a band with such deeply Christian/ evangelical roots. But “Crawl” is also a powerful anthem. “Sex on Fire” has an elementary structure: three verse/choruses with no bridge and an extended refrain at the conclusion—and a similarly simple melody that it milks for all it is worth, to great effect. So why, then, are the Followills wasting our time with so much undistinguished material? B-

LANGHORNE SLIM, When the Sun’s Gone Down—Folk performer Sean Scolnick took his performing name (and his band’s name, apparently, though they were previously known as War Eagles) from his hometown of Langhorne, Pennsylvania, which is adjacent to the town where I spent my childhood. I fear that people might get the wrong impression of his and my native soil from his music and his persona: while it is still true that one does not have to venture far from Langhorne to find Bucks County cornfields, the town is more likely to sprout subdivisions these days. When the Sun’s Gone Down, his band’s debut, was first issued by Narnack Records in 2005 and then reissued in 2008. I have to start out by saying that I do not much care for folk music and then, having admitted that, evaluate this record on its own terms. Langhorne Slim, who wrote all the music himself (he had a collaborator on two of the tracks), honed his compositional skills at the conservatory at Purchase, the “artsy” college of the State University of New York that also helped mold Regina Spektor. His music, while based on folk idioms, draws on bluegrass and rock as well. Mostly, it is voice and guitar or voice and banjo, with light percussion and sometimes a keyboard part or a bit of harmonica. The melodies and song structures are kept fairly simple and taut and are fairly effective as such. Moreover, while some of the lyrics are cornpone-hokey, others are genuinely clever. Slim’s voice, not particularly lovely but strong and expressive, has a certain plasticity, sounding on “Mary” as innocent as a little lamb and at other times half-strangulated (at one point during “Drowning,” I could swear, he is the aural dead ringer for Martin Short imitating Kathaine Hepburn). Mostly, though, he plays at being a yokel, singing in an earnest yet cornball, half-falsetto, half-hoarse, raucous voice rising to a shout at moments of intensity. The rapid-fire strummer “Loretta Lee Jones,” featuring some frenetic humming in between verses, is the ne plus ultra of Slim as Southern rube poseur. For variety, “Hope and Fulfillment” is an accordion-fueled, triplet-filled polka stomp. There are a couple of quiet instrumental interludes, bass and Rhodes electric keyboard, that serve as codas to the songs that preceded them: “Sisterhood” follows “Mary,” and “Hanshaw Shuffle” caps off “And If It’s True.” The barroom blues number “I Love to Dance,” in which Slim puts his social graces and diplomacy with the ladies on display, brings in a yowling, guttural trombone for a touch of Dixieland spice at the record’s end. Slim’s authenticity as a straw-hat-and-overalls folkie is unlikely to be helped by a recent move from Brooklyn to northern California, but he is gaining a following nonetheless. My own predilections will lead me not to give this CD much play, but for many, its high-spirited, plain-spun balladry will no doubt prove infectious. A-/B+

M83, Saturdays = Youth—The peculiar equation in the title lends itself to several interpretations. Saturdays belong to young people? The weekend is a time of rejuvenation? The lyrics on this otherwise splendid pop record veer between genuine poetry and vapid juvenilia. M83 has been around since 2001, and Saturdays = Youth is its fifth recording. The “group” is essentially Anthony Gonzalez, of Antibes, the French Riviera resort; a few years back, he split with his original cofounder, Nicolas Fromageau. For the current record, Gonzalez pulled together an ensemble that featured Morgan Kibby, of the Los Angeles indie band the Romanovs, on vocals and keyboards and Loïc Maurin on drums and other instruments. Coproducer Ewan Thomas, who divides his time between London and Berlin, plays keyboard on some tracks as well. Gonzalez created all the music, while his brother Yann and Morgan Kibby collaborated with him on the words. Coproducer Ken Thomas has worked with the Cocteau Twins, whose work from the 1980s this album is sometimes compared to, as well as Queen, David Bowie, Public Image Limited, Sigur Rós, and others. The record does consciously hearken back to 1980s pop; Gonzalez has said in interviews that he intended it as a tribute to his teenage years and that he was influenced by some of the teen-themed movies of the eighties (the resemblance of the cover photo on the CD to The Breakfast Club has been remarked upon). But he also labored not to become a prisoner of the recollections, which would yield an archive project. With the lineup put together for the current record, M83 shifted emphasis from the electronica that characterized earlier recordings, though you still hear it on, for example, the nearly wordless “Couleurs.” Most of what you hear was produced by live instruments, not computers. The ringing guitars of the shoegaze genre show up on a handful of tracks: “Graveyard Girl” and “Highway of Endless Dreams” and, to a lesser degree, “Skin of the Night” and “Dark Moves of Love.” But in its limpid tones, its richly consonant melodies, its breathy vocals, and its general lightness, the record bears comparison to Gonzalez’s compatriots Air, even if the classical derivation of Air’s compositions is missing here. If Gonzalez’s voice sounded anything like that of Jean-Benoît Dunckel or Nicolas Godin, songs like “You, Appearing” or “Too Late” could readily be taken for an Air recording. The best piece on the album is “Skin of the Night,” a gossamer confection of delicate beauty. Kibby’s light, silvered ultra-high soprano takes the lead, while Gonzalez provides a creditable backing vocal; it may just be the best pop song made in 2008. Of similar quality, if slightly more treacly, is “Up!” Of the four songs issued as singles, “Graveyard Girl,” the most ghoulish of several songs with ghostly lyrics, is the most inconsequential and melodically dull. “We Own the Sky” has a pumping beat but, again, an unmemorable theme. “Kim and Jessie,” a song about time-honored dreamy teen idealism, is well crafted, with the most conventional song structure of any piece on the disc. “Couleurs” impresses as the big, pounding dance-floor number, an extended track that does not wear out its welcome. Another song that has a fat beat, filling the room with exuberant sound and just enough variation to keep its repetitive pattern from becoming mind numbing, is “Highway of Endless Dreams.” The stately progression of “Dark Moves of Love,” another song of boundless teen passions, ends on a single, shimmering chord, with a few gently cycling undertones, that is absurdly sustained for a full eleven minutes on the concluding track, “Midnight Souls Still Remain.” There is no development whatsoever in this final piece, no theme, no overlay, no rhythm—just that great cosmic chord. A/A-

MATTHEW HERBERT BIG BAND, There’s Me and There’s You—I was more than a little dismayed by this record, in part because my expectations were raised by Herbert’s excellent previous release, Scale (2006; not produced with his Big Band; see my 2006 music survey), and in part because it is far more like musical theater than I was expecting. Like bad musical theater, like an audacious but misguided attempt to re-create the brassiness of Chicago or Cabaret or even Threepenny Opera, yet with songs by a supremely talented composer. The CD jacket is best ignored because Herbert’s political posturings quickly grow tiresome. OK, Matthew, so you’re anticorporate and hate the Gap; well, you’re still relying on a corporate entity (!K7 Records in Berlin) to distribute and sell your music (product). The CD, Herbert says, was “written according to the rules of PCCOM,” which stands for the Personal Contract for the Composition of Music and is to music what the Dogme 95 principles of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg are to filmmaking. (No drum machines, no ‘pre-existing’ samples; nothing that cannot be replicated in live performance, etc.) Each track on There’s Me and There’s You supposedly incorporates the sounds of various inanimate objects (a bottle of sparkling wine? How does a ‘carbon-neutral coldplay cd’ enter into the final track?), some of which purport to represent protests against the Iraq war or U.K. detention laws. “Nonsound,” the tenth track, in its book jacket description, engages in the sort of shameless Israel bashing that has become fashionable among the European left and in certain circles on American university campuses: its conceit is that it collects “sounds contributed by palestinians of their favourite, or their most hated sound” (no imagination needed to divine what their most hated sounds involve)—somehow, the sound of a Palestinian terrorist blowing a bus full of innocents to kingdom come or shooting rockets into Israeli schools and bedrooms is strangely absent from this compilation. A pity because that sort of excrescence (excreta?) ruins what is otherwise an intriguing theme. Most of all, I rue the absence from this recording of Herbert’s wife, Dani Siciliano, who did so much to humanize Scale with her warm, jazz-inflected singing. This is not a knock against Eska Mtungwazi, the singer Herbert employs for all the vocals on There’s Me and There’s You. She is a pro and a trouper, displaying her range and versatility throughout and singing with verve, spunk and charisma. Certainly, her sexiness and charm spice up the opening track, “Story,” the best on the record. Notwithstanding the “nothingness” of the lyric for “Story,” it has a gentle but sultry swinginess and a chugging rhythm, and the way Herbert effortlessly raises the intensity level in returning to the theme following the bridge is an exercise in masterly compositional subtlety. The high-pitched rapid twittering of the neonatal unit monitor that forms the background for “One Life” is strangely affecting. In other places, though, There’s Me and There’s You strains for theatrical effect; the final number, “Swing,” is Mtungwazi’s Liza Minnelli star turn but fails to convince. “Breathe,” “Waiting” (“come on and feel the murder” says the insistent refrain—huh?), and “The Yesness” are similarly over the top—some great horn charts in the latter, but it all feels a little cheesy. I respect Matthew Herbert’s artistry, if not necessarily subscribing to all his politics, but this record is a misfire, a misallocation of everyone’s considerable talents. B+/B

PALMS, It’s Midnight in Honolulu—The album’s title is indisputably true—for one moment each day. Palms is a trans-Atlantic duo consisting of Midwestern-bred, New York-based Ryan Schaefer, who plays guitar, synthesizers, and whatever other electronic overlays or percussive effects are called for and sings backing vocals as well, and Berlin-based, multilingual vocalist Nadja Korinth. The record is spare and elemental, even more severe than the two young artists’ fierce gazes in the dual photographic portraits on the inside of the CD book jacket. Yet, much of it is starkly beautiful, and it makes for an impressively self-assured, if brief (barely thirty-two minutes long), debut. Korinth’s voice itself is one of the album’s strengths, clear, strong, and versatile: viscerally declamatory on “Our Home”; silvered and delicate on “New Moon.” Schaefer’s voice, by contrast, is a bit weak, which detracts from the tracks in which it features prominently, namely, the fairly static “End of Term” and “Leather Daddies,” a verbally rambling number, more rolling than rocking, that recalls influences like Sonic Youth and Lou Reed. The darkly forbidding “Der Koenig” (The King), the first of several songs with both English and German lyrics, sets the tone for what follows, at the same time plaintive and strident, with a touch of cartoon ghoulishness in its minor-mode theme. “Das Lowenfell” is about as stripped-down as can be, just Korinth’s vocal stutterings and musings about, among other things, waves rolling over each other like “baby dogs” (I guess “puppies” did not fit the lyric’s meter), over a very basic guitar accompaniment and a martial drumbeat, with a touch of background wind sound. It ends in an odd little section of chanson, with Korinth speaking French while there’s a bit of accordion music in the background. In two of the songs, she deploys a primal yell: On “Monte Alban,” it is a ringing vocal tremolo over sustained synth notes, eventually subsiding and giving way ultimately to a thudding drum pattern. Some critics regard the ululations as grating, but I give her credit for laying it all out there; musical expression is about the gamut of emotions, even the more anguished and alarming ones. “Hang Your Head,” by contrast, sounds like an Amerindian war chant, at least until the yelps at the end of phrases coalesce into the incongruous “Farewell, my love, farewell,” sending the simile up in smoke (signals). “New Moon” is the most subtle piece on the record, ghostly and ethereal in its churchly keyboard chords, held for a seeming eternity, its sparse lyric barely audible. “Boundary Waters” is the temperamental opposite of “New Moon,” heavily percussive, with zooming sirens and scratching sounds, framing a sprechstimme entirely in German. Like “Das Lowenfell,” it concludes with a section that is radically different from the body of the song, with even more pounding drums and a sort of ominous hum. The somber “Our Home” at the disc’s end is, appropriately, Korinth at her most domesticated, sounding oddly like Golde from Fiddler on the Roof in declaring, “This house is our home.” Even so, the imagery conjured by the words is more Hansel und Gretel: fabulist and phantasmagoric. A/A-

PLASTILINA MOSH, All U Need Is Mosh—I put this record in with the mainstream pop, although the music stores have consigned this highly Americanized Mexican band to the “world music” bin. Like the band Kinky, Plastilina Mosh hails from Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo León and the economic capital of northern Mexico; also like Kinky, it aims for an audience that spans the Rio Grande, singing in both Spanish and English, with much of the postproduction work done in the United States. The two bands’ styles are similar yet different; I would classify both as “new New Wave,” or postpunk, but whereas Kinky also draws heavily on techno, Plastilina Mosh, less so. But “P-Mosh” is clearly more indebted to hip-hop; the Beastie Boys in particular appear to have been an early inspiration. While Latin American influences occasionally creep in at the margins of All U Need Is Mosh, particularly in “Paso Fino” (a breed of horse developed in the Caribbean) and the background marimba music for “My Party,” the characteristic banda sound of northern Mexico (norteño music), which has some bearing on the music of Kinky, is absent here. Other bands I have reviewed that are in a sense kindred spirits with Plastilina Mosh are Norway’s Datarock and Brazil’s Bonde do Rolê (see my 2007 music survey for both groups). The sound is energetic, in-your-face obnoxious, sometimes funny. Songs like “Toll Free,” “Let U Know,” and “Cut the Crap” are pure New Wave, getting by on punchiness rather than any artistic finesse. “Jonaz Goes to Hollywood,” “My Party,” and “Danny Trejo” feature rapping, though the backing music is played live rather than sampling. “My Party” is especially amusing for its aspirational name-dropping, talking about Paris Hilton shaking “her baby-maker” and George Bush showing up “with his buddy Danny Bonadouche—I mean, Danny Bonaduce.” Also crashing the party: the police, “not Summers, Copeland, or Sting—the kind of cops that don’t sing.” Tinges of funk pervade “Danny Trejo” and especially the jittery rocker “Come Back Bitch.” “Arriba Dicembre” [Up with December], a relatively mellow number, is intriguing for having lyrics in Italian, though the song title is a twist on the final lyric, substituting the Spanish “arriba” for the Italian “arriva,” from the line “e dopo quello, arriva Dicembre” [and after that, December arrives]. The origins of the expansive, spacy (as in “planetarium laser show music”), essentially lyric-less track “Going to Mars Bolton” are curious; some casual research revealed that the Mars candy company has its Canadian headquarters and a factory in Bolton, Ontario; no other connection is evident. The instrumental “San Diego Chargers,” driven by its bass and drum tracks, samples crowd noise and cheering, referees’ whistles, and perhaps a bit of barely audible radio broadcasting. The slow funk groove “Paso Fino,” the longest track on the record at slightly more than six minutes, with Spanish lyrics (“call me crazy, fresh, timid, discreet, attentive, and a gentleman … call me first,” and so on) rapped over the beat, puts me in mind of some of the work of Brazil’s Mundo Livre S/A, a personal favorite of mine, on its records Carnaval na Obra (1998) or Por Pouco. (2000) “Pervert Pop Song,” with lead vocals contributed with grit and forcefulness by Ximena Sardiñana, mixes postpunk with hip-hop; apparently, the song was used on the soundtrack of a recently released movie titled Máncora. Plastilina Mosh is essentially a two-man band, Jonas González (“Jonaz”) and Alejandro Rosso (“Rosso”), with help from numerous others, notably Juan José González (a relative?), in composing some tracks and writing lyrics for others; Eduardo “Emo” González on piano and lead and backing vocals; Natalia Slipak, who plays drums and does some backup vocals; and Milton Pacheco, who adds backup vocals as well. Although the two principals are multi-instrumentalists, Jonaz carries the bulk of the singing, while Rosso is the keyboard master and songwriter. A-/B+

SANTOGOLD, Santogold—If you are a casual listener, you might think you do not know of Santi White, or Santogold (now changing her performing name to Santigold as the result of a threat of legal action by some tacky jewelry firm called Santo Gold). In fact, her “Lights Out” and “Creator” have featured in beer commercials on television. Her debut album was widely praised—perhaps overpraised—by critics: Jon Pareles had Santogold on his ten-best list of pop albums for the year, and Rolling Stone named her an artist to watch. White is not blessed with a great singing voice—at best it is serviceable, as in the most tuneful and innocuous song on the record, “Lights Out”; at worst, it is bubblegum-juvenile and downright grating. This detracts from what is indeed an attention-grabbing first effort. She cites a broad spectrum of influences but objects to those who would classify her music as rhythm and blues or hip-hop, saying there is an inherent racism in lumping her in with those categories. Nonetheless, the influence of hip-hop, at least, on her record is undeniable, even if it is not the dominant genre. She has invited rappers like Spankrock and Trouble Andrew, as well as hip-hop producers Switch and Freq Nasty, as guest participants on the record. And she has not completely dismissed comparisons that critics have made with M.I.A., whose rapping is integral to her sound. The biggest influence evident on Santogold is reggae; Santi White, a Philadelphia native, was previously a member of a Philly ska-punk band called Stiffed, along with John Hill, her writing partner on most of the album’s songs. Dub reggae flavors a number of tracks, such as the bubbly “Unstoppable,” in which the vocal seems a cross between dancehall toasting and Toni Basil-style cheeleading. “Shove It,” one of the CD’s most powerful tracks, is steeped in languid Caribbean rhythms and Afrobeat-style horns, though neither White’s lyric nor Spankrock’s rapping could be characterized as laid-back. Further toasting punctuates “Creator,” which is otherwise all about heavily processed, swooping synthesizer tones and manipulated vocals, courtesy of Switch and Freq Nasty. “My Superman” is of another type, one that invites the unwanted R&B categorizations, invoking another idol of White’s, Nina Simone. From the punk/new wave side of her heritage (Bad Brains is a group White has worked with, and Chuck Treece, a Philadelphia guitarist who tours with the band, has done some production work for Santogold) come songs like the record-opening “L.E.S. Artistes,” for which Rolling Stone evoked both the Cars and the Strokes, and “You’ll Find a Way,” featuring an agitated vocal over a punchy bass line. “Say Aha” has some of White’s most artless singing but otherwise successfully marries her dub and new wave sides in a quick-paced burst of energy that became the record’s fourth single (after “Creator,” “L.E.S. Artistes,” and “Lights Out”). “Starstruck” is as dark as Santogold gets; working with Philadelphia D.J. and producer Diplo (Wesley Pentz), White pairs a plaintive vocal and sighs with an unrelenting progression of deep whole notes generated electronically or through the bass. The final track on the CD is a dub remix of “You’ll Find a Way,” dispensing with the guitar propulsion in favor of a robotically synthetic beat. Keep an eye on where this Wesleyan-educated solo artist’s career heads. A-/B+

SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS, Alpinisms—Benjamin Curtis, the lead guitarist for School of Seven Bells, came over from Secret Machines, an alt-rock band with a different sound from his new venture, leaving behind his brother in favor of identical twin sisters, Alejandra and Claudia Deheza. The Dehezas had been in a band I had never heard of, the now defunct On! Air! Library! They sing in duet and generally play guitar (Alejandra) and keyboard (Claudia). School of Seven Bells’ debut record, Alpinisms is sometimes described as “dream pop” but draws heavily from the related shoegaze subgenre as well. Named for an apocryphal “pickpocket academy” in South America, the band succeeds more than most in its genre in creating a hypnotic, mesmerizing soundscape. Its melodies are consonant and its rhythms regular, so from a formal standpoint there is nothing cutting-edge about the music, yet, working within conventions, it still manages to be fresh and innovative. In its simplest and most freewheeling form, this results in a song like “Half Asleep,” so delightfully tuneful that its chord progressions and harmonies seem almost predetermined, yet, obviously, it was not created out of thin air. More intriguing still are songs that pile on the electronic effects to reach a stirring climax, freighting elemental melodies with textural density: both “Wired for Light” and “White Elephant Coat” fall into this category. Though the first half of Alpinisms has its above-mentioned treasures, it is in the second half that it really takes flight. “Connjur” is, in compositional terms, little more than a recurrent simple arpeggio, a symmetrical (more or less) arching note pattern riding a gentle syncopation, but the production gives it more depth by layering the rhythm guitar accompaniment with gauzy washes and zooms. Utterly transfixing, the succeeding song, “Sempiternal/Amaranth” (yes, it is this sort of pretension in titling that gave plenty of ammunition to punk rebels in the 1970s; and even the cover art is reminiscent of Roger Dean’s work on the prog rock albums of the early seventies), eleven-plus minutes of swiftly throbbing, pulsing bliss embellished with a bittersweet melody sung in a quavery voice by (I think) Alejandra, stands as the record’s emotional and creative peak; even if you think the melodic core itself less than profound, you may find yourself swept along and transported to a state of grace. The songs that follow to close out the disc are each distinctive but share in that breezy tunefulness: “Chain,” with its vocoder processing of Alejandra Deheza’s voice to sound like a synthetic horn or sax; “Prince of Peace”—bass-heavy and with a quasi-Oriental theme; and “My Cabal” (pronounced like “cable” by Alejandra), guitars ringing out in affirmation, in true shoegaze fashion, the peculiar and baffling lyric notwithstanding (“My cabal, he sleeps outside; pulling the shadow over the moonlight”). A/A-

SIGUR RÓS, Með Suð i Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust—Previously wedded to glacial pacing, Sigur Rós, perhaps in a bid for greater accessibility, picks up the tempos for some of the songs on Með Suð i Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust, which translates to “With a Buzz in Our Ears, We Play Endlessly.” Somewhat defeating that purpose, the band still sings exclusively in Icelandic, a language that fewer than half a million people on the planet can understand. With one exception: the placid final number, “All Alright,” is in English but an English that is so murmured as to be barely intelligible. No matter; Sigur Rós (“Victory Rose”) is selling records not because of its lyrical appeal but because of its lush, cinematic soundscapes. Thus, it was a bold move to turn toward lightier, poppier fare for the new record’s first half, at least. The opening song, “Gobbledigook,” released as a single, with its rapid-fire drumming, handclaps, and soft ululations, moves the band closer to the freak folk of Akron/Family or Yeasayer, unaccustomed territory for the Icelanders. “Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur” (Within Me a Lunatic Sings), the succeeding track, manages to maintain the brisker tempo without sacrificing the stately melodic eloquence—piano and Jón Þór (“Jónsi”) Birgisson’s tenor, supported by strings and chiming bells—that the band is known for. After the fourth track, however, the album reverts for the most part to the band’s accustomed deliberate pace. Long, churchly sustained tones and a near absence of rhythm characterize “Festival,” though it has a second section in which percussion kicks in, driving one of its themes repeatedly with more urgency. The drums and andante rhythms return for one last hurrah with the sixth track, “Með Suð i Eyrum,” before quitting for good. “Ára Bátur” (Oar Boat) starts as a quiet song for voice and piano but swells to grandiosity with the addition of the London Oratory School Schola choir, whose services have been enlisted for several recent movie soundtracks. For all that, a good bit of hot air is expelled toward the end without much payoff in terms of enlightenment. “Fljótavík,” named after a lakeside spot in Iceland, has a certain quiet, ambient majesty, as Jónsi shifts between his tenor and falsetto registers, and “Straumnes” (a mountain near Fljótavík) serves as a muted, wordless coda to “Fljótavík.” While the attempt to change stripes in the early portion of the record is an intriguing development, and there are pretty atmospherics throughout, Sigur Rós has reached loftier creative peaks on earlier releases. B+

SQUAREPUSHER, Just a Souvenir—Squarepusher is Englishman Tom Jenkinson and his orchestra, which is an array of electronic equipment. Just a Souvenir is practically wordless, but “A Real Woman” has what sounds like a computer-generated voice delivering what might well be computer-generated lyrics that seem like an exercise in self-esteem boosting, beginning with “You are a member of society” and continuing with such banalities as “You’re impressive; you’re important; you are smoking; ’cause you are real.” This song is preceded by a minute-long little guitar intro called “Open Society.” The funk groove “The Coathanger,” which follows an opening tune, “Star Time 2” that is pleasant but insubstantial, repeats a few words about “[something] your coat.” There is a fair amount of variety among the record’s fourteen tracks: “Aqueduct” and “Fluxgate” are brief, rhythmless pieces featuring some gentle electric guitar solo perambulations underpinning a sequence of electronic whirs and splashes and zings, while “Quadrature” flips the emphasis, presenting a subtle little guitar piece with a stuttering rhythm and blips and twirls of electronic filigree. “Yes Sequitur,” which rounds out the playlist, is for heavily miked acoustic guitar and has the texture and tenor of a ballad by a forgotten Iberian or Cuban composer. “Duotone Moonbeam” is a relaxed, jazz-inflected piece with a moody soul. The three-song sequence in the middle of the record—“Planet Gear,” “Tensor in Green,” and “The Glass Road,” are more like the neoprogressive rock of the Mars Volta (without Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s vocals), high-strung, cosmically inclined, full of keening guitars, shimmering synthesizer sustained chords, and energetic bursts of drum volleys, the most vibrant and fun pieces on an otherwise sparer album. The brighter-hued “Glass Road” also resembles progressive rock in its seven-minute-plus length, complete with a “humming void” sequence at the close. “Delta V” is also like a 1970s-era etude for electric guitar and drums, brute force channeled and disciplined. If you listen carefully several times, it will dawn on you that “The Glass Road” borrows a thematic motif from “Planet Gear” and the finger-scorching guitar-and-drum exercises from “Delta V.” In fact, whenever I might have been inclined to think of this kind of solo electronica experimentation as lacking in vitality and emotional impact, it proved me wrong with its compositional sublimity. A-

STEPHEN MALKMUS AND THE JICKS, Real Emotional Trash—Never a member of the Pavement fan club, I am also a late arrival for Stephen Malkmus’s successor band, which features Mike Clark on guitar, Joanna Bolme on bass, and Janet Weiss on drums. And I came away decidedly underwhelmed by its fourth release, which seems to start a little slow and then lose momentum. Maybe Malkmus is just too much the slacker rock star for my tastes; the songs on Real Emotional Trash are aimless and unfocused. Even what is meant to be the album’s tour de force, the ten-minute-long title track, rambles and loses its way, veering into a second section that bears no relation to what came before it, turning a contemplative ballad into an acid rock trip in the manner of the Doors’ “L.A. Woman.” The opening number, “Dragonfly Pie,” awkwardly marries grungy power chords with an innocuous pop refrain, a large tail wagging a very small dog. ‘Hopscotch Willie” is a decent tune, in shades of blue, about a hard-luck murder suspect, with a nice little stop-time section featuring a skittering atonal piano sequence, just before the beat resumes with Malkmus singing that Willie was “panting like a pit bull, minus the mean.” Unlike elsewhere, the lyrics to “Hopscotch Willie” are readily comprehensible rather than obscurantist or free-associative. “Gardenia” is more self-contained than the majority of the songs on the record and would be pleasant enough if one could simply ignore the dopey lyric; much the same can be said for “We Can’t Help You.” Elsewhere, there are fleeting pleasures to be had in clever lines like “Wicked, wicked Wanda/What was it that spawned ya?” from “Wicked Wanda” or “I feel like a nympho trapped in acloister” from “Cold Son.” On the sprawling “Elmo Delmo,” Malkmus shows the range of things he can do with both acoustic and electric guitars, but beyond sheer technique, potentially interesting ideas are thrown off like radiation and not pursued, yielding an incoherent stew of song elements. “Wicked Wanda” holds some appeal in the passages in which it appears to be turning anthemic, tracing a poignant, echoey chord progression, but naturally the restless Malkmus is not content to stick with one mode of expression when three or four will do. I found myself quickly losing patience with this CD. B-

STEREOLAB, Chemical Chords—Stereolab has now been around for nearly two decades, and the band’s best years are well behind it. Lacking major-label support, it now records on its own Duophonic label and has a distribution deal with an indie label, Too Pure. Thus freed from immediate commercial pressures, it can pursue its own course, working at its own studio, Instant Zero, in Bordeaux. Refusal to compromise on artistic principles or license to noodle around? Probably both. While the full-length recordings Stereolab has put out since the turn of the millennium have been of little consequence, Chemical Chords is the lightest and jauntiest record the band has ever come up with. The lyrics may still be as impenetrable (and nearly half the songs are sung in French), and, to be sure, Laetitia Sadier still delivers them in a funereally somber tone, even on the spirited “Daisy Click Clack.” But this disc adds no firepower to the arsenal of critics who think that the group, at times accused of being crypto-Marxists, takes itself too seriously. Stereolab itself describes Chemical Chords as “a perfect equipoise between an implausibly cool past and a shamelessly exotic future.” What did I just say about not taking itself too seriously? The record, the band’s website says, was constructed atop a foundation of tiny drum loops and improvised piano and vibraphone chords; this is not easy to discern but no matter. Stereolab’s chord progressions are striking, yielding a unique chromatogram, yet it is all quite familiar to fans from the group’s previous recordings. So, no new ground is broken, yet there are still worthy nuggets strewn about, with a decided tilt toward the record’s second half. Of the tracks on the first half, ‘One Finger Symphony,” an eerily haunting theme, and the title track, a deliberative composition that recalls Stereolab at its creative peak in the mid-1990s, are the standouts. “Pop Molecule,” the only wordless song on the record (and thus the only one credited to Tim Gane alone, without his partner on lyrics, Sadier), lacks development and ends abruptly but is still memorable for its smothered, sputtering bass sustained tones, rolling in a churn like an angry sea. “Cellulose Sunshine” pairs one of Sadier’s characteristically mourning dove descending-scale vocal cooings with a dainty little harpsichord ostinato. “Fractal Dream of a Thing,” a suitably pensive number, has a nice and surprising resolution to vibraphone part at the end of the song. The metronomic “Daisy Click Clack” is about the cheeriest little pop tune Stereolab has ever devised. “Vortical Phonthèque,” another harpsichord-themed piece with a stately march tempo, serves as a tangy closer to the album. B+

TV ON THE RADIO, Dear Science—The problem with TV on the Radio’s previous release, Return to Cookie Mountain (2006), was its unevenness: it had a couple of terrific song ideas (“I Was a Lover”; “Dirtywhirl”) nestled amid a mound of indifferent material. The problem with the new record is that there are fewer true highlights to speak of. Dear Science is a tremendously wordy, cluttered record. Comprehension of the obscure lyrics is not aided by the way they are laid out, end to end, on a single sheet inside the CD jacket, as if transcribed from some religious scroll. “Red Dress,” the most overtly political song on the disc, encapsulates the woolly and overstuffed nature of the record—as the words blather on about mono crops and blackface and jacaranda petals, the music is twisted and jerked to fit the unwieldy verse—a real no-no in composition. Sections of it sound like a truncated version of an Antibalas jam—not coincidentally, Stuart Bogie of Antibalas plays sax on the piece, and Martin Perna, also of Antibalas, plays flute on other tracks. Other songs, such as “Shout Me Out” and “Lover’s Day,” try to dress up anodyne themes in arrangements and instrumental complexity. One song that manages at least to contain its patter in a neat rhythmic package, if with the unfortunate side effect of sounding a bit like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” is “Dancing Choose,” spiced by a sax-rich, jazzy refrain and a droll reference, among seven zillion others, to a “foam-injected Axl Rose.” The record’s snappy opener, “Halfway House,” features Ramones-esque backing vocals, as lead singer Tunde Adebimpe switches characteristically in and out of falsetto. “Golden Age” moves into the realm of funk; this may give the song a cool vibe, but it is still verbose, and the refrain’s theme is anything but memorable. “Family Tree,” by contrast, is a pop-oriented ballad with a warm, melodic refrain (though the verse unimaginatively gets trapped in a single fifth interval) featuring a shimmering keyboard part and sweet but not cloying string accompaniment, courtesy of various (female) guest performers. What the band is aiming for seems to come together on “DLZ,” a dark-hued mid-tempo number with genuine soul, a touch of the funk, and not a surfeit of words, despite Adebimpe’s singing about the “long-winded blues of the never” in the chorus. It bears mentioning that Dear Science got far more favorable write-ups elsewhere: both Rolling Stone and Spin named it album of the year, and it came in second in NME’s end-year list, while it also topped Pitchfork Media’s reader poll and the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop survey of critics. That is an impressive list; nonetheless, I remain unconvinced, still waiting for TV on the Radio to rise to its true potential. B

[VARIOUS ARTISTS], Pop Montréal ’08—This is a promotional CD that I picked up at Sound Fix Records. Like all such samplers, it is a mixed bag of musicians struggling for exposure and recognition. A number of these bands and artists (only about a third of which are actually Montreal based), who performed at the five-year-old festival called Pop Montréal, seem underdeveloped, while others already have a distinct sound. The disc features a wide range of pop styles, from the reggae/club sound of Toronto’s Bonjay on “Gimme Gimme” to the headbanging of Brutal Knights (also from Toronto), screaming “I wanna die!”; from the dream pop of Nova Scotian Chuck Blazevic’s Dreamsploitation to the “soul with cowboy boots” of Nashville’s powerful-voiced Denitia Odigie, on “Miss You”; from the otherworldly techno/hip-hop of South African duo Playdoe to the gentle folk-pop strains of Mittenstrings, on the song “Neil Young.” Mittenstrings, which counts as one of the half-dozen “local” bands on the compilation, has an interesting lineage: the brother-sister team of Sylvan and Lily Lanken are children of Anna McGarrigle and have worked with Martha Wainwright. “Neil Young” is a nicely turned example of a genre I do not usually warm to. “I Wanna Die” is a little hard on the old ears, but Brutal Knights has a sense of humor, at least: just when you think the song is finally over, you are waylaid by one last bawling cry. Caroline Keating, of Montreal, is a dead-ringer for Regina Spektor (acoustically, not in terms of physical appearance) on her song “Billy Joel.” It is remarkable to think that Spektor is far enough advanced in her career that still younger women are modeling themselves on her—her vocal stylings, her whimsicality, the way her piano darts between themes. San Francisco’s The Dodos’ single, “Red and Purple,” somewhat melodically wan, is notable primarily for its rambunctious, shuffling percussion, accented by a tinny Jaymar toy piano (the YouTube video of this song makes for an entertaining four and a half minutes). Of the two Francophone contributions to the sampler, Geraldine’s “Enrôle Toi dans Mes Bras” (Wrap You in My Arms) is a disaffected little postpunk trifle whose calling card is its ear-perking refrain, “F**k l’amour, f**k la guerre, f**k me, f**k me, f**k me, yeah,” whereas Automelodi’s “Buanderie Jazz” (Laundromat Jazz) has a smooth, Byrds-like chime to its guitars and a torchy Gallic vocal (by Laszlo Arnoldi) to carry the theme. Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” is an odd number, with a cartoonishly high-pitched, high-strung vocal, cavorting synthesizers à la Journey or Styx, a thudding beat, and samplings of a song called “Oro Mo Bhaidin” by Irish harpist Mary O’Hara—it all should not work together but is strangely affecting all the same. Passion Pit, from Cambridge, Mass., signed to the same label as the Dodos (Frenchkiss Records), has a record titled Manners coming out in spring 2009 and could be a band worth looking out for. Two strong instrumental numbers sit at the disc’s midpoint: Brooklyn’s Ratatat lays on a carousel of power pop and electronic effects on “Shempi,” followed by the glistening mellow confection of electronica beats, lounge-y guitar strings and plinking piano keys, and stylized wordless female vocalizing that is Dreamsploitation’s “The Night Everything Changed.” Playdoe’s “Gravey Yard” illustrates how far techno has ventured beyond its Detroit origins, melding its spacy grooves with hypercaffeinated rapping for a concentrated shot of testosterone. “Poison Dart” by The Bug (a.k.a. London’s Kevin Martin), featuring the dub vocals of the British-Jamaican Warrior Queen, a powerful six-minute-long track with a deep bass groove, marks the compilation’s emotional peak. Ghost Bees’ “Goldfish and Metermaids” makes for an intriguing closer, indie folk that is mystical and Eastern European sounding, with its mandolin and wailing violin adding color to the straightforward guitar accompaniment. Though the song is ostensibly about Vietnam and the horrors of napalm, it is a fair bet that Sari and Romy Lightman, the 24-year-old twins of Russian Jewish heritage who make up Ghost Bees, had other kinds of gas in mind as well. They are Toronto natives now based in Halifax. There is a fair sampling of forgettable material (Adam & the Amethysts, These Hands, Valleys, Dark Meat) on Pop Montréal ’08, but there is also enough that is worthwhile to sustain repeated listening. I presume the sampler disc is available by using the contact page at www.popmontreal.com. B+

VIVIAN GIRLS, Vivian Girls—If value is measured in terms of sheer quantity, then Vivian Girls, lasting barely longer than an EP disc, is a rip-off. Of course, a 21-minute musical treasure house is conceivable; unfortunately, this record does not even come close. The Brooklyn-based all-female trio of Cassie Ramone (lead vocals, guitar), Kickball Katy (bass), and Ali Koehler (drums) adheres to postpunk conventions on their self-titled debut without adding anything original. With their monotonous pacing (racing through each song), robotic singing, and grungy guitar sound, they are relying purely on energy to carry the day, and it is just not enough. Ramone’s singing is flat, both literally and in terms of emotional affect,which does not help matters; the extreme limitations of her vocal range seriously compromise any melodic ambition. The guitar playing and drumming never rise above the primitive. Punk devotees regard these sorts of liabilities as virtues; I cannot possibly be so patronizing—it is like calling a third-grader’s scribbles art. To cite highlights on this disc is like pointing out the barely perceptible rises in the landscape of the Netherlands or the Oklahoma Panhandle since the ten songs are pretty much interchangeable and of little consequence. “Tell the World” slows slightly, to a rapid march pace, and here the simple tune and elemental song structure (though it is one of the few here long enough to contain a bridge section, consisting mostly of pounding beats with a few sustained chords and reverb) actually work in its favor. “Where Do You Run To,” the succeeding song, slows even further, to a walking tempo, for the only true change of pace; it is also the only real “song,” in the sense of being songful, on the album and is therefore by default the star track. One track, “No,” consists of the lead singer caterwauling that one negative title word throughout, and that just about sums up Vivian Girls’ first recording. C-

“Hors de Combat” section


HONORABLE MENTION: MISCELLANEOUS

ISSA BAGAYOGO, Mali Koura—Of the two records in this section of the survey from Mali, which in recent years has become a prime focus for Western consumers of African music, this one is the more pop oriented, while Toumani Diabaté (see below) is more “classical” in nature. In fact, following the release of his dance-oriented debut album, Sya (1999), Issa Bagayogo picked up the moniker “Techno Issa” in his home country. Bagayogo’s life story in brief is the classic tale of rags to, if not riches, at least considerable commercial success, but there were complications along the way. A singer and performer on the kamele n’goni (or “youth harp,” a lute that was developed from a bulkier instrument used on hunting expeditions in the Wassoulou region of southern Mali in the 1960s), his first couple of cassette demo efforts did not break through. Not wanting to return to the arduous life of a millet farmer, he also failed at being a bus driver in Bamako, leading to a period of despondency in his home village before he pulled it together and resolved to try again in music. French producer Yves Wernert (most Americans probably do not appreciate the pivotal role of the French in bringing West African music to our attention) and former Ali Farka Touré guitarist Moussa Koné suggested that he work with drum machines and other preprogrammed rhythm tracks, which represented quite a departure for a Malian musician steeped in rural traditions. Call it musical colonialism if you must, but the resulting hybrid has proved its appeal on its home soil as well as abroad. The producers were much more hands-on than most in shaping the record: Wernert and his collaborator, Gaël Le Billan, composed and arranged the music and played bass, keyboards, sax, drums, and accordion. Other notable collaborators on the disc included Malian guitarist Mama Sissoko, flutist Ba Diallo, and djembe drummer Adama Diarra. Bagayogo’s voice, described by Calabash Music as “not flashy,” has a buttery smoothness with just a hint of a rough edge, not far off the quality of one of the great Brazilian pop tenors like Ivan Lins or Milton Nascimento. The artist’s label, Six Degrees Records, says he sings in Wolof on “Tcheni Techemakan”; I do not know if he does so throughout or switches to Bambara or some other language; in any case, none of his lyrics, much less translations, are spelled out. Pamela Mapaha supplies most of the backing vocals. Mali Koura, Bagayogo’s fourth album to date, is mostly dance tunes, but, unlike (so I have read) previous efforts, it explores other moods and modes as well. Particularly intriguing is “N’tana” for its skewed rhythms and unconventional harmonics. “Tcheni Tchemakan” and “Namadjidja” have the laid-back feel of lounge music, the latter with a rhythm gently rolling over itself and a plinking piano. Taking a brisk andante tempo, “Ahe Sira Bila” begins with traditional strings, but touches of harmonica and marimba take it far from the shores of Africa. The similarly paced “Dunu Kan” is given a very different feel by a funky electric guitar and organ/piano accompaniment and a periodic sax chorus; Bagayoyo sings the refrain but is otherwise chattily conversational in the course of this song. Of the danceable showpieces, “Poye,” riding the momentum of a swiftly flowing guitar ground bass, has the most metronomic quality; “Fimani” bops along energetically, its string accompaniment practically punched out rather than plucked or strummed. “Filaw” is one of several pieces to feature a guttural flute, playing in its low register; building from an elementary guitar sequence, it adds exuberant sax flourishes and call-and-response vocals to create a vigorous ensemble whose heat is cut, like yogurt after a chili-laden dish, by that coolly gritty flute part. My sole reservation is that there is a certain sameness to some of the uptempo pieces, making, say, “Sebero” and “Dibi” nearly interchangeable. Some of the arrangements have a touch of disco-ball or “cool jazz” cheesiness to them as well. But that does not really detract from a record that is peppy and self-assured. A/A-

TOUMANI DIABATÉ, The Mandé Variations—Toumani Diabaté, who is in his mid-40s, is described in the CD book jacket as “without a doubt the world’s greatest kora player.” This is not a statement I am equipped to debate, but he also comes from a proud lineage. His father, Sidiki Diabaté, was one of the foremost practicioners of the kora, the West African stringed instrument that is commonly thought of as a kind of African guitar, though it has both harplike and lutelike properties and uses a calabash, or giant gourd, as its sound chamber. And his forefathers, stretching back a very long time, were instrumentalists as well. Toumani Diabaté plays traditional griot songs as well as his own compositions and more “syncretic” pieces that meld the traditional with influences from elsewhere or interweave distinct tunes from Malian regional cultures. He uses two different koras, one the conventional instrument handed down from his father, the other a “machine head” kora, with a neck specially fabricated in Australia. The standard kora has four different tunings, of which only one, the sauta (described in the very informative CD booklet, written by scholar Lucy Durán, with song-by-song notes from the artist himself, as a major scale with a sharp fourth), is used on The Mandé Variations. For the machine head kora, Diabaté developed his own tuning, which he calls “Egyptian” because it is said to sound Oriental in nature. He has collaborated on a number of records since coming of age with his debut solo album, Kaira, in 1988, but The Mandé Variations is apparently just his first solo outing since that one, more than two decades ago. Of the eight tracks on it, “Ali Farka Touré,” named in memory of the Malian “king of the desert blues” guitarist, and “El Nabiyouna” (Our Prophet), are distinct because they are improvisations, a kind of kora solo jam session, more frenetic and with a looser compositional structure than the rest, full of furious runs and untethered to a steady beat; they are as much about virtuoso technique as expression. “El Nabiyouna” is described by the artist as gathering influences as diverse as flamenco and Indian music; “Ali Farka Touré,” while an homage, makes no conscious effort to mimic the sound of the late master’s music. “Elyne Road” is one of two songs named after streets in London (the other is “Cantelowes”), where Diabaté spent some time in 1987 and where he met the record’s producer, Nick Gold (who also produced Touré’s final recording; see my 2006 music survey). It was inspired by the UB40 cover version of the song “Kingston Town,” with which I am not familiar” (the phrase makes me think of the altogether different “Jamaica Farewell” from Harry Belafonte) and is the gentlest and most trancelike composition on the record. “Cantelowes,” according to Diabaté, mostly reinterprets a love song called “Jarabi” that appeared on his first solo album. But American ears will primarily pick up on its allusion to the soundtrack of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and will perceive it as variations on the famed Ennio Morricone principal theme from that spaghetti Western. The songs derived from Malian classicism tend to be the ones performed on the traditional kora, although “Si Naani” (Four Lineages), the opening piece, which alternates between instrumental takes on griot chants from different parts of the country, uses the machine head instrument. The songs’ apparent simplicity is deceptive: Diabaté is mixing themes and introducing new permutations of familiar ones; moreover, he is using the twenty-one-string instrument to reproduce the griot’s melody, its accompaniment, and the bass harmonies all at once, and sometimes to reproduce the impact of drums as well. “Djourou Kara Nany,” which is the Arabic name for Alexander the Great, reproduces and updates a song of Sidiki Diabaté, which appeared on a landmark 1970 recording, Cordes Anciennes, that featured three of the greatest living kora masters of the time. “Kaounding Cissoko,” a tribute to Baaba Maal’s late kora player, modernizes a tune called “Alla l’a Ke” that was composed for the kora about a century ago, speeding up its tempo and adding almost polyphonic layers of density to it, a supreme pleasure to listen to; meanwhile, “Ismael Drame,” named in memory of the artist’s spiritual guide, takes that same theme—barely recognizable as such since it has been stripped down and given the “Egyptian tuning”—and ensconces it inside another, a griot song titled “Miniyamba,” the whole thing introduced with an Arabic prayer. Half the songs honor people who are deceased (“Si Naani” is dedicated to the still living—and still apparently Mali’s foreign minister, although the liner notes describe him as “former”—Moctar Ouane), carrying on the oral traditions of the Mandé griots and other West African peoples. A

LE TRIO JOUBRAN, Majâz—Listening to Majâz (which means “metaphor” in Arabic), one feels a sense of timelessness that is both true and deceptive. The three Joubran brothers, Palestinian/Israelis from Nazareth, are masters of the oud, or Arabian lute, which was being played more than a millennium ago. They are heirs to a musical lineage that stretches back several generations. So they are mining a rich tradition, yet, with one exception, all the pieces on this record are newly composed by the group. That exception, “Min Zamân,” is a traditional song from Nazareth that the brothers arranged for this recording. It is also the only song on the disc that is sung (by the brothers themselves; as a chorus, they do not in any way embarrass themselves) and the only one for which the ouds are relegated to accompaniment. That is in itself a break with custom; typically, in Arabic music, the oud serves merely to complement the singer’s expressiveness. Here, the oud chorus is front and center, accompanied only by (and not on every track) a percussionist. In fact, the percussionist, Yousef Hbeisch, who uses a range of traditional drums, shakers, and other effects, such as finger cymbals, does not really get the credit he deserves in the sparse liner notes—he is fantastic, and the record would not sound fully realized without his contribution. One thing that might strike the listener as unusual is the frequency with which the brothers are playing in unison rather than in concert; in passages where they are playing against each other, it always seems to be one against two rather than three independent parts. Further, while homophony is traditional in Middle Eastern music, the Joubrans seem to eschew harmonies of any sort, much less the three-part harmonies their ensemble would allow for. Samir, the oldest brother, was exposed to jazz and flamenco guitar at an early age and had a solo career before launching Le Trio Joubran, while Wissam, the middle brother, is a luthier who graduated from the Stradivarius Institute in Cremona, Italy. The album features three solo improvisations called “Tanâsim,” which, according to the press release available on the Rock Paper Scissors website, refers to a sweet-smelling breeze, although it is also close to the Arabic word for “improvisation.” Each brother takes a solo turn, with Adnan, the youngest, putting in the freest-ranging and most note-bending performance on “Tanâsim I.” The opening piece, “Masâr,” begins with spare and stately strumming, which becomes slightly more rhythmically elaborate as the percussion begins to kick in, then even more so, as the piece gradually picks up in tempo, intensity, and sheer volume—like Ravel’s Bolero, the theme never changes, but by the end it is hard charging, with the drums thundering. After that tour de force, “Roubbama” makes for a quiet contrast, ornate yet austere, with shivery tremolos, although it, too, eventually picks up in intensity before reverting to form at the end. “Laylana” is the first piece on the record with extensive passagework in which one brother leads while the others play accompaniment; the soloing sounds like a sitar at certain points; the “Oriental” modal scales could as readily be Indian as Levantine; “Sama-Sounounou” has much the same qualities. The arpeggiations and etude-like figurations in the principal theme of the spellbinding “Shajan” give it an Iberian feel, although the quarter-tone steps and warping of pitch anchor it firmly in lands at the opposite end of the Mediterranean; like “Masâr,” this one ends in a furious rally, with oud and drums feeding off each other’s frenzy to reach a thrilling conclusion. Incidentally, the CD’s cover photo, with the three brothers barefoot on a beach, in black suits with their shirt tails hanging out, looks like a GQ spread. A

[VARIOUS ARTISTS], Umalali: The Garifuna Women’s Project—The subtitle of this recording sounds more like work, a sociomusicological study, than fun. Ivan Duran, a Belizean musician and producer, set out to be the Alan Lomax of the western Caribbean, recording the overlooked voices of Garifuna women (most Garifuna music is, according to the source notes, written by women, if usually performed by men). The Garifuna are a unique people, descended from Caribbean slaves and Amerindian populations of the islands who migrated to Central America and whose settlements are distributed largely along the northern coast of Honduras, the eastern coast of Guatemala, and in Belize. But these are not field recordings like Lomax’s, notwithstanding Duran’s stressing that he was working women with little time to spare for performance; they were recorded in studios, primarily one that Duran set up himself in Hopkins, Belize, in 2002. I do not want to give the impression that the primary value of this record is ethnomusicological or that, to indulge in stereotyping, its primary appeal is likely to be to the fair-trade-coffee-sipping, Putumayo Records-buying crowd of musical tourists. Since the emphasis is on women’s voices, however, it is a problem for me that most of the singers Duran showcases are underwhelming. Sofia Blanco, of Livingston, Guatemala, the first voice to appear (she sings both “Nibari” [My Grandchild] and “Yündüya Weyu” [The Sun Has Set]), has an irritatingly pinched, nasal voice. Silvia Blanco, Sofia’s daughter, sings (two songs by her aunt, Silvia Baltazar Rochez, “Barübana Yagian” [Take Me Away] and “Fuleisei” [Favors]) with similar qualities but in a higher, grainier voice and with careless diction, so far as I can tell—all the lyrics are in the Garifuna language. The other voices on the album, with one notable exception, tend to be very low, almost masculine in quality, à la Brazil’s Maria Bethânia (OK, not quite that low!), or at least indistinctly androgynous. Among these, vocal timbres range from the scratchy (Marcelina Fernandez Guity, or “Masagu,” on “Luwübüri Sigala” [Hills of Tegucigalpa]) to the pure (Chela Torres, on “Anaha Ya” [Here I Am] and “Áfayahádina” [I Have Traveled]). The one singer I really found appealing, Desere Diego, one of the younger women and perhaps the only active professional represented, does not appear often enough: she sings in duet with Chela Torres on “Mérua” (named after a mountain in Honduras) and doubles the vocal of Sarita Martinez on “Hattie,” a song lamenting the destructive wake of Hurricane Hattie in 1961. She also sings backing vocals on several tracks. The most prominent style of Garifuna music is punta, a moderately fast, hip-swiveling, circular dance whose leading exponent, until his sudden death in early 2008, was Andy Palacio. There is just one example of punta on Umalali (which means “voice” in the Garifuna tongue), however, “Tuguchili Elia” (Elia’s Father), written and sung by Elodia Nolberto of Punta Gorda, Belize; the song has a clipped, cantering rhythm. Several of the songs here, including “Yündüya Weyu” and “Hattie,” are in a style called paranda, which appears to be a form of country ballad, analogous to the bachata of the Dominican Republic but with somewhat quicker tempos and more active percussion. “Mérua” is offered as a work song from Honduras and is the only track on the disc to have as its primary motor the Spanish Caribbean clave rhythm of three beats against two. “Barübana Yagian” has an exuberant Caribbean lilt; by contrast, “Luwübüri Sigala,” a song of loss as a woman searches for her family, has a shuffling rhythm in the chekeres (shakers). “Anaha Ya” sounds distinct because it was originally just Chela Torres’s booming voice and the accompanying drums (two types of drums feature in Garifuna music, the primero, or tenor, and the segunda, or bass), to which a “Hendrix-style” Fender Stratocaster guitar by Eduardo “Guayo” Cedeño was later overlaid by the producer. On “Fuleisei,” Duran notes in the extensive CD booklet the flamenco-like quality to Silvia Blanco’s singing, and he is not entirely off base, but the main reason the song sounds “flamenco” is because that is how he orchestrated it, with Spanish guitar and fiercely volleying drums (no handclaps, though). “Uruwei” (The Government), sung by Belizeans Bernadine Flores and Damiana Gutierrez and written by Flores’s grandmother, Ola Flores, is an earthy tune about a mother’s decision to take a government job to support her children. It is one of two very slow numbers on the record (separated by the high-spirited, rhythmically rolling “Áfayahádina”), a deceptively relaxed-sounding song in which the vocals were recorded first and then Duran’s accompaniment and the sound of a creaking hammock added several years later. The other deliberate-paced song is the closer, “Lirun Biganute” (Sad News), a dirge in which a mother mourns her policeman son, killed in a romantic triangle scuffle, and wonders how to break the news to relatives; written and sung with touching solemnity by Julia Nuñez of Belize, it is given an appropriately simple arrangement. Listening to it made me wonder how different this record might have been had Duran’s production presented the women in relatively unmediated fashion rather than engaging in heavy-handed production and arrangements to frame their voices in a more commercially appealing manner. (Ironically, though, what I like about this record is primarily the arrangements and not so much the singing.) In fact, Duran does furnish an opportunity to hear these women, and others, unembellished: the disc, when inserted into a CD-ROM drive, makes available a number of videos (the video portions do not always load properly, at least on my computer), slideshows, and field tapes that could not be accommodated on the record itself. B


HONORABLE MENTION: LATIN

JOVINO SANTOS NETO, Alma do Nordeste/Soul of the Northeast—Flutist, pianist, and composer Jovino Santos Neto was born in Rio de Janeiro and spent fifteen years apprenticing in Hermeto Pascoal’s band before relocating to the United States in 1993 and striking out on his own. Now based in Seattle, he received a grant from Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company, in 2006 to do field research in the Brazilian Northeast (home to his grandparents, as well as to Hermeto Pascoal) and come up with a record based on his observations and inspiration. The result was Alma do Nordeste. Was it worth the effort? Perhaps not. I like the tracks that, to my ear, sound most “Northeastern.” But too many of the broad, tuneful melodies strike me as bland and uninteresting. When there is sax involved and the music comes across as “smooth jazz” with a Brazilian accent, I inevitably think of Lee Ritenour, with mild distaste. Thus, “Amoreira” (Raspberry Vine), despite an energetic accompaniment led by Santos Neto’s piano, “São Pedro na Jangada” (Saint Peter on the Raft), which has a curtailed middle section in which the instruments recede to reveal a pure samba street beat, “Fulô Sertaneja” (Flower from the Sertão), and “Borborema” leave little impression and fade quickly from memory. Similarly, the two compositions in which the harmonica carries the main theme—“Rede, Sossego e Chamego” (Hammock, Peace, and Cuddling) and “Biboca” (Mud Hut)—are too “Sesame Street” for my liking (an issue I have with lots of jazz harmonica), and the accordion-saturated “Saudade de Sua Gente” (Your Folks Miss You), a tribute to a recently deceased Northeastern female singer nicknamed Marinês, drips through the percolator without absorbing much flavor. “Saudade de Sua Gente” is organized in standard jazz fashion, with the piano and bass taking improvisational turns following the accordion, before the main theme returns. “Donkey Xote,” a xote (a type of forró) in which the composer imagined Don Quixote riding a donkey instead of a stallion, poking along and rocking from side to side, also lacks an engaging theme but is rescued by its humor and its gently swaying gait. The most traditional numbers are the brief “Passareio” (Birdsong) and the title track. “Passareio,” which Santos Neto conceived of as a syncopated 31-beat cycle (I am taking this from the CD jacket notes—it is not something I would likely have figured out on my own), with just drumming and a pair of dusky, cooing “fifes” playing off against each other, with the composer adding birdsong from the field at Macuca Farm and market chatter from the Madalena market, both in Pernambuco state, is eerily spellbinding. “Alma do Nordeste” is a conversation between two flutes, sometimes fluttery and sometimes earthy and guttural, one played by Santos Neto (this is the only track on which he plays flute) and the other by Carlos Malta, with its own set of atmospheric background sounds and “cattle calls” at the end from a musician called simply Pernambuco, who, like Carlos Malta, still plays in Pascoal’s band. Unlike “Passareio,” the title piece eventually generates a melody, swingy, spiky, and cool, for which strings and drums join the flute chorus. “Forró Vino,” though called a forró by its author, is the most straightforward jazz composition on the record and, as such, does him credit, briskly paced and tightly structured. The opener, “Festa na Macuca” (Party at Macuca Farm), with its accordion pumping out a theme that is doubled by the flute, is richly Northeastern in texture, a baião (another type of forró) that is a square dance with a wicked twist—Santos Neto gave it a 7/4 beat. The closing song, “Vermeio Agreste Lampião” (Red Wild Lantern), imagines the legendary bandit leader Lampião, or “Lantern,” riding swiftly through the scrub to evade capture. It has the appropriate clip-clop rhythm and twang for its genre and is a real ensemble piece, with all sorts of instrumentalists taking part; it gets a little woolly as it develops but is still an enjoyable chase. But the pleasures of Alma do Nordeste are too thinly spread. B

SIDESTEPPER, The Buena Vibra Sound System—Ivan Benavides and Richard Blair’s Colombian electronica/dub/salsa project borrows heavily from its own earlier work, particularly the records More Grip (2000) and 3am (In Beats We Trust) (2003), for the current disc. Just four songs are genuinely new; the rest are remixes or presented as the “original mix.” Since the new material does not add up to much, The Buena Vibra Sound System could be characterized as Sidestepper living off past glories. I was already familiar with the songs taken off 3am (In Beats We Trust) (see my 2004 music survey): “Más Papaya” and “Deja.” The Lightning Head remix of “Más Papaya” chugs along busily on bass notes, less laid back and more rigidly tied to the beat than the original. “Deja,” here titled “Deja Soft,” is fairly close to the original but with the Ivan Benavides lead vocal mostly excised in favor of a new vocal track, partly rapped and partly sung, by Goyo (Gloria Martínez), who also makes an appearance on the Aterciopelados record (see above, in the pop music section). The true gem of the new record, however, is the Boyz from Brasil remix of “Hoy Tenemos,” which originally appeared on More Grip. This is a classically “Latin” (i.e., Spanish Caribbean, salsa-tinged) number, with a bouncy piano line (which briefly pauses to indulge in some strikingly modernist chords), sultry flute embellishments, a clave rhythm of three against two, and a battery of percussion including timbales and shakers. The uncredited lead singer, most likely the band’s own Érika Múñoz (who was “discovered” on Popstar, Colombia’s homegrown answer to American Idol), has her voice processed through a vocoder, which makes it sound like Alejandra Deheza of School of Seven Bells (see above, in the pop section) on “Chain,” from Alpinisms. “La Bara Ratín” the other substantial remix, of the song “La Bara” from More Grip, is the type of tune that fans of electronic and dance music would say “has a good beat” (lightly syncopated), while others might well find its near-monotonal melody and repeating vocal samples tedious. The other remixes on the album—“Sidestepper,” “Me Voy Andando” (originally just “Andando”) and “Chimical”—from More Grip and, in the case of “Chimical,” Sidestepper’s debut recording, Southern Star (1997), are mere snippets, lasting from less than a minute to less than two. In its ninety-six seconds, though, the opening “Sidestepper” plays around with certain mambo clichés, not least of which is having Benavides chant, “ Sidestepper: sabor, sabor,” and the sound is variously muted and brought on full force, with stray yelps and clattering percussion as it blends into “Más Papaya.” Of the new tracks, the most tuneful (only the refrain is tuneful; the verse is rapped in tones that vary little) and ingratiating is “San Juan,” with Goyo and Érika Múñoz dueting, backed by a sumptuous buffet of beats and timbres supplied by drummer Kike Egurrola. “Me Voy Tripeando” (Spanglish for “I Go Tripping”?) is all noisy percussive effects and twangs and robotic rapping from Goyo. The dull call-and-response incantations of “La Paloma” are the musical equivalent of a dun-colored landscape, enlivened only by the clarinet soloing of Jacobo Vélez. B+

SONANTES, Sonantes—How do you market a previously unknown São Paulo musical collective releasing its debut album? Make sure everyone knows the lead singer is a star, or a “heaven,” as CéU’s stage name (given name: Maria do Céu Whitaker Poças) translates. CéU has issued just one album herself, but in part because Starbucks promoted it heavily, she is recognized even in this country. Not that the other members are complete unknowns: Dengue is the bassist and Pupillo the drummer for Naçao Zumbi (see below, in What’s Happening in Pernmabuco?), while the Amabis brothers, Rica and Gui, are guitarists and established soundtrack composers, and Rica Amabis is in a band called Instituto. CéU’s motives for making this album were laudable: she wanted to take risks trying new things and to go beyond the highly personalized nature of her solo debut. The results are mixed, if generally enjoyable: the selections, though inconsistent in quality, contain more hits than misses. Notwithstanding the artists’ desire for experimentation, the compositions are slight and not in any way transgressive. The opening number, “Carimbó” (named after a dance from the Amazon Delta region), is dusky and languid, with almost a Jamaican feel to the rhythm and the bass, while CéU’s voice enters at an emotional remove, half-speaking the verse like Camille Dalmais on the Nouvelle Vague cover version of “Guns of Brixton.” On “Toque de Coito,” the lead vocal is warbled by Siba, a (male) singer from Recife (again, see below, in What’s Happening in Pernmabuco?), and on “Itapeva 51” by funk/hip-hop/dub performer Bnegão, with CéU singing backup. The laid-back quality of “Itapeva 51” is augmented by its blurry, static Mellotron-generated strings and horns. “Mambobit,” trifling but enjoyable, airily recalls the bossa nova classics of the 1960s and early 1970s; it starts out in minor mode and then abruptly shifts to major, the sun popping out from behind a thick cloud, to sampled cheering and applause. One of the tightest compositions on the disc is the titularly syntactically challenged instrumental “Looks Like to Kill,” written by Daniel Bozio and Fernando Catatau, who heads Cidadão Instigado, another Northeastern band (once more, see below, in What’s Happening in Pernmabuco?), a burbling electric guitar chorus rocking with just a touch of percussion and keyboards. “Defenestrando” has a slinky sound that would have been helped by a little more warmth and immediacy in CéU’s singing. She shakes off her remoteness to rally into the chorus of the following song, “Quilombo Te Espera” (Quilombo [a kind of hinterland settlement by outcasts in Brazil] Waits for You), which is muted, soothing, and tuneful, with a gently syncopated accompaniment. The gauzy, contemplative “Braz” features pulsating, shimmering sustained tones on a Hammond organ and particularly aspirated vocals by CéU, collapsing into sweet sighs toward the end. The closing number, “Frevo de Saudade” (the frevo is a musical style from Northeastern Brazil, and “saudade” is that almost untranslatable Portuguese/Brazilian notion of yearning or nostalgia), is an odd bird, using a drum machine in place of actual percussion (you hear it best at the very beginning) and samba whistles to lead into what turns out to be an old-fashioned, Caribbean-style cha-cha, with mincing vocals from CéU and a full horn section of alto and tenor sax, trombone and fluegelhorns, together with flute. It remains to be seen whether Sonantes is a project to which the budding star CéU will stay committed, or whether this album appearance is the musical equivalent of Ryan Howard doing a rehab stint with the Lakewood BlueClaws. A-/B+

[VARIOUS ARTISTS], What’s Happening in Pernambuco? New Sounds of the Brazilian Northeast—My beef with this compilation is its title. While I appreciate what David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label has done to expose Northern Hemisphere dwellers to Brazilian music, What’s Happening in Pernambuco? gives the impression that the music it contains is all current. In fact, the one selection I was familiar with beforehand, Mundo Livre S/A’s “Maroca,” first appeared on that band’s 1998 album Carnaval na Obra. Nor, to quibble further, are all the musicians from Pernambuco state, though all are from the Brazilian Northeast, and in just one case (Alex Sant’Anna) is a performer from a state that does not border Pernambuco. (Sant’Anna’s home base of Aracaju is mistakenly described in the liner notes as north of Pernambuco when in fact it is south.) The music scene around Recife, Pernambuco’s capital and Brazil’s sixth-largest metropolitan area, gained international attention in the early 1990s, following the publication of the Mangue Bit (Mangrove Beat) manifesto, “Caranguejos com Cérebros” (Crabs with Brains), written jointly by DJ Renato L and Fred Zero Quatro, the latter the lead singer of Mundo Livre. Mangue Bit was as much political as musical, an attempt to jolt the stagnant Northeastern economy through a cultural transfusion; loosely defined, the music shook up traditional styles like the maracatu and the coco with imported rock, funk, and hip-hop. The two most important exponents of this movement were Mundo Livre and Chico Science and Naçao Zumbi, each of which is represented on What’s Happening in Pernambuco?, though with songs that are in some ways atypical. “Maroca” is a romantic flight of fancy, dedicated to Fred Zero Quatro’s wife and far removed from his usual political concerns. Fred’s vocal shortcomings, particularly on any sustained tone (and this song has more than most in his repertoire), do not seriously distract from what is a lovely piece; I highly recommend the record to anyone who can find it, most likely online since record stores are disappearing and destocking. Naçao Zumbi’s “The Carimbo/Coco Assassins,” from the 2000 record Radio S.amb.A, represents a return to performing following the tragic death of Chico Science in a car accident in 1997. I saw Chico Science and Naçao Zumbi (as well as Mundo Livre) perform in Prospect Park in the mid-1990s, and, for me, the band is easier to take stripped of Chico’s aggressive hip-hop posturings. That said, “The Carimbó/Coco Assassins,” while pleasant enough listening, may actually be the blandest track on the record. The rest of the tracklist can be crudely divided into techno-futurists (Otto, Mombojó, Cabruêra) retro-stylists (Siba, Tiné, Cidadão Instigado, Vates e Violas), and those who do not fit comfortably in either category (the opening tune by Eddie and the final three on the record). In this last category, Eddie’s “Pode Me Chamar” (You Can Call Me), from Original Olinda Style (2004), is a laid-back tune that draws on surf music, funk, and Jorge Ben. Also looking southward toward Rio de Janeiro and Jorge Ben as a touchstone is Wado e Realismo Fantástico, in the deceptively mellow-sounding “Se Vacilar o Jacaré Abraça” (If You Hesitate, the Caiman Will Get You). Gravel-voiced Alex Sant’Anna, on “Poesia de Barro” (Earthen Poetry), from his recent Aplausos Mudos Vaias Amplificadas (Silent Applause, Amplified Hisses), looks to Northeastern past masters like Luiz Gonzaga and Jackson do Pandeiro but adapts their rural themes to an urban sensibility with rapid strumming of his guitar, a dolorous piano accompaniment, and a touch of electronics. Junio Barreto’s “Amigos Bons” (Good Friends), from his self-titled debut, released in 2004 when the singer had reached the tender age of forty, is the simplest and quietest song on the disc yet is powerful in its portrayal of a person so desperately hungry that his dreams are about the satisfying meals most of us take for granted. The “retro” songs all sound like they would fit comfortably on a Putumayo sampler disc of the region’s music. “Instante Feliz” (Happy Moment) by Vates e Violas, is in the Northeastern style of arrasta-pé, a furiously paced, accordion-driven type of forró. Siba, a founding member of the Recife band Mestre Ambrósio who also sings a track on the Sonantes record (see above), conjures a mythical eden on “Vale do Juca” (Juca Valley), from his 2003 record Floresta do Samba, designed to make city dwellers nostalgic for their rural roots. Similarly, the music of Tiné (José Henrique Neto), on the simply structured and spare “Cobrinha” (Little Snake), from 2004’s Segura o Cordão (Tie the Cord), pines for the sertão, the scrubby interior of the Northeast, and its folklore. Cidadão Instigado, “O Pobre dos Dentes de Ouro” (The Poor Man with Gold Teeth), from O Metodo Tufo de Experiencia (2005), takes the throwback sound of folk pop, with its handclaps and rudimentary percussion and wailing strings, and gives it a different orientation, with lead singer Fernando Catatau mimicking the vocal mannerisms of the great Tom Zé and with electronic manipulation of the voices in one passage giving it a weirdness of which Tom Zé himself would be proud. Of the modernizers represented on What’s Happening in Pernambuco?, Mombojó is the most psychedelic and trippy. The seven-person band, on “Cabidela” (Blood Stew), from Nadadenovo (Nothing New, 2004), filters old bossa nova themes through a gauzy chromatograph, with buzzes, scratching, and sampling and a particularly wan-sounding refrain. Otto, a former member of both Mundo Livre and Naçao Zumbi, renders his spacy “Bob” (a reference to Bob Marley), from his 1998 Samba pra Burro (Samba for a Donkey), endlessly repeating the lyric “She’s from the era of Bob; she’s from Pina in the Copacabana,” to create a fascinatingly murky, multilayered sound mix. Perhaps the best piece on the recording is the wordless “Erectuos Cactus” by Cabruêra, from 2004’s Samba da Minha Terra (Samba Of My Land). A riot of strings, some strummed, some shimmery, with some abrupt rhythmic shifts to keep the listener off balance, Arthur Pessoa’s band produces a rich sonic stew that is self-assured and refreshingly original. A

ZUCO 103, After the Carnaval—The long-awaited follow-up to Zuco 103’s Whaa! (2005) turned out to be mildly anticlimactic. This was almost inevitable, given that Whaa! will easily make my list of top ten albums of the decade. After the Carnaval, Zuco 103’s sixth album if remix discs are counted, is still a pretty good record, but it is not one I could listen to ten times in a row without tiring of, as was the case with its predecessor. Long categorized as Brazilian music because of its Brazilian lead singer, Lilian Vieira, who sings mainly in Portuguese, the Amsterdam-based trio (the other members are drummer and sonuc manipulator Stefan Kruger—“Stuv” by his Dutch nickname—and Munich native Stefan Schmid on keyboards and programming) took a step closer to that identification by recording part of the new disc in Rio de Janeiro, with Brazilian musicians pitching in. In particular, Sergio Chiavazzoli, who has played with Gilberto Gil, lends his guitar and other string sounds to about half the tracks; you hear his four-stringed cavaquinho on “The Same Way” and “Espero” (I Hope). And Marcos Suzano contributes percussion to mostly the same tracks. So, the intent was to move closer to the bossa nova and samba sources that contribute to the band’s electronica and away from sampling to produce a more “naturalistic” sound. The palette is varied, thanks to outliers like “Fulero,” on which Chiavazzoli’s banjo adds a rustic element to what is otherwise a chattery bit of funk-electronica. Vieira, whose classically trained voice is remarkably rich, strong, versatile, and charismatic, sings in the lowest register she can manage on “Fulero” yet still manages to be chirpy and to rise to the occasional whoop. “Begrimed,” which features a refrain sung in English by Stefan Kruger and verses in Portuguese from Vieira, is one of the darker and more purely electronic compositions, a throbbing film noir vignette, co-written by Dutch songwriter and editor Nienke Gaastra. “Back Home” has the funkiest bass and drum sequences supporting Vieira’s spiky, 1970s-throwback vocals, accentuated by the horns and saxes of several Dutch session musicians. Similar to “Back Home” in spirit, “Beija a Mim (Saudade)” (Kiss to Mim) energetically pumps out retro electrofunk. Questing for the soul of the bossa nova, “The Same Way” comes up with a theme that is stirring and poignant, replete with the synthesized tropical birdcalls often found in the genre during the period of its flowering. Even more soulful is the reflective, midtempo “Pororoca” (the word for an Amazonian tidal bore that sweeps noisily upriver at times—ironically, this is one of the quietest songs on the record). The opening song, “Nunca Mais” (Never Again), with backing vocals by Fulvia di Domenico, is a glory, sweeping up the listener in a dreamy rhapsody of rapidly strummed acoustic guitar, electric piano ornamentation, and a soaring melody delivered by Vieira. “Madrugada” (Dawn) is problematic: a soft, romantic ballad with a gorgeous keyboard accompaniment and gently shuffling rhythm, it suffers from a boring main theme. The song that follows it, “Ginga de Criança” (Child’s Swing), has a similar mismatch, as its intriguingly metallic, twangy percussion and moody, tense piano line (akin to the one in Traffic’s “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys”) build up to a deflatingly slight, major-mode resolution. Songs like “Cria,” “Espero,” and “Volta” (Twist, or Turn) are too slick for their own good; they go down smooth without managing to touch a nerve along the way. The album’s lyrics are supposed to be available for download on the website www.sixdegreesrecords.com, but I could not find an option for that on the site, which is unfortunate since, among other considerations, deprives non-Portuguese speakers of appreciation of the message of “She,” with its tragic tale (this gleaned from the record company’s own promotional material) of domestic violence. A/A-


HONORABLE MENTION: JAZZ

ANAT COHEN, Notes from the Village—Leaving behind (at least for now) the big-band sound that filled up her most recent recording, Noir (2007), in favor of a quartet—on several cuts, a quintet, with the addition of Gilad Heskelman’s guitar—Anat Cohen looks for more immediacy, if not accessibility (her music has always been accessible). Also in a departure from Noir (though two of her previous records included some of her own songs), half the material on Notes from the Village is original. Her opening number, “Washington Square Park,” is upbeat and breezy. Not only does it bound ahead with no-nonsense briskness; it launches immediately from the opening theme into its first improvisation, that of Heskelman. Adding to the sense of lightness, Cohen plays soprano sax, with marvelous fluidity. One oddity on this piece is Jason Lindner’s piano solo: he overlays a track on which he is playing the Prophet ’08, a polyphonic analog synthesizer with a squidgy, slightly cheesy sound, so that he is dueting with himself. Whatever “Washington Square Park” lacks in passion is more than made up for on the following ballad, “When You’re in Love Again,” which is introduced with a tender interplay, subtly blue in mood, between Cohen’s clarinet and Heskelman’s acoustic guitar; before long, Lindner claims a central role in the conversation, too. Cohen’s lullaby-soft melody incorporates shadings of Eastern European Jewish and klezmer music. Taking this gentleness straight into the nursery is “Lullaby for the Naïve Ones”: it starts and ends with Heskelman playing dreamy, simple arpeggios while Lindner’s right hand sprinkles glissandos from the far end of the keyboard, like a tinkly toy piano, and Cohen’s tenor sax limns appropriately ingenuous tracings of melody. In between, though, the song becomes thematically far more grown-up and sophisticated; it is warmly gorgeous and moving. Rhythmically tricky at its opening and close, keeping the listener off balance, “J Blues” has a certain Henry Mancini-esque lilt to its clarinet theme but is in all the least engaging of Cohen’s four compositions on the disc. I was less enthralled by the four covers on Notes from the Village, with the exception of Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” which is executed with a great deal of verve, offering some nice touches like the double-time section toward the end, rebounding with alacrity from a pause for quiet at the end of the bass solo. The piano solo once more gives evidence of Lindner’s control, range, and power. The exposition of Ernesto Lecuona’s “Siboney” is too measured and detached, draining the song of its mystique, its sultry romanticism. But in midcourse, the band launches into a fierce descarga, or jam session, that concludes with a showy clarinet cadenza before Cohen restates the melody. Her quiet rendition of John Coltrane’s “After the Rain” is noteworthy mainly in the way she switches off between B-flat clarinet and the rich, deep sound of the bass clarinet. The reverential restraint shown in the treatment of Sam Cooke’s rhythm and blues protest “A Change Is Gonna Come” is worlds apart from the Roy Hargrove Quintet’s interpretation (see below) of Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me.” A-

AVISHAI COHEN, Flood—Avishai Cohen released Flood as the second part of a cycle called The Big Rain Trilogy. When I saw that it was part two, I realized I did not have part one, but nobody does, in fact, since Cohen chose to issue part three first (and I do not have that one for comparison, either). Part three, After the Big Rain, features Lionel Loueke (see below) on guitar and vocals. Though Cohen performs with his woodwind-playing elder siblings, Yuval and Anat, as the Three Cohens and as part of Anat’s big-band format, the Anzic Orchestra, as well as recording on her label, Anzic Records, he has carved out his own niche as a trumpeter and bandleader on the New York jazz scene. Confusingly, there is another jazz musician of the same name, a bassist, who is likewise Israeli but continues to make his home in Tel Aviv. The instrumentation on Flood is spare: Cohen is accompanied by pianist Yonatan Avishai (another Avishai!) and percussionist Daniel Freedman, who also plays on Anat Cohen’s Notes from the Village (see above). The music, all composed and arranged by Cohen, is thus elemental—appropriate to its theme—even if, as a concept album, it carries higher pretensions than the others on this list. The idea behind the trilogy is an epochal flood that sweeps away all before it and forever changes the world, as new growth begins. In contrast to the Noah story in the Bible, Cohen, having observed from afar the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, does not draw any moral lessons from the deluge; nature simply is what it is. The opening piece, “First Drops,” is linear in structure: following a lyrical, slow keyboard introduction filled with grace notes, the pianist settles into a pattern of chiming two chords ad infinitum, on top of which are some right-hand flourishes to provide contrast to the trumpeter’s basic tone poem. The drummer does not so much keep time as provide accents. There is no improvisation. Eventually, Cohen’s part drops away, leaving just that persistent pair of piano chords. The prologue to “Heavy Water” stands outside of rhythm entirely; Cohen, unaccompanied, plays long notes like a shofar but one whose reverberations slowly die away. The main body of “Heavy Water” is more sprightly and conventional, with Cohen and Yonatan Avishai not soloing off the principal theme but rather improvising in concert. There follows a slower section in which the pianist reverts to his chiming chords beneath a trumpet solo, after which comes a brief passage of particularly dynamic interplay between the two and then, having stirred things up, subsidence. “Nature’s Dance,” the centerpiece of the disc, is also its most accessible tune. Here Cohen gives himself ample room for improvisation, and Yonatan Avishai gets a lesser degree for himself, but otherwise the piece is fairly unchanging, never straying far from the melody. Freedman keeps time with a shaker throughout. The title track gives no hint of catastrophe; it is a somber fanfare that dies away and then is repeated with drums kicking in this time. The placid “Sunrays over Water” consists of a sequence of keyboard arpeggiations that begin in major mode, eventually becoming more ambivalent, above which Cohen solos on muted trumpet, with brushed cymbals and a bit of the shaker the only percussion; the piano part ultimately does resolve on an optimistic note. The fifteen-minute-plus “Cycles: The Sun, the Moon and the Awakening Earth,” which concludes the disc, contains a number of discrete sections. An austere keyboard opening gives way briefly to those paired piano chords again, as Cohen lays out the theme, but as the trumpet part becomes more free ranging and spiky, Yonatan Avishai switches to counterpoint. There follows an extended, expressive keyboard solo incorporating some intriguing sonorities derived from accidental notes, before the trumpeter reenters and the mood becomes more stormy. After things settle down with some sunnier trumpet flourishes, the composition finishes up in a two-minute segment, oddly detached from the rest of the piece, that is just a bouncy piano line and drums, with Cohen’s trumpet barely registering, all sounding quite benign as nature renews itself. It is a shame that Flood appears to have been largely overlooked by critics, for it sets out big ambitions and largely achieves them. A/A-

THE ROY HARGROVE QUINTET, Earfood—Roy Hargrove was aiming for something simple and pleasing with this record, hence the title. Seven of the thirteen compositions on it are his. I have to say that I prefer overall the ones that are not, although I do enjoy his “Strasbourg/St. Denis.” This begins with a deep-soul groove from bassist Danton Boller, to which Gerald Clayton’s piano joins in just before Hargrove himself enunciates the main theme on trumpet, a fairly basic, pop-flavored ditty in which one sequence is repeated three times and then resolved tentatively; improvisations are then traded off between piano, trumpet, and Justin Robinson’s alto saxophone. “The Stinger” moves briskly, flitting between sax, muted trumpet, and piano solos without generating any real surprises, while some of the ballads, in particular “Divine” and “Rouge,” are merely soporific. “Joy Is Sorrow Unmasked” is a tone poem that sets up some nice interplay between horns and keyboards. The midtempo “Style” lets Robinson carry the principal theme and showcases a frenzied sax solo, while Hargrove and Clayton cast aside restraint in favor of florid expressivity, the trumpeter practically blaring near the top of his range and the pianist playfully bouncing between extremes of the keyboard in his solo. If Hargrove’s own compositions suffer from a certain dullness of sheen, those of other songwriters he has chosen do not. The most subdued of the bunch are “Blue” Lou Marini’s “Starmaker,” a keening, sax-driven piece of recent vintage, and the Kurt Weill pop ballad “Speak Low,” from the Broadway musical One Touch of Venus (1943); the latter is played as a trumpet sonata in miniature, with Hargrove deftly softening his tone and playing legato, to delicate piano accompaniment. “To Wisdom the Prize,” by pianist Larry Willis, from his 1994 disc Heavy Blue, begins with a broad keyboard theme but quickly shifts to a more studied mood as the horns kick in, first in concert, then individually. Willis is a former member of Hargrove’s band and is considered a mentor by the trumpeter. Another mentor was Freddie Hubbard, and Weldon Irvine Jr.’s spunky “Mr. Clean” first appeared on Hubbard’s Straight Life (1970). Listening to Hargrove’s vigorous runs and attacks, the lusty jump from grainy tones to squealing notes from Robinson’s sax, and the sinuous, splayed piano figurations by Clayton, one would never guess that the composer of this brash tune, known as “Master Wel,” ended his life with a public suicide outside the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, L.I., in 2002. The disc begins with Cedar Walton’s magnificently rollicking ensemble piece “I’m Not So Sure,” from Firm Roots (1974), and ends with a wailing, let-out-all-the-stops jazz rendition of Sam Cooke’s 1961 soul music touchstone “Bring It On Home to Me.” Inexplicably, the CD jacket does not anywhere explain how or where this last tune was produced, although it is clearly the only track recorded live. The website Giant Step says that it was recorded in Gleisdorf, Austria. Earfood was released in June to considerable critical acclaim, though many critics these days are in effect little more than PR flacks. From the opposing bench, Steve Greenlee of The Boston Globe said, “I still can’t shake the feeling that Hargrove doesn’t have anything new to say.” B+

GUILLERMO KLEIN Y LOS GUACHOS, Filtros—It is puzzling why a composer as innovative as Guillermo Klein has not made much of a splash commercially. The Argentine pianist reassembled his big band, Los Guachos (“the homeboys”), for its fourth studio recording (though only the third that has been released), and the result was highly praised in both The New York Times (where it caught my attention) and the Village Voice. Not everything on Filtros is consistently wonderful, but most of it is. The eleven-piece ensemble features, in addition to Klein, some well-known musicians: flutist and alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón, drummer Jeff Ballard, and Chris Cheek, who plays soprano, tenor, and baritone sax on the record. Klein, who currently resides in Barcelona following a sojourn in New York in the mid- to late 1990s (the recording was made on a return trip to New York), sings on several tracks as well, and on “Amor Profundo” he is joined by Carmen Canela, also based in Barcelona. The first eight of ten tracks are original, seven of them composed by Klein and one (“Memes”) by one of his two trumpeters, Taylor Haskins. “Vaca” (Cow), the ninth piece, is described in the CD booklet as a traditional Argentine song, but it “includes excerpts from György Ligeti’s Hungarian Rock,” originally a harpsichord piece written in 1978. “Vaca” is a fairly basic theme that is initiated by the piano and embellished as it is traded off between the keyboard and guitar and horn players, exaggerating the natural syncopations; the motive from the Ligeti, itself heavily syncopated, is soon introduced as a second theme and ultimately played in counterpoint to the first. Continuing in the classical vein, Olivier Messiaen’s “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus” (Eulogy to the Eternity of Jesus), from his Quartet for the End of Time (1941), is given a most unjazzy orchestration: the original, although part of a quartet setting, is in essence a miniature sonata for cello and piano; in Klein’s version, the soprano sax takes the cello part, with the other horns and percussion weighing in later. It is just a bit leaden in the band arrangement, forsaking Messiaen’s elegant simplicity, and makes for a peculiar finale to a disc that is characterized by lightness. The choice pick is “Miula,” one of my favorite compositions of the year and a terrific way to spend ten minutes. Calculated to unsettle the listener, it has a swingy, vaguely retro-sounding tune carried by muted trumpet and flute, aided by the piano, guitar, and baritone sax, and set to jagged, off-kilter rhythms. Between the valve trombone solo by Diego Urcola and Ben Monder’s guitar improvisation, and again between the guitar and drum solos, there is an ensemble passage that keeps shifting unpredictably between full and half speed, like a wind-up toy that needs lubrication or a battery-powered one whose cells are on the fritz. The short piece that follows, “Manuel,” is for the most part a somber little duet for the alto and bari saxes. Haskins’s “Meme” begins as a stately trumpet showcase, supported by the saxes, but in midstream, its sizzling electric guitar yowls bring it into the territory of fusion. “Luz de Liz (Filtros)” is drawn out past the point of tediousness, almost eleven minutes of an insistently unvarying dotted-note pattern, exposed when it is not undergirding the main theme (which is most of the time), although the tempo is sometimes slowed momentarily, somewhat akin to “Miula.” For the songs with lyrics, Klein’s voice is thin and not always pitch perfect, but it is not unpleasant to listen to. “Va Roman,” the opening song, begins with just Klein’s wispy voice accompanied by his own piano chords. But from the tenuous protomelody that ensues, a magnificent harmonic superstructure is built atop a repeating sequence of three descending notes on the keyboard. The chord changes in “Yeso” (Plaster) at times sound uncannily like recent Radiohead recordings, yet, again, a fleshed-out tune never coalesces in this contemplative piece. The torchy ballad “Volante” (Flying) comes closest of the four songs to having a fully realized melodic sequence. “Amor Profundo” (Deep Love) substitutes a series of modulations for any real melody (and the sparse lyrics are rudimentary as well), but it is still a delight to hear Carmen Canela’s voice top-lining this jaunty little number. A/A-

LIONEL LOUEKE, Karibu—Lionel Loueke’s route to becoming a presence on the New York jazz scene was a long one, with many twists, starting in Cotonou, Benin, and proceeding via the Ivory Coast, Paris, Boston (Berklee College of Music), and Los Angeles (the Thelonious Monk Institute). For Karibu, the guitarist has reassembled the trio of Berklee alums that he put together for for his debut album, Virgin Forest (2007), and that also has played together for two records under the name Gilfema. Ferenc Nemeth, from Hungary, plays drums, and Swedish-Italian bassist Massimo Biolcati rounds out the rhythm section. The new record is also graced by the presence of two mentors and elder statesmen: Herbie Hancock bangs out piano improvisations on “Seven Teens” and sounds tempestuously modernist on “Light Dark,” while his Miles Davis Quintet mate Wayne Shorter plays soprano saxophone on John Coltrane’s “Naima” as well as “Light Dark.” Loueke himself sings on some tracks, in various West African languages. He also scats and commands quite a range of percussive sounds, from clicks to puckering, with his mouth. When he is not singing openly, he is often humming, doubling the notes he is playing, à la Keith Jarrett. Of the seven compositions that Loueke himself wrote, “Light Dark” is the most avant-garde, while the closer, “Nonvignon,” is the most African in sound, with lyrics in the Fon language. Written at the behest of Terence Blanchard, another mentor, “Nonvignon” (Loueke refers to this as his middle name or his African name) is upbeat, melodically simple but rhythmically precise. Also tending toward a “West African” sound is “Zala,” another elementary kernel of melody, slightly downcast, that is reiterated several times, following which the song brightens briefly for a new, more Occidental-sounding phrase that is modulated once before returning to the first theme. There is no true resolution here, although Loueke’s singing at one point rises to an unexpected squawk and then dissolves in what sounds like village chatter, with guitar, bass and drums all scrambling in different directions before regrouping gradually. “Light Dark” toys with the concept of chiaroscuro, contrasting angry outbursts and lyrical passages on the piano, even as Shorter progresses from honks to agitated flutters and runs; the piece’s aural tension slackens once Hancock’s playing smooths out, but some of the menace and foreboding return toward the end. The title track, which opens the set, plays off a guitar intro that is peppy and uplifting against a more legato and sobering sung theme. “Seven Teens” does not refer to a gaggle of teenagers but the time signature of the song, which is said to be 17/4 (hard to tell in fact where the downbeat is in music of this nature). Although the tune was penned by Loueke, it puts a premium on Hancock’s fluency and mood-shifting expressiveness, with the guitar (and the humming) acting as a mere foil. The least impressive numbers are “Benny’s Tune,” written for Loueke’s wife, Benedicta, in which his interpretations of the snappy opening passage lose focus and momentum, and “Agbannon Blues,” which is primarily about the groove established by the rhythm section and is not really a blues, though its temperament is fitting. “Naima” begins strikingly with some beats from Nemeth that give the sensation of bubbling up from great depths as well as Loueke’s “prepared” guitar, made to sound more like a traditional West African instrument by inserting paper between the frets. It is some time before the soprano sax enters to sketch in the familiar Coltrane ballad, itself composed for the artist’s wife at the time, with plenty of Shorteresque filigree cutting against the grain of the song’s restraint. The other nonoriginal piece on the record is Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark,” a pleasant pop standard that the trio plays close to the vest. Karibu did not always keep my ear glued to the speakers, but it has plenty that is conceptually interesting, pointing to promise for subsequent records. A-

RUDRESH MAHANTHAPPA, Kinsmen—The first time I saw saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa perform was at the Jazz Gallery in Lower Manhattan a number of years back—if memory serves me, he was a sideman with Jason Moran that evening. The genesis of Kinsmen was Mahanthappa’s older brother giving him a record titled Saxophone Indian Style as a gag gift. The younger man was entranced by what he heard on the disc from the Indian saxophone player, Kadri Gopalnath. Gopalnath was an acknowledged master of Carnatic music (from the region of the four southern Indian states that speak Dravidian languages), but because he played an unconventional instrument, it took him a long time to be acknowledged as such. Mahanthappa eventually obtained a Guggenheim fellowship to study with Gopalnath in India and subsequently secured further support from the Asia Society in New York for the making of the current album. The result has to be one of the most intriguing jazz records of the year, as the two alto sax players, Indian-American and Indian, bring together their radically different approaches. Mahanthappa introduced an American rhythm section of of Carlo de Rosa on bass and Royal Hartigan on drums, and Gopalnath was complemented by an Indian percussionist, Poovalur Sriji, and violinist, Avasarala Kanyakumari. The Pakistani-American guitarist Rez Abbasi rounds out the septet, called the Dakshina Ensemble by Mahanthappa. Sriji plays the mridangam, a barrel drum tapped by hand, something like a conga, that is the South Indian counterpart to the tabla. As for the violin, it first entered the Carnatic music tradition from abroad in the eighteenth century and thus is not considered so alien an instrument as the saxophone. Kinsmen mixes things up not just between Western and Eastern sounds but between shorter and much longer compositions (all written jointly by Mahanthappa and Gopalnath). Among the four ten-minute-plus tracks, “Ganesha,” despite being named for the Indian elephant god, starts out as conventional as anything on the disc, as Mahanthappa trades licks with his guitarist, riffing off the primary theme over the bass and drums. But when “Kanya,” as the violinist is familiarly known, takes over improvising, that gives the song an Asian timbre, for she simply does not play like a Westerner; then there is an extended passage in which she trades off the lead with Gopalnath (I think). “Longing” is a moody, introspective ballad, not much more than a rhythmic frame for the rangy peregrinations of the two alto players. Kanya again offers a couple of minutes’ worth of exotic tinge, with that moaning, stringy tone of hers. The difference in the way Mahanthappa and Gopalnath play the alto sax is presented most starkly at the opening of “Kalyani”: the American is playing the “straight man” to his counterpart’s tonal bending. I am not sure what kind of guitar Abbasi is using on this piece, but it certainly sounds Indian, like a vina. The mridangam also takes prominence on “Kalyani.” “Convergence (Kinsmen)” brings all the players together (not all at the same time) for the finale, which, at more than fifteen minutes, stretches things out longer than it has ideas to fill the space, though there’s a nice “dueling saxophones” section about two-thirds of the way through, battling it out over a repeated bass figuration plus the mridangam. Each nonpercussion instrumentalist, other than the bandleader, gets a solo turn, an improvisation called an alap in Indian music, set over a drone in the case of the India-based performers. Kanya’s picks right up where Gopalnath’s leaves off, but whereas the saxophonist sounds almost Middle Eastern to an American ear, the violinist sounds quasi-Chinese, as if playing an erhu. Abbasi’s alap is short and mellow but richly harmonic and evocative; it seems to cut off in midstream, though. The ensemble piece “Snake!” takes what sounds like a street processional, with Gopalnath playing in soprano sax range and Sriji furiously pounding the skins, and puts it through a dizzyingly modernisitic time warp. A/A-

DANILO PÉREZ, Across the Crystal Sea—I am placing Across the Crystal Sea in the jazz section because Danilo Pérez is a jazz pianist and hence the record has been marketed as jazz. It is really not jazz at all, however; much of it is through-composed, crowding out improvisation, and little of it truly swings. It is more like a symphonic suite or multiple-movement concerto for piano jazz quartet and orchestra. Two of the pieces taken from the popular songbook of an earlier era feature the deep vocals of Cassandra Wilson. The others are, with one exception, derived from classical works. All are taffy-soft and lushly orchestrated, and each would sound just fine filtered through the public address system of your local TJMaxx or Office Depot, which is less of a knock than it seems: some of the compositions are meltingly beautiful, while others are stultifying. Claus Ogerman, the almost eighty-year-old (at the time of the recording) German composer responsible for writing three-quarters of the tracks (all except those on which Wilson sings) and arranging and conducting all of them, has worked with legitimate jazz musicians—Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, and Cal Tjader—but also with the likes of Antonio Carlos Jobim and George Benson. Deeply in debt to some of the more floridly lyrical of the late Romantic composers, it is not surprising that he wrote the scores for more than a dozen German and American films. The title track, which opens the set, based on theme by early twentieth-century German composer Hugo Distler, is the highlight of the disc: magnificent and deeply stirring, a somber yet achingly sweet melody expressed by the piano first and then by massed strings with pianistic grace notes, set to gently Latin percussion. “Rays and Shadows,” using a Jean Sibelius theme as its starting point, is another subtly sophisticated, heart-rending number that allows space for the orchestra to drop out in the middle, leaving the jazz players freedom to stretch their muscles. The orchestral backdrop to “The Purple Condor,” inspired by Manuel de Falla, is sufficiently repetitious to allow Pérez to range freely across sundry elaborations of the primary theme, which he does with a masterly touch, keeping the listener’s attention rapt throughout. “The Saga of Rita Joe,” though paying its respects to Jules Massenet, comes off sounding, in its string lead-in and accompaniment, like incidental music from a James Bond movie, yet it also contains the most technically demanding fingerwork from Pérez, as he skitters through flourishes and cataracts of chromatic scales. In fact, the striking chromaticism and sense of yearning in the passages Pérez plays put me more in mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff than does the limpid but characterless “If I Forget You,” the Ogerman tune here that is actually borrowed from a Rachmaninoff movement. Ogerman’s own composition at the end of the disc, “Another Autumn,” is unfortunately the least engaging of the bunch, a time-swallowing bit of fluff with no sense of motion or drama but whose final orchestral strains sound almost Bartókian. Of the selections with words, “(All of a Sudden) My Heart Sings,” by Harold Rome, Jean-Marie Blanvillain (wrongly given as “Blancillain” on the CD jacket), and Henri Herpin is a snoozefest, no matter how smotheringly tender the treatment that Wilson gives it. In sharp contrast, John Latouche and Jerome Moross’s “Lazy Afternoon,” from the 1954 musical The Golden Apple, an adaptation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, no less, set in Washington State, is excellent. It conveys the languor of a summer’s day yet with a sense of underlying tension like a distant stormcloud; in some respects, it is evocative of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. As convincing as sounds, the odd thing about “Lazy Afternoon” is that Pérez and his jazz mates are left with very little to do. Altogether, this is a most unusual and uneven recording, faint echoes of jazz emanating from a gilded cage. B+

[VARIOUS ARTISTS], Hear, O Israel: A Prayer Ceremony in Jazz—This reissue of a 1968 recording rescues from what might have been a well-merited obscurity one of the true oddities of the jazz world. There have been various masses set to jazz over the years, but this may be the only Jewish Friday night jazz service to make it into a recording studio. The original was released privately, in limited quantities, and, according to its reissuer, a Brit named Jonny Trunk, probably sold just a few hundred copies. What makes the recording remarkable is that a) it was composed by a seventeen-year-old, Jonathan Klein of Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1965, for Temple Emanuel of Worcester at the behest of its rabbi, David Davis; b) it featured, in addition to a rising young operatic soprano (here singing contralto) named Phyllis Bryn-Julson, several major names in jazz: Herbie Hancock on piano. Thad Jones on trumpet and fluegelhorn. Ron Carter on bass, and Grady Tate on drums. Somewhat lesser known was Jerome Richardson, who played flute and alto and tenor sax. Klein himself, as the composer, got to play French horn and baritone along with these legends. Finally, Antonia Lavanne (now a voice teacher with the New School and Mannes College of Music in New York) took the soprano part, and Rabbi Davis had a couple of speaking parts toward the end. The prayer ceremony, or “conclavette,” as it was referred to by its rabbi, covers most of the standard liturgy for a Friday night, though by itself it makes for a curtailed service, even by the standards of Reform Judaism, clocking in at a shade less than forty minutes. Several of its nine movements are very short: the opening “Blessing over the Candles”; “May the Words of My Mouth”; and the “Final Amen,” which consists of the rabbi reciting Psalm 150, the final chapter in the Book of Psalms, urging the faithful to praise God with music—it has often been set to music—followed a few “amens” by the singers, over spare instrumental accompaniment. The vocal passages are, to put it mildly, hard to appreciate; without them, there would be no service, yet their presence detracts from whatever pleasure there is in listening to the jazz musicians do their thing. I do not think that Klein, at that tender age, had mastered how to write for voice, and thus both women’s parts come off as awkward and shapeless, at times static, at other times engaged in desultory busywork like an atonal, modernist take on the Andrews Sisters. The vocals make entire sections sodden and most unjazzlike in idiom, except in an eccentric, Grachan Moncur III kind of way. These flaws mar in particular the “Matovu – Bor’chu” (How Goodly – Blessed), “Sanctification,” and “Torah Service – Adoration” movements. The “Micho Mocho” (Who Is Like unto Thee; more typically transliterated from the Hebrew alphabet as “Mi Chamocha”) and “Torah Service – Adoration” sections attempt a sort of listless swing, but beyond a few lyrical piano runs toward the end, “Micho Mocho” does not develop very far, while the instrumental portions of “Torah Service – Adoration” (the longest segment, at almost ten minutes), with its sax and piano solos, hardly stray from convention in their harmonic patterns. However, because elsewhere the purely instrumental interludes soar above the mire of the singing, the disc cannot be dismissed out of hand. This is, after all, Herbie Hancock on the ivories (and ebonies)—Hancock close to the height of his creative powers as a soloist and a member of the Miles Davis Quintet, just a few years removed from the marvelous “Canteloupe Island.” The “Sh’ma” (Hear, O Israel) movement, once past the brief prayer itself, really takes off on a flight of piano, sax, and trumpet improvisations. The nonvocal sections of “Sanctification” feature some interesting interplay between Richardson’s sax and some heavily syncopated piano chords from Hancock. The “Kiddush” movement glides along on bossa nova rhythms, with the flute at first doubling the contralto’s part and then indulging in its own blissful reverie. Klein today appears to be an associate professor of music and film scoring at Berklee College of Music in Boston. In the end, this recording will interest primarily Hancock completists and curiosity seekers, particularly those interested in Jewish themes. B-


HONORABLE MENTION: CLASSICAL

As usual, I will not actually venture to assign grades or critique extensively the classical recordings, an exercise best left to those with the musical vocabulary and training needed for it. I picked up seven recordings that were 2008 releases.

PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD (piano), Hommage à Messiaen—The year 2008 was the centennial of Olivier Messiaen’s birth. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a bold champion of modern music who had a long association with Messiaen (who died in 1992) dating back to his studies in piano technique with Yvonne Loriod, the composer’s second wife, decided to record a tribute to the master. Aimard, in addition to being a tremendous pianist, also is a terrific exponent of Messiaen’s ideas in the liner notes. He chose to highlight keyboard pieces that are often overlooked but are illustrative of Messiaen’s interests, sensibilities, and unique approaches to harmony and rhythm, taken from three different periods in the composer’s life. The Preludes pour Piano (1928-29) are among Messiaen’s earliest compositions and were the first published. There are eight preludes, varying in length from barely ninety seconds (“Le Nombre Léger” [The Light Number]) to nearly ten minutes (“Cloches d’Angoisse et Larmes d’Adieu” [Bells of Anguish and Tears of Farewell]), all with evocative names. Each prelude makes use of “modes” (a series of tones forming a scale with limited transpositions; this gets into complicated music theory, but the resulting symmetry was pleasing to the composer and also placed his music well outside the bounds of conventional harmony), which Messiaen associated with specific colors. The otherworldly effects can be seen especially well in the cascading runs of the fifth prelude, “Les Sons Impalpables du Rêve …” (The Impalpable Sounds of the Dream …). Most of the movements are gentle and reflective, although the third (“Le Nombre Léger”) and fifth each send Aimard’s fingers scurrying around the keyboard. The final prelude, “Un Reflet dans le Vent …” (A Reflection in the Wind …), is surprisingly fierce and menacing, in particular, toward the close. But it also offers some graceful moments; Messaien’s harmonic weirdness, like that of his forerunner Claude Debussy, does not preclude passages of great beauty. The Preludes pour Piano were written in the wake of Messaien’s mother’s death, and the first one, “La Colombe” (The Dove), is a brief portrait of her, while the “Cloches d’Angoisse et Larmes d’Adieu,” replete with bells of varying tones tolling and reverberating, laments her absence. The two selections from Catalogue d’Oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds, 1956-58) are somewhat less to my taste because they sound like a sequence of slow chords interrupted by flurries of what could be birdcalls, although if a listener were to hear the piece in isolation, that is not necessarily the interpretation one might make. Messiaen’s obsessive interest in birdsong, combined with his intense Catholicism, made him the St. Francis of Assisi of the classical music world. “Le Bouscarle” (Cetti’s Warbler) sounds more like a mockingbird’s repertoire—some thunderingly low and monotone, others high and chirpy, all insistently repeated—than an individual birdcall, whereas “L’Alouette Lulu” (The Wood Lark) seems to be just one species, introduced by a seductively doomy set of descending chords. The disc ends with two selections from Quatre Études de Rythme (Four Studies of Rhythm). These are much as advertised, rhythmic exercises, essentially tuneless, a fair amount of banging the keys. Yet the variety of rhythms on display, even in the shorter “Île de Feu I” (Isle of Fire I, 1949), is breathtaking. Messiaen had studied music from the East, particularly India, and was also taken with the idea of musical primitivism, dedicating the pieces to “the Papuans.” In “Île de Feu II” (1950), eventually, the pianist takes off in a torrent of notes that sounds like what happens if you hold down the “track up” button on your CD player. “Île de Feu II” slows down at the close to explore a completely different set of rhythmic patterns.

FERDE GROFÉ, Grand Canyon Suite; Mississippi Suite (Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Felix Slatkin); Death Valley Suite (Capitol Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ferde Grofé)—This disc is a reissue by EMI of a 1997 Angel Records CD in its American Classics series. The actual recordings took place in the 1950s, at which time the Death Valley Suite, commissioned for the centennial of the California Gold Rush, was still fairly new. Grofé, who established his career working in jazz as a pianist and arranger for the Paul Whiteman big band, is best known, aside from his orchestration (1942) of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, for the Grand Canyon Suite of 1931. His music is pictorial and episodic, full of the brash optimism and, indeed, hokum, that characterized much American classical music of the day. It is no surprise that he found a second (or third) career in Hollywood, as a composer of film scores. Nonetheless, the Grand Canyon Suite is highly regarded enough to be a concert programmer’s staple. Its signature theme is the third movement, “On the Trail,” which uses a violin to simulate a braying donkey and then a clip-clop rhythm and poky, swaying melody to represent the trip into the canyon on the animal’s back. It also has a wonderfully pastoral opening movement, “Sunrise,” and an appropriately stormy close in “Cloudburst,” pulling out all the stops. Interestingly, two of the three suites on this disc end with fierce tempests; the Death Valley Suite (1949) concludes with “Sand Storm.” The “49er Emigrant Train” movement of the Death Valley Suite contains, aside from a huffing and puffing locomotive at the start, what is meant to sound like a Native American dance. The prospectors’ relief at finding a “Desert Water Hole” is celebrated with Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna,” which has associations with the Gold Rush, and “Old Folks at Home,” better known as “Swanee River.” The Mississippi Suite (1925), written with the encouragement of Whiteman, was Grofé’s first serious attempt at composing. Like the Death Valley Suite, it is a slighter and less ambitious work than the Grand Canyon Suite, but it has its charms as it takes a trip down the mighty river, from Minnesota to Louisiana, in several stages. In particular, the “Huckleberry Finn” movement has high jinks aplenty and seems to take Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897) as an inspiration. The suite ends with a lively “Mardi Gras” dance sandwiched around a nicely lyrical slow section. The disc is extended with a version of the “Cloudburst” movement from the Grand Canyon Suite conducted (as was the Death Valley Suite) in 1954 by Grofé himself, with verve (though the brass players of the Capitol Symphony Orchestra muff one attack as the climax builds) and slightly faster pacing than in the Felix Slatkin/Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra rendition heard earlier.

MARC-ANDRÉ HAMELIN (piano), In a State of Jazz—This recording of “jazzy” pieces by classical composers of the twentieth century, in addition to being enjoyable in its own right, is instructive regarding the differences in the way classical and jazz keyboard players approach their instruments. French Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin says in the CD booklet that nothing on the disc is truly jazz since, with one small partial exception (the coda to Friedrich Gulda’s Prelude and Fugue), everything on it is through-composed rather than improvised. Four composers are represented. Three exercises (the first two swing charmingly, the third is more straightforward, while the first and third reflect stride piano influences) from German composer Friedrich Gulda’s Play Piano Play (1971) were chosen, along with his Prelude and Fugue (1965), which, the musical omnivore Hamelin notes, also appeared on Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Welcome Back My Friends to the Show that Never Ends (1974), played by Keith Emerson as part of a medley called “Piano Improvisations.” Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin’s four-movement Sonata No. 2 (1989) sends the performer scurrying up and down the keyboard in the opening Allegro and even more so in the finale: witness the tight control Hamelin maintains over both the torrent of notes and their dynamic range. The third-movement Largo, relaxed and chromatically stylish in a Vince Guaraldi sort of way, seems almost ponderous by comparison, while the Scherzo is by turns heavily syncopated and jaunty. I am less convinced by Bulgarian-born French composer Alexis Weissenberg’s Sonate en État de Jazz (Sonata in a State of Jazz, 1982), which, aside from lending the record its title, means to evoke four dances popular in the 1920s but in the language of 1950s jazz: the tango, the Charleston, the blues, and the samba. It is too abstract to meet the expectations it raises, particularly in the tango and blues sections (there is just a hint of the sliding notes of tango), though the Charleston movement is agreeably loose limbed. More accessible are Weissenberg’s settings of Six Songs Sung by Charles Trenet, which was originally published anonymously, under the title Mr. Nobody Plays Trenet. These jewel-like settings of boulevardier songs, all but one written or co-written by Trenet himself, are a delight, reminiscent of the miniatures of Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. The final piece on the disc is the American George Antheil’s nutty Jazz Sonata (1922-23). In its eighty-plus seconds, it strings together a carnivalesque assortment of tiny vignettes, from clanging bells to showy runs to sudden stops and starts and abrupt rhythmic changes. Not jazz, perhaps, but animated by the same spirit of exuberance.

LEON KIRCHNER, Complete String Quartets (Orion String Quartet)—A student and follower of Arnold Schoenberg (see below) at the University of California, Los Angeles, and later a teacher of John Adams, among others, Leon Kirchner, who turned ninety near the beginning of 2009, was a leading American composer of the twentieth century. As evidenced by his String Quartet No. 4 (2006), his creative powers carried on into the twenty-first century, undimmed by age. The Orion String Quartet has gathered all his quartets, spanning nearly sixty years, on one CD (“complete,” unless he manages to write another). Kirchner’s compositions are chromatic and largely atonal; although he plays with the twelve-tone technique in the opening movement of his String Quartet No. 1 (1949), he is not a strict Serialist like his onetime teacher Schoenberg. The Allegro ma non troppo movement that begins the first quartet, jittery, anxious, and restless, displays another trait of Kirchner’s music—rapid shifts in meter. Toward the end, the rhythm becomes sharply syncopated, something that carries over later to the deft-fingered Divertimento third movement, and the technique devolves into a mixture of bowing and pizzicato. The second movement Adagio continues to offer a mixture of broadly held tones, plucked strings, and buzzy sounds from close and rapid bowing. The fourth and final movement starts off slow, later building to an intensity to match the initial Allegro before all sense of movement is brought to a near halt in the closing bars. The three-movement String Quartet No. 2 (1958) covers similar ground in the realm of harmony and chromaticism and likewise radiates a sense of jangled neurons but sands off some of the first quartet’s rough edges and is therefore less intriguing. Skillfully melding electronics with the strings, the single-movement String Quartet No. 3 (1966) is my favorite. The taped whirs, zaps, gurgles, Morse code tappings, and computerized starbursts of notes that sound like what is supposed to represent the outer reaches of the cosmos in cheesy science fiction dramas give the work a space-age feel appropriate to its era of exploration. But these electronic interludes and interpositions, culminating in a “tape cadenza” near the end, are integral to the composition. The string players keep the performance taut throughout, creating a sense of tension in both their sustained notes and tremolos and their edgy attacks and cadenzas. All the while, they mediate between reacting to the taped sounds and doing their own thing regardless, responding to their human counterparts instead of mechanical signals. Forty years passed between the third and fourth quartets, and Kirchner was 87 years old by the time he got around to String Quartet No. 4. The fourth quartet, just one movement only ten and a half minutes long, retains the nervous energy of its predecessors and the legerdemain of their abrupt metrical course changes. Yet, its atmosphere is more benign, as if to say the composer had made his peace with the world around him. This effect in part results from a shift toward tonality and more conventional intervals. In some respects, Kirchner was charting the same course as Schoenberg, finding a means to reconcile with traditional music in his old age while still placing his Modernist stamp on it.

MAGNUS LINDBERG, Sculpture; Campana in Aria; Concerto for Orchestra (Esa Tapani, horn; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo)—The New York Philharmonic’s composer-in-residence for the upcoming 2009-10 season, Magnus Lindberg celebrated his fiftieth birthday in 2008. The three compositions on this disc are each effectively tributes, one to an architect (or to his work) and the others to Finnish conductors. While each is a unitary piece, they nonetheless comprise distinct sections. Sculpture (2005), composed twenty-four years after Lindberg’s Sculpture II, was written for the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry and home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Composed to evoke the sculptural properties of Gehry’s work, the composition calls for unusual orchestration, heavy on the tubas and other lower brass, bass clarinets, bassoons, and oboes (somewhat countered by passages in which flutes, piccolos, clarinets, and harps are prominent), while the timbre of the string section is also downshifted by the absence of violins. By turns declamatory, with trumpet fanfares later echoed in the woodwinds, and churning as the entire orchestra joins in, Sculpture also unleashes the occasional bell, alarm, bent note, or muted “raspberry” squawk, in the spirit of Edgard Varèse. Campana in Aria (1998), Italian for “bells up,” an instruction to horn or woodwind players to maximize their sound volume, is a shorter work, a one-movement horn concerto, dedicated to Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, French horn player, and the composer’s near exact contemporary, having been born three days after Lindberg. It demands of the soloist, here Esa Tapani, that he play sustained tones and energetic passages primarily near the upper end of the instrument’s range, particularly at the outset. At times, the soloist engages in an exchange with the orchestra’s own horns, and elsewhere his sputterings and outbursts are answered or mimicked by runs in the strings or woodwinds, or they are accentuated by wood block, celesta, or other percussion. Toward the end, the soloist rises to a high note that might resolve a more conventionally tonal piece but then continues his run, with the piece dying out on a more tentative sentiment. The Concerto for Orchestra (2003), nearly a half-hour in duration, was a BBC Symphony Orchestra commission and dedicated to Jukka-Pekka Saraste, who conducted the premiere. It begins with a brass fanfare in a stuttering rhythm that is echoed in other instrumental groups; this pattern is put through innumerable orchestral permutations and dynamic shifts. Slowly, the music changes character to become softer and dreamier but still punctuated by that same jittery spasm. The piece comes to a false end about twenty-five minutes in, after which things get stormy as the whole orchestra becomes involved. Eventually, the ship is righted, the composer takes a turn toward the tonal, and the work ends becalmed, quickly fading out.

KAIJA SAARIAHO, Notes on Light; Orion; Mirage (Anssi Karttunen, cello; Karita Mattila, soprano; Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach)—Named “Musician of the Year” for 2008 by Musical America, Kaija Saariaho has succeeded in building a popular following despite writing what could be termed “difficult” music in a modernist vein. Notes on Light (2006) is a five-movement work for cello and orchestra. The first movement, “Translucent, Secret,” is astringent, about as severe as Saariaho’s intense gaze in the photo on the back of the CD jacket, as the cellist, Anssi Karttunen, plays mournful tones—sometimes rich, sometimes strained, at times changing from one to the other while holding the same note—against a hovering orchestra whose sustained pitches frequently swoon away. “On Fire” is of a different nature entirely: the cellist bows vigorously but more for rhythmic than melodic effect, while the orchestra responds to the soloist’s agitation in a much more colorful fashion. “Awakening” carries some traits from each of the first two movements, while the orchestral background is glitteringly cosmic. For “Eclipse,” the cello goes missing, in a movement dominated by higher strings and low murmurs from the rest of the orchestra. “Heart of Light,” while not as airless as “Translucent, Secret,” sounds nearly as despondent, with a certain glassy brittleness. The three movements of Orion (2002) for orchestra have a firmer sense of forward movement, yet the music also conveys a sense of vastness and permanence, in the way that objects in the night sky change at a far slower rate than we do as observers. “Memento mori” emerges from a sonic murk in a crescendo to blaring at its end, while “Winter Sky” uses various instrument groups and solo players to create impressions of distance, iciness, mysteriousness. “Hunter,” the last movement, mostly but not entirely casts off sensations of ethereality and infinitude in favor of turbulence and violent pursuit; Orion as predator, prior to his transmogrification into a constellation. Mirage (2007) was recorded live in Paris; in fact, this was its world premiere. A single-movement duo concerto for cello and soprano, it takes as its text a declarative (and not particularly impressive) poem by a twentieth-century Mexican mystic named María Sabina. The score puts the lovely voice of renowned Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, singing an English translation of the verse, through some ghastly contortions and a few exasperated spoken phrases along the way. The cello, supposed to be an equal partner, is reduced to subservience by the phantasmagorical bombast of the singing. I can only hope that Saariaho’s operatic and choral works do not sound like this.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, Verklärte Nacht (Artemis Quartet, together with Thomas Kakuska, viola, and Valentin Erben, cello); Chamber Symphony No. 1 (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Simon Rattle); Chamber Symphony No. 2 (English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Jeffrey Tate); Five Orchestral Pieces; Erwartung; Variations for Orchestra (Phyllis Bryn-Julson, soprano; City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Simon Rattle)—The very name of Arnold Schoenberg conjures visions of forbiddingly cerebral works and compositions that are more academic exercises than entertainment. But Schoenberg had a long career that developed through several phases and had been composing for more than two decades before he started working in the Serialist idiom that so many dread. Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1899 for a string sextet, is very much in the late Romantic tradition: throbbing, passionate, bearing the chromatic characteristics of a Wagnerian prelude yet remaining within the bounds of conventional tonality, ultimately. Based on a poem by Richard Dehmel about a woman who admits her unfaithfulness to her husband, who resolves to continue loving her and the child she bears, it is a long piece (almost half an hour) that is by turns troubled, somber, agitated, and, toward the closing minutes, sweet. Several times, it appears as if it is going to end before moving on to another section. In the final minute, there is some harplike plucking of strings in the violins. The two chamber symphonies are a study in contrasts: Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1906), written for a fifteen-piece orchestra, is as bustling as it is unsettling, with rapid shifts in meter, motive, and dynamics; it also employs irregular intervals to subvert any sense of tonic equipoise. Formally written in four movements, in fact, the movements all have subsidiary sections, and everything is run together with no discernible breaks. Only the third movement is slow, and even this one breaks free of its restraints to climax in a burst of activity and sound. The final movement, taken at a considered pace at first, boils over into a frenzy of woodwind attacks pierced by the shrillness of the piccolo. Having started Chamber Symphony No. 2 shortly after the first, Schoenberg abandoned it for other concerns, resuming work decades later, a few years after settling in Los Angeles, to finish in 1939. Where the first chamber symphony is hyperactive, the second is more orderly and sedate; whereas the first is slipping the moorings of tonality, in the second, Schoenberg is finding ways to reconcile with it, particularly in the closing bars. The Adagio movement has a brief peak of intensity midway before settling back into an anguished calm. The second and final movement ticks on with an industry worthy of Béla Bartók for its first two-thirds before slamming on the brakes for a grandly epic denouement. On the second CD, Schoenberg moves ever closer to equal weighting of the chromatic scale. The Five Orchestral Pieces (1909) do not sound all that radical from the perspective of a century later, but in abandoning both tonality and traditional symphonic form, they were. These short pieces are the musical analogue to Expressionism in art (think Edvard Munch’s The Scream), cameos of distress or horror (the first and fourth movements) or sullenness and resignation. Hewing even more closely to the Expressionist zeitgeist is the one-act “monodrama,” or opera for a single soloist and orchestra, Erwartung (Expectation, 1909). The libretto (not reprinted in the CD booklet even in the original German) by Marie Pappenheim, steeped in Freudianism, centers on a woman who goes out into the woods to search for her lover at night and discovers his dead body, puzzles over how it came to be, accuses him of abandoning her, and wonders how she can go on living. The vocal writing is most unbeautiful, although it is not meant to be since it is portraying a protagonist who is distraught and quite possibly losing her sanity. Phyllis Bryn-Julson, who as a much younger woman took part in Hear O Israel: A Prayer Ceremony in Jazz (see above, in the jazz section), does about as well as could be with the knotty soprano part, with no tonal anchor and no repeats, at times fighting to be heard above the orchestra’s thunderous outbursts; there are also extended passages of spooky quietude. The scenes/movements all run together without breaks. The final couple of movements achieve some measure of spiritual repose, if hardly resolution, and are gentler on the ear. Variations for Orchestra dates from 1927-29, by which time Schoenberg had fully worked out his twelve-tone system. This is a classic theme and variations with an utterly unconventional theme; the tone rows, while disorienting, are not as fearsome to listen to as the reputation that precedes them. The first, third, fifth, and eighth variations are the most noisy and active; the third and fifth in particular sound restless and tormented, while the eighth is a tiny perpetual motion machine. The second variation has a delicate violin-oboe interplay, and the seventh rides on a bassoon solo so pianissimo that it could be mistaken for background. The structure of the piece is peculiar: some of the variations (like the eighth) are microscopic, while the finale is considerably longer than the original theme. What pleasures may be derived from the Variations for Orchestra are decidedly intellectual, not visceral.