Funky Green Dogs
Star (Twisted America)
Oscar Gaetan and Ralph Falcon's Murk label patented a fiery signature sound in the '90s. Their raw, tribal drums and from-the-gut vocal harmonies are sentimental favorites with many veteran house DJs and dancers.
The pair has spent the last few years working under the Funky Green Dogs moniker, adding vocalist Tamara on this full-length effort. Star unabashedly shoots for the widest possible audience, but that's a good thing - secrets like the Murk boys shouldn't be kept forever.
Co-Fusion
Co-Fu (Sublime)
Tokyo-based Co-Fusion, who signed with Japanese techno maestro Ken Ishii's Sublime label, immediately became stars in their native land. The band's début is driven by complex percussion programming, obviously learned through hard study of British drum-and-bass records. But instead of copying older styles, Co-Fusion has taken that complexity and, er, co-fused it with elements of techno and jazz. The result twists and turns between genres, sounding one minute like 4Hero in a sound clash with Jeff Mills, the next as if Art Blakey and Kraftwerk had stumbled into the same studio. With such variety, not everyone will like each track, but the whole is stunning.
The Olivia Tremor Control
Black Foliage (Flydaddy)
Athens-based Olivia Tremor Control's sophomore release is a psychedelic pop record subverted by noise artists. The Olivias wire warm multipart harmonies, comfy late-'60s guitar, and piano melodies with sweet chimes, mournful handsaws, and absurd kazoos. Each song explodes into shards that, as they sing, "liberate the world of sound." But with the CD clocking in at 69 minutes, the Olivias could benefit from a good editor.
Ani DiFranco
Up Up Up Up Up Up (Righteous Babe)
Twelve months after the release of Little Plastic Castle, the prolific punk-folk indie queen lets loose the most accessible of her dozen solo albums, while holding onto her visceral sound. Ranging from goofball to righteous babe, DiFranco is in classic form here: Songs careen from hushed acoustic poetry to finger-bleeding guitar attacks and vocal flights.
Evidence of her recent marriage appears mostly through omission. Her pissed-off sexual politics have dimmed. (There is a song about a former female lover.) Now her smart-as-a-whip edge attacks social politics. Indeed, it's her personal growth that's most riveting. Her spirit is summed up on the raucous closing jam, on which she riffs, tongue firmly in cheek, "I will not be afraid to let my talents shine."
Hank Dogs
Bareback (Hannibal)
Some records demand a nighttime intimacy - curtains closed, the sense of darkness outside - to open up. That's the way of the Hank Dogs. The vocals and music (acoustic and folky) seduce softly, but the words belie the mood, revealing a dangerous edge. Nick Drake mastered this quality, and these are his natural heirs. They draw you in with a velvet glove; it's only too late that you realize it's holding a sharp sword.
Rachmaninoff
A Window in Time: Rachmaninoff Performs His Solo Piano Works (Telarc)
Though he's been dead 56 years, Russian pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff's new CD teems with life. Inventor Wayne Stahnke's electronic reproducing piano reanimates 19 of Rachmaninoff's pieces and reestablishes his principal status. Culling from antiquated piano-roll recordings made throughout Rachmaninoff's career, Stahnke processed and translated his data to include pedaling, phrasing, and other subtleties.
The pianist's well-known arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" (1929) proves Rachmaninoff was as nimble as he was powerful.
Hive
Devious Methods (FFRR)
Proving there might yet be hope for American breakbeat culture, Hive pieces together crisp frantic percussion, menacing keyboards, thrashing guitars, and conspiracy-theory vocal snippets. Most potent as a junglist, Hive shines brightest with the rattle and drum of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and the ominous descending bass patterns of "One Way Path."
Miles Davis
The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (Columbia/Legacy)
Carlos Santana once said that hearing Bitches Brew for the first time was like growing up in a grass hut, stepping outside one day, and seeing a sliding glass door on a skyscraper. Though Davis's 1970 double album wasn't the first to mix rock instrumentation, funk grooves, and the jazz "cry," the electrified swamp of Bitches Brew still bristles the hairs on the back of your neck with its primordial terrifying majesty.
A revelation, this four-CD set unearths 90 minutes of unreleased jams. While the original album emphasized urban ferocity, the discoveries here take the meditative serenity of Davis's In a Silent Way a light-year deeper into Indian-inflected space.
STREET CRED
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