Penthouse belong to the ranks of British bands that are not afraid of going the opposite way of Brit-pop.My Idle Hands is even noisier and bluesier .But Unt sounds like a bad Jon Spencer imitation.60 Ft Dolls is the name of a Welsh band that plays hard-rocking melodies with a style borrowed from Jam . Guitarist Richard Parfitt leads the trio of garage-punk rave-ups that showed up on singles and are collected on The Big 3 : Happy Shopper, N.1 Pure Alcohol and Pig Valentine.Joya Magica is even worse.Richard Parfitt s first solo, Highlights In Slow Motion , however, reveals yet another old-fashioned pop-soul singer.7 Solution were formed in Austin by guitarist and vocalist Reese Beeman, a Texas transplant originally from Mississippi, to perform improvised jams in a style reminiscent of both Can s avantgarde experiments and Pink Floyd s early psychedelic suites.The line-up solidified with the arrival of guitarist James Adkisson and the sound veered towards a form of space-rock without the edge: a texture of dreamy solos and instrumental trance but enlivened by a melodic, song-oriented approach that may at times recall REM and Radiohead. That quality is what makes All About Satellites And Spaceships outstanding in that year s musical cene: 7 Solution adds more dynamics to the drone-driven ambient psychedelia of the shoegazers.The single Lullaby introduces the three-guitar attack of Beeman, Adkisson and new member Julian Capps, but Gabriel s Waltz , a concept album centered around the musical form of the waltz, mostly disappoints with a self-indulgent take on Stereolab and Tortoise . Between melodic hard-rock , Neil Young balladry and instrumental jam , the band carves itself a unique place in the history of Texas psychedelic rock.764-Hero is the project of Seattle songwriter Juan Atkins . On the single High School Poetry and on the album Salt Skins And Sugar Floats the band is but a duo of Atkins and drummer Polly Johnson .The duo sounds like a professional combo on the EP We re Solids .The line-up is augmented with bassist James Bertram on Get Here And Stay . Atkins is now playing full-blown rock and roll, often with a vengeange , although the calm Calendar Pages is still more representative of his persona. Lush and operatic arrangements and complex harmonic acrobatics unveil the trio s ambitions, which obviously extend beyond the naif ditties of this collection. 764 Hero s third album, Weekends of Sound , could be their best. A bunch of sprightly, catchy ditties , a tender ballad and a serious tour de force are the highlights equally entertaining and compelling.Atkins other project is Magic Magicians, whose Girls offers lo-fi roots-rock. With bass player James Bertram replaced by newcomer Robin P, 764 Hero s Nobody Knows This Is Everywhere offers a slightly more aggressive sound and sligthly catchier tunes . The six-minute Confetti Confessional and The Long Arm of the Law are less obvious than the average of alt-pop, and Answers and Skylines boast solemnly haunting textures, but the feeling is that some bands should make EPs, not LPs. The John And Spencer Booze Explosion is a collaboration between Murder City Devils vocalist Spencer Moody and 764-Hero s Juan Atkins, who take on a bizarre selection of covers.Luke Slater is a London dj who became a celebrity in the techno underground. His early recordings were collected on X-Tront and 92-94 . Planetary Assault Systems had the most prolific career: Archives , Electric Funk Machine , The Drone Sector , Atomic Funkster . Under his own name, Slater released a modest milestone of latter-day techno, Freak Funk , an eclectic potpourri of hip hop , propulsive funk and ambient textures. Compared with that feast of postmodern hybrids, Wireless is disappointing, but nonetheless it contains overdoses of adrenaline. The two volumes of All Exhale are quintessential Slater art, especially the spectacular Futureshock. Alright On Top is a tired work from a tired artist who is beginning to follow the trends rather than set them.9-Iron are the creature of singer songwriter Will Baum, a Los Angeles kid and a former Love Child, who sings about his generation s woes with a penchant for self-reflection that recalls Jonathan Richman.Baum matured with the concept album Make-out King , that pays tribute to the tradition with charm and passion. More serious fare like This Town Again leans towards the blue-collar rock of Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, but still with youthful exuberance.90 Day Men were originally a post-rock band from St Louis that released records such as the single If You Can Bake a Cake You Can Build a Bomb , the EP 1975-1977-1998 , and the single She s a Salt Shaker Activate the Borders. Relocating to Chicago in 1999, they added keyboardist Andy Lansangan and recorded their first full-length, It Critical Band . The piano now dominated their music, which carved a niche between Sonic Youth s noise-rock, Jesus Lizard s convoluted hardcore, Gastr Del Sol s loose soundscapes and the new wave of the late 1970s. Brian Case sounds like a less possessed David Yow , and the instrumental passages sustain his performance with a subtle range of polyphony. To Everybody and the EP Too Late Or Too Dead showed improved technical skills, and place the keyboards even more openly to the forefront of the music.Panda Park is sometimes too slick and predictable, as if the band was trying to reach for a broader audience or was more consciously trying to imitate past bands, but moments such as Even Time Ghosts are enough to redeem the entire work.90 Day Men s Afro-American bassist Robert Lowe is also active as Lichens. The vocals sound even more supernatural in Shore Line Scoring, underpinned by a denser drone of instrumental noise, as if swept by a dark and unrelenting wind. The 20-minute You Are Excrement If You Can Turn Yourself Into Gold is a mixed blessing.:Wumpscut: is the project of Germany s Rudy Ratzinger, soon to become a staple of electro and gothic industrial dance. Music For A Slaughtering Tribe is an appropriate title for the violent sounds of pieces like Koslow. The album as well as the previous cassettes Defcon and Small Chamber Musicians will be compiled on the double-CD Bloodchild . The five-song EP Dried Blood contains Black Death, their manifesto and their masterpiece, an evil hybrid of Sisters Of Mercy, Leaether Strip and Ministry. The five-track EP Gomorra contains the terrifying visions of Turn Off Pain and Ultramensch. Bunkertor 7 is not only brutal, it is also amazingly sophisticated, thanks to complex, layered arrangements that run the gamut from Tangerine Dream to Led Zeppelin.Mesner Tracks collects rarities and remixes. Embryodead is another soundtrack to pain. Totmacher is the highlight of Boeses Junges Fleisch that also includes the shocking Ich Will Dich and Flucht.The crises that lasts since 1995 erupts off Wreath Of Barbs , another uninspired collection of dance tracks.4 Non Blondes were formed in San Francisco in 1989 by Linda Perry, already celebrated in the Bay City s blues clubs for her Janis Joplin-style roar, for her doleful acoustic guitar and her open homosexuality. In 1990 the band had a local hit with Mr President, but it was the album Bigger Better Faster More that climbed the charts. The material is eclectic and not always original, often recalling an amateurish Jefferson Starship, nervous when incorporating funk or rockabilly .Her first solo album, In Flight , was a slick production aiming at the charts .4 Hero is the duo of Dego MacFarlane and Marc Mac, two debuted on London s hip-hop scene in the mid 1980s, but left their mark when they started pioneering new forms of drum n bass since 1990. Mr Kirk s Nightmare and Journey From The Light were the gloomy classics that signaled a change of mood within the rave scene, although initially 4 Hero was mainly known for harmless dancefloor hits such as Risin Sun, Combat Dance and The Scorcher.In Rough Territory collects and remixes some of the early singles and adds a few more tracks. Mac Mark also launched the Manix project with singles like Oblivion and Hardcore Junglism, while MacFarlane launched the Tek 9 alter ego with sophisticated singles like A London Sumtin and Just A Dream. With Parallel Universe , the duo abandoned the genre they had helped pioneer and embraced a form of armchair jungle that offered a groundbreaking marriage of fusion-jazz and ambient music, bordering on Weather Report and Sun Ra rather than on their friend Goldie.Another sci-fi concept album, this time credited to Jacob s Optical Stairway , perfected the idea, by investing heavily in synthesized strings and adding the vocals of a disco diva .In the meantime, Mark Mac debuted the straightahead hardcore techno of Nu Era. After the singles Stars and Breaking in Space, the album Beyond Gravity showcased the existential grooves of Mono Concentrate and Mirror Imagesd. MacFarlane, on the other hand, turned his Tek 9 side-project into a laboratory of innovations: It s Not What You Think It Is further refines his approach to jazz fusion , but ultimately lands him into acid-jazz and trip-hop territories, whereas Simply , featuring a number of vocalists, returns him to sample-free, vocal hip hop, soul melodies and bass-heavy funky rhythms. The new 4 Hero EP, Earth Pioneers , and single, Hero Lullaby, introduced live instrumentation.The two-disc album Two Pages furthers the investigations of Parallel Universe and Jacob s Optical Stairway. Mellow, kitschy orchestral arrangements highlight Star Chasers, a natural progression from Universal Love and Loveless, halfway between Curtis Mayfield and disco divas, perhaps reminiscent of the styles that turned Roni Size and LTJ Bukem into millionaires. Third Stream features African percussion and dancing violins, but the main theme is beaten by the piano as a mechanical pattern, and is rounded up by a fantastic clarinet solo. Spirits In Transit returns to the classical arrangement of Planetaria, but with a festive, fanfare-like attitude .The second, all-instrumental and more experimental disc challenges the arduous structures of Spring Heel Jack and Squarepusher with the eight-minute percussive pastiche We Who Are Not For Others. The other tracks sound a little amateurish and it may not be a coincidence that the best is Pegasus 51, another melodic offering. As avantgarde composers, the duo is definitely not up to the task, but, at least in their intentions, this is the Ummagumma of drum n bass. Two Pages Reinterpretation is the remix album. Mark Mac and Dego McFarlane cannot repeat the magic of Two Pages on Creative Patterns . Their elegant, sensual and baroque drum bass fails to capture the same metaphysical essence of pieces like Golden Age Of Life. The disc is equally divided between noir, expressionistic atmospheres set to warm and slippery techno beats and ballads delivered by an assortment of mainly female vocalists . The instrumental tracks are club-friendly and the ballads are radio-friendly, the latter being the most interesting from the viewpoint of the arrangements.Marc Mac formed the Visioneers, a project with Brad Somatik and 4 Hero s drummer Luke Parkhouse, with the mission to concoct some kind of fusion of hip-hop and jazz, not exactly the most original of concepts.Given the legions of Limp Bizkit, Incubus, etc that roam the lands of funk-metal-rap fusion, one would hardly expect the need for yet another Los Angeles-based purveyors of this most exploited of stereotypes.J. Despite all odds, Lost Angel manages to pack enough punch to elevate the brutal rapping and riffing of Cities on Fire, Flow Heat, Blind My Eyes, All Lies above the average. The band can be more melodic than their rivals and that skill is emphasized when the songs turn into studies in harmonic contrast, as No Light does. Boston s 360, fronted by tough female vocalist Audrey Clarke, often compared to Chrissie Hynde, played granitic rock and roll with an emphasis on the emotional and virtuoso guitar of Eric Russell.Strawberry Stone is a disappointing collection of regular power-pop ditties with a touch of Flaming Lips eccentricities .311 is a band from Omaha that spent years playing a hybrid of funk and rock too far from Los Angeles and San Francisco to be heard.Their effervescent cacophony of heavy metal, reggae, rap, funk was revealed to the world by 311 Music and Grassroots . Do you right, Feels So Good, Visit and My Stoney Baby were the hits in 1993; Homebrew, Lucky and 8:16am followed in 1994. Relocated to Los Angeles, the band started mellowing down.Freeze Time and Come Original are the standouts from Sound System . From Chaos , Evolver and Don t Tread On Me were less and less interesting.The long-distance duo of Joseph Dierker and Tim Donovan that goes by the moniker of 310 debuted with Aug 56 and Snorkelhouse . The former is an album of cold ambience that harks back to the chill-out rooms and to Brian Eno s Apollo studies.The Dirty Rope is an eclectic and erudite melange of post-rock, trip-hop and post-techno . With Nothing To See Here , 310 embraced new-age music. This album contains a parade of short, soothing vignettes realized manipulating natural sounds , human sounds and musique concrete . After All Biosphere Matmos 2Pac is the second alias of Tupac Shakur , the former member of Digital Underground who adopted the gangsta-rap aesthetic for 2Pacalypse Now and Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.His most powerful album was Me Against the World , produced by Sam Bostic, released while he was in jail for a sexual assault. Both gloomy and explosive, it covered a vast spectrum of styles, from homicidal to sensitive, while remaining true to the gangster persona. Much of the anger and fear gone, 2Pac adopted a more domestic stance on the uneven All Eyez on Me , the first double album of hip-hop music, produced by Dr Dre, Mike Mosley and many others . He also released Makaveli s The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory and Tupac Shakur s The Rose That Grew From Concrete , besides 2Pac s R U Still Down?He was shot dead in 1996.Finnish trio 22-Pistepirkko has made an art of crafting blues ambience. Their albums include: Piano, Rumpu Kukka , Kings of Hong Kong , Bare Bone Nest , Big Lupu , Rumble City , Eleven . Tracks: Taxi 74, Onion Soup, Coma Moon, Sad Lake City, Boardroom Walk, Hey Man, Let The Romeo Weep, Beatiful Morning, Frustration, Shadow. 13 Engines was a Toronto quartet that played an intelligent and elegant brand of power-pop. John Critchley, singer and guitarist, was often compared to Tragically Hip and Neil Young, but his more mature work bears a much stronger resemblance to Robyn Hitchcock s. The former ran the gamut from rock and roll to sentimental balladry , and the latter also spawned the modest hit Beached. After a mediocre A Blur To Me Now , that included singles Big Surprise and King Of Saturday Night, their fourth album, Perpetual Motion Machine , suddenly found the magic balance between popular and high art. More and Smoke And Ashes divulged their pop style, while Bred in the Bone and What If We Dont Get What We Want showcased the delicate infrastructure of that style.While Beneath My Hand and Vermillion are catchy and refined, Conquistador is ultimately the album of a band that has not found its personality yet and the 13 Engines dissolved shortly thereafter. John Critchley s solo career took off with Crooked Mile .13 Engines was a Toronto quartet that played an intelligent and elegant brand of power-pop. John Critchley, singer and guitarist, was often compared to Tragically Hip and Neil Young, but his more mature work bears a much stronger resemblance to Robyn Hitchcock s. The former ran the gamut from rock and roll to sentimental balladry , and the latter also spawned the modest hit Beached. After a mediocre A Blur To Me Now , that included singles Big Surprise and King Of Saturday Night, their fourth album, Perpetual Motion Machine , suddenly found the magic balance between popular and high art. More and Smoke And Ashes divulged their pop style, while Bred in the Bone and What If We Dont Get What We Want showcased the delicate infrastructure of that style.While Beneath My Hand and Vermillion are catchy and refined, Conquistador is ultimately the album of a band that has not found its personality yet and the 13 Engines dissolved shortly thereafter. John Critchley s solo career took off with Crooked Mile .The album 12 Rounds revealed the fantastic voice of Claudia Sarne, a female version of Nick Cave s macabre and existential howl, with PJ Harvey overtones. Her morbid ballads Pleasant Smell and My Big Hero are set to the music of Massive Attack s trip-hop by seasoned producer Atticus Ross. 10 CC were a British band formed during the heydays of progressive-rock and hard-rock by four veteran songwriters and multi-instrumentalists: Graham Gouldman , Lol Creme, Eric Stewart and Kevin Godley. They debuted with the demented bubblegum hits There Ain t No Umbopo and Neanderthal Man , from the album Songs credited to the Hot Legs. They then changed name to 10CC for Donna , the retro ballad that established them at top of the charts and that coined their kind of parodistic kitsch. After offering more of the same with Sheet Music , in particular the Wall Street Shuffle, and experimenting with even crazier arrangements, the foursome embraced the high-tech studio a la Sparks and turned The Original Soundtrack into a stylistic tour de force, albeit still rooted in their weird sense of humour and in their poppy melodies. I m Not In Love even became a hit, while the extended collages of Une Nuite A Paris and Life Is A Minestrone straddle the line between Frank Zappa s operettas and the Beatles Abbey Road. Cartoonish wit and four-part vocal harmonies made them quite unique in their age, occasionally worthy successors of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. How Dare You , which includes the self-parodistic Art For Art s Sake and I m Mandy Fly Me, Godley and Creme launched a separate career with the triple-album rock opera Consequences , that used a new technique to produce symphonic, choral and natural sounds, and pretentiously bizarre albums such as L , Freeze Frame , containing An Englishman In New York, Ismism , Birds Of Prey and Goodbye Blue Sky ; while 10cc continued with Deceptive Bends , Bloody Tourists , with Dreadlock Holiday, Look Here , 10 Out of 10 , Windows In The Jungle , totally ignored despite Food For Thought. The foursome reformed the original 10cc for the terrible Meanwhile . Then the two couples continued their separate adventures, 10cc releasing Mirror Mirror and Godley Creme concentrating on their successful career as directors of videos. Images is an anthology of Godley and Creme.Upstate New York s 10,000 Maniacs played atmospheric, intimate and intellectual folk-rock enhanced with vocalist Natalie Merchant s plaintive sanguine colloquial tone. After venting their existential angst on Secrets of the I Ching , they opted for Fairport Convention s more conventional folk-rock on The Wishing Chair . The fragile and pensive In My Tribe was the first album to fully display Merchant s persona , although it led to the ecstatic easy-listening of Blind Man s Zoo . Our Time In Eden , their commercial breakthrough, balanced the profound and the ethereal elements of their art and set the stage for Merchant s solo career. 1 Mile North is the New York-based project of guitarist Jon Hills and keyboardist Mark Bajuk. The hypnotic repetition of New Clock and Evil Architecture tried to exploit an old minimalist trick, while the more emotional scores of Escorting Deep Waters and Have a Good One What were reminiscent of new-age music and cosmic music. Minor Shadows is more of the same, just at a higher degree of complexity. The best part of the 9-minute In 1983 He Loved To Fly comes when the piano takes the lead, two minutes from the end. Most tracks, though, indulge in slow, languid, gentle and predictable atmospheres which fall somewhere between Harold Budd and new-age music.The Gibson Bros in Ohio, led by guitarist Don Howland and vocalist Jeff Evans, were natural heirs of the Cramps and Pussy Galore. The blues and rockabilly bacchanals of Big Pine Boogie , which is mainly covers, and Dedicated Fool , Evans moved to Memphis and formed 68 Comeback, another blues outfit, while Howland formed the Bassholes, whose Captain Beefheart-ian blues orgies topped the Gibson Bros at least on When My Blue Moon Turns Red Again . Out Hud were formed in 1996 in Sacramento with Nic Offer , Tyler Pope , Justin Vandervolgen , Molly Schnict and Phyllis . Nic Offer and Tyler Pope were formerly in Yahmos, a Sacramento punk band formed around 1990. They released the EPs Right On and Off Your Parents , while their album Undefeated will be published only several years later.Out Hud debuted with a trio of EPs: Out Hud , Natural Selection , First Single of the New Millennium and the single Le Elephant Stomp . The all-instrumental album Street Dad contains six dance tracks that hark back to the dance-oriented new-wave bands of the early 1980s, such as Contortions and Golden Palominos. Story of the Whole Thing is a monster revisionist piece of the reggae and funk tradition, enhanced with gothic overtones, a tinning guitar pattern, classical-sounding cello lines and frantic hip-hop explosions. Dad There s a Little Phrase Called Too Much Information, propelled by the steady beat and whirling electronics of European disco-music of the 1970s, and derailed by recurring and slightly discordant guitar patterns, soars in a funk fanfare worthy of the glorious Love Of Life Orchestra. Hair Dude, You re Stepping On My Mystique and My Two Nads are more convetional dance tracks that simply reiterate previous elements, but still a lot of creative fun. The conceptual centerpiece of the album is the 12-minute The L Train is a Swell Train and I Don t Want to Hear You Indies Complain, a syncopated and tribal techno ballet that mixes oneiric guitar tones, industrial-grade panzer rhythms and a symphony of quirky background sounds. Out Hud moved to New York in 2001. , a septet, formed in 1996 in Sacramento, whose debut EP was a split with Out Hud , followed by a single and the album !!! , containing the nine-minute funk-ska-punk dance There s No Fucking Rules Dude and the electronic fireworks of Feel Good Hit Of The Fall. The 20-minute EP Me And Giuliani Down By the School Yard collects two lengthy new-wave-ish dance jams, and the nine-minute title-track is another glorious disco-punk nightmare that resurrects the likes of ESG and Liquid Liquid.The second album by !!! , Louden Up Now , hypnotic and orgiastic dance music deranged groove-driven instrumental workouts that sound like parodies but actually constitute the new avantgarde ., Theme from Space Island, Pardon My Freedom and Dear Can are endless chain-reaction mutations of Me And Giuliani Down By the School Yard, each adding new eccentric twists to the base concept.Out Hud s Let Us Never Speak Of It Again is another cauldron of quotes from the 1970s. The elements that stand out are the extremes: either when the music harks straight back to the beginnings of synthetic funk music, or when the experiment is truly theirs, Out Hud s . The pounding percussion and exotic vocals of It s For You is distinctively 1990s, not nostalgic at all, and the treatment of the melodic progressions and the string arrangements is plainly futuristic. The cubist, hiccupping ballett of One Life to Leave and the noisy, trancey interludes of Old Nude overcome the superficial resemblance with disco-music. The tribal orgy of the instrumental The Song So Good They named it Thrice best summarizes their aesthetic principles by laying down a rhythmic base and then devastating it with a hailstorm of cosmic bleeps, mutating synthesizers and whirling, exotic symphonic melodies: Frank Zappa meets Giorgio Moroder and the Talking Heads. The horror score of 2005 A Face Odyssey is, de facto, a free-form sonata, fading and returning like a ghostly presence, until it explodes in a massive fanfare. The 11-minute Dear Mr Bush There are Over 100 Words for Shit and Only 1 for Music is a thumping feverish techno locomotive that shifts gear a few times and destabilizes the hypnosis with mournful cello phrases. From mutation to mutation, the melody becomes more relevant, and, by the end, the piece has turned into some kind of triumphal Yanni-like anthem. The overall feeling is one of psychoanalysis of the post-industrial digital world, not of nostalgic reminiscence of the pre-digital era. !!! s EP Take Ecstacy With Me is devoted to covers, notably the namesake Magnetic Fields song.Adam F has rapidly achieved cult status among fans of jungle, thanks to the dancefloor success of his singles Circles and Metropolis . The album Colours has revealed a refined musician, who can alternate his jungle fever with bursts of jazz-funk and touches of mellow soul .Add N To are a trio of British musicians who mainly play analog keyboards, augmented by the occasional vocoder or drum machine.Add N To are in splendid form on On the Wires of Our Nerves . The music is made of artsy beats and noises and evokes a dark, claustrophobic, teutonic fantasy of mechanical monsters gone mad. Such punk retro-futurism owes a debt to a variety of rock and pseudo-rock ensembles: Mother Mallards, Tangerine Dream, Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire, Kraftwerk, Devo and, more recently, Atari Teenage Riot. The album opens with a videogame-inspired We Are Add N To X that sounds like a tribute to Devo. Murmur One is the quintessential industrial suite, all metallic bangs, pounding machines, robotic ballets and radio interferences, early Cabaret Voltaire and Human League. Grey Body takes off from there and lands in even more experimental territory, with rhythms that belong to the videogame generation rather than to Sheffield working class milieu. Orgy Of Bubastus references Brian Eno s dadaistic vignettes and Giorgio Moroder s eurodisco locomotives. Melody appears in Sound of Accelerating Concrete: a guitar and a synth weave their melodic themes onto each other before being swept away by tribal, polyrhythmic electronic percussions .Some tracks are recognizable as more or less conventional rock songs , albeit still diluted in a sea of sound effects. The guitar riff of hard-rock surfaces in Black Regent, that sounds like Jimi Hendrix fronting the Allman Brothers and broadcast over a dirty channel. Sir Ape Their battery of analogue keyboards plays different roles at the same time: the guitar solo of heavy metal, the forceful drumming of punk-rock, the shouting of rhythm and blues.This isn t electronica, just like Led Zeppelin s was not blues. They discovered a new, rougher and deeper, dimension of electronica, just like Led Zeppelin discovered a new, rougher and deeper, dimension of blues.So it comes as no surprise that the follow-up album was titled Avant Hard . The title is a misnomer, though: somewhat smoother and easier, Avant Hard put aside the previous album s uncompromising sonic onslaught for a more mature symphony of tones and textures. Revenge Of The Black Regent is an exalted symphonic poem, somewhere between classical music, military music, Morricone soundtracks and Procol Harum. Oh Yeah Oh No boasts a female whisper with the quiet bliss of Stereolab s lullabies, a jazzy trumpet and intense drumming. The latter two are experiments in the experiment as they further broaden the band s horizons and show new nuances of the method. The 10-minute suite Machine Is Bored With Loved picks up from here and is a manifesto of sort: an atmospheric whistle is swallowed in a sonic black hole. Elsewhere, the band resurrects the rock format in grand style. What makes it uniquely Add N To is the maelstrom of synthesizers that rages, layer after layer, over the forceful drumming. A synthesis of sort, Metal Fingers In My Body approaches the perverted intensity of Pierre Henry s Rock Electronique and establishes a new peak for the band s rock output. Less erudite and programmatic than Wires, the album presents a more human version of Add N To . With Add Insult To Injury , Add N To gave their most schizophrenic album yet . The singalong Monster Bobby, the alien Kingdom Of Shades, the decadent Plug Me In, the devoluted anthem Adding N To and Brothel Charge show more of a rock and roll edge, while the progressive-rock suite The Regent Is Dead is just about the contrary, fifteen minues of convoluted, pathetic, melodramatic magma. The thesis of Loud Like Nature is that confusion is a sign of wisdom. Luckily, the band s growth does not limit itself to the horizontal axis, but also occurs on the vertical axis: songs such as Electric Village, PP MAchine and Take Me To Your Leader are surgical strikes that exhibit manic cohesion and absolute determination. But their post-industrial decandent futuristic punk cabaret is best represented by the alien weirdness of Invasion Of The Polaroid People, Party Bag, Up the Punks, and Large Number. And it even finds room for a couple of poppy, silly novelties such as Sheez Mine and Total All Out Water. Spray on Sound is Ann Shenton s debut solo album. Large Number is Ann Shenton s solo project, that debuted with Spray On Sound .The Adolescents, with Rikk Agnew on guitar , Tony Montana Cadena on vocals and Steve Soto on bass, released one of the most mature punk albums of 1981, whose sticks of dynamite exploded one after the other without a moment of pause illuminating a poetic universe representative of the teenager medium of Los Angeles . Touching on anthems to supersonic rhythm like I Hate Children, the nonsense-refrains of the Ramones like Wrecking Crew and the epic slogans of the Clash like No Way, the disc presents a phenomenal ability to forge powerpop songs, thanks overall to the riffs and fiery solos of Agnew. Far from indulging in the tragic tone of so much punk rock of that period, the Adolescents disc excels rather in the comic register: sarcastic vignettes like L.A. The masterpiece is Kids Of The Black Hole, a classic rock cut with boogie progressions that ll remind you of Zeppelin played and sung with the futuristic melancholy of Ultravox. Like so many of these one-album wonders of 1981, the Adolescents also came unglued immediately following their first album. But only in 1986 did he succeed in reforming the Adolescents and releasing an album of new material, Brats In Batallions , inferior to the first and to Agnew s solo album. Much better was the successive offering Balboa Fun Zone , with Alone Against The World and It s Tattoo Time, as far as it is still a disengaged work without the powerful presence of their debut. They passed more years of silence before Agnew succeeeded in finding another recording contract. This time it was under the heading of Yard Sale and the first album, Emotional Vomit , emphasized simply hard rock, preserving the verve and the melodism of their good times.Soto had meanwhile formed Joyride, perhaps the formation that brought together the true heredity of the Adolescents and their principal competitors, Big Drill Car, in the 90s: the 45 rpm She s A Rebel and the two melodic gems All I Ever Wanted Was You and As I Fall from the album Another Month Of Mondays were nothing to envy over the power pop of ten years earlier.Irish singer-songwriter Adrian Crowley debuted with A Strange Kind , possibly the first collection by a male British singer-songwriter to bring back the glory days of the 1970s. Capricorn weds the simple tone of a and the psychological tension of a John Martyn, while a small ensemble turns the atmosphere into a quiet nightmare.For such an accomplished album, it is odd that the mood be best summed up by an instrumental track, Trilogy, whose foggy ambience and distant tolls seemed to be washed ashore from another planet. When You Are Here You Are Family is a more conventional album, in the vein of Will Oldham . Very few word painters have a palette as broad as Crowley s. A Northern Country employs the neoclassical pace of One Hundred Words For Snow before tip-toeing into Dark Anvil Skies, weaves the warmer and denser Morning Frost before evoking Leonard Cohen s tender melodies in A Northern Country, suspends himself in the hypnotic lullaby Photographing Lightning Strikes before weeping into the anemic blues of Great Salt Lake, delves into the dilated trance of Brake Lines and reemerges in the sullen piano notes of Happiness Came To My Door.English virtuoso folk guitarist Adrian Legg became famous for his supersonic fingerpicking but is actually more important for his fusion of folk, country, bluegrass, blues and new age elements. After three albums released only in England, Technopicker , Fretmelt , Lost For Words , Legg became a sensation with Guitars And Other Cathedrals , which remains a classic of modern guitar, thanks to the frenetic Thump The Clouds, Reckless Love, Guitars And Other Cathedrals. On the other hand, the best moments on Guitar for Mortals may be on the contemplative, elegiac tunes Waltzing with Jesus and The Netsman And The Laird. Wine Women And Waltz Mrs Crowe s Blue Waltz contains the Green Ballet and High Strung Tall Tales the High Strung Suite.Waiting for a Dancer is a less exciting set, whose standout being the somber, atmospheric L Amour Manque, Carolina Sunday Waltz, Bayou Belles.Postcard From London is a two-CDROM set of music and videos.Adult is Detroit s duo of Jack Vulpine and android vocalist Nicola Kuperus, one of the original purveyors of electroclash before the term was invented. Their theatrical fusion of disco-music, punk-rock and glitch electronica permeates the EPs Dispassionate Furniture , Modern Romantics , credited to Plasma Co, and Entertainment , including Human Wreck.The album Resuscitation collects their best singles and remixes. Anxiety Always is a more visceral and violent work, that highlights their punk personas. Suck The Air High Heels On Tile Floors and the EP D.U.M.E.Insanity makes further inroads into Adult s sound on Gimmie Trouble , thanks mainly to the maturation of Nicola Kuperus vocal style and a new member, guitarist Sam Consiglio. Strange Mistakes, Turn Into Fever, In My Nerves, Seal Me In, Helen Bach are schizophrenic workouts that redefine their mission in music, while Bad Idea, Lovely Love and Still Waiting, the tracks that more closely resemble their electroclash roots, sound naively redundant at this point.With the help of Spirea X vocalist Judith Boyle, Beattie later formed Adventures In Stereo and opted for a simpler, direct form of pop that returns to Primal Scream s origins. Airline and When We Go Back, the singles preceding, and later included, on Adventures In Stereo , as well as opener Underground Sound, are tiny gems in a style that rips off the Beach Boys and Phil Spector productions for girl-groups.Greater confidence and down-to-earth humility lends Alternative Stereo Sounds a Stereolab feeling. Silence Falls, Dream Surf Baby, and the trailing singles Down In The Traffic and A Brand New Day, are more immaculate photocopies of the Sixties, albeit in a slightly offbeat style. Monomania indulges in more of the same, except that vocal harmony has reached new peaks of baroque and the duo has embraced the genre of the slow ballad .Formed in 1997 in Glasgow by Ganger s singer-guitarist Craig B, Aereogramme debuted with two singles, Translations and Hatred, and two EPs, Glam Cripple and White Paw. Their first full-length album, A Story In White , offered an ambitious mixture of prog-rock, death-metal, post-rock, industrial music and emo-core. The band s specialty is the quiet loud routine of The Question Is Complete , Zionist Timing and Post-Tour Pre-Judgement, although the most gripping sounds come out of the bombastic and chaotic Shouting For Joey, and the most touching moments display a surprising dose of emotion. The album is an exercise in style, not simply copying styles but trying to coin a new one via a process of metamorphosis. Sleep And Release is an equally complex album that relies on even looser song structures. If sometimes the results sound confused and pretentious the majestic, symphonic glam-pop of Black Past, the chamber industrial post-rock of Process of Elimination and the graceful elegy of Gratitude, drenched in classical strings and solemn drums, unleash avalanches of feelings sounds that, if not for content, are impressive as sheer form. The mood swings, the gentle melodies and the menacing eruptions, the narrative subtleties of Older, No Really and Wood hark back to prog-rock melodrama, but with a neurotic angelic twist that gives new meaning to King Crimson s 21st century schizoid man . It all comes together on the tenth track, six minutes of martial crescendo that negate Aereogramme s skills at dynamics but also prove their irrational take on rationality. The mini-album Seclusion is a vastly inferior work, despite the surreal mini-concerto of Alternative Score. Seclusion is an eclectic and confusing collection, generally harsher and denser, but highlighted by an emo-core anthem, Inkwell, and by a ten-minute psychodrama, The Unravelling, that had little in common with the rest .Slint s guitarist Dave Pajo contributed to dispel the notion that instrumental music had to be atmospheric with Aerial M , which delivered languid sub-sub-ambient slo-core in which elements of lounge jazz, Ennio Morricone s soundtracks and Rachel s semi-classical scores were carefully defused. His minimalist and transcendental technique, equally inspired by Pat Metheny , Robert Fripp and John Fahey , reached an existential zenith on Papa M s Live From A Shark Cage , a phantasmagoria of cubist de-composition, the instrumental equivalent of Tim Buckley s music. New York City-based hip-hop artist Aesop Rock debuted with Music for the Earthworms and Appleseed . He then released one of the most intense albums in the history of hip hop, Float .Labor Days was not as revolutionary, and not as consistent, but still boasted two gems such as Daylight and Labor. It helped publicize producer Anthony Blockhead Simon, who had already collaborated with Aesop Rock but blossomed as a beat sculptor with this album. Bazooka Tooth is another feast of classy, creative numbers .The seven-song EP Fast Cars, Danger, Fire And Knives is a mediocre collection of trivial political rants. Anthony Blockhead Simon has released the solo Music by Cavelight .In Ohio, Greg Dulli s Afghan Whigs, who had begun as punks with Big Top Halloween and pseudo-grunge rockers with Up In It , an abrasive blend of Replacements and Dinosaur Jr, rediscovered soul music and the rhythm n blues ballad on Congregation , a calmer and catchier collection.The first conscious artist of rap s aural collage was Afrika Bambaata, aka Kahyan Aasim, the Leonardo of the beatbox , the producer of Soul Sonic Force s Zulu Nation Throwdown , the rap auteur of Planet Rock , Looking For The Perfect Beat , Renegades Of Funk , World Destruction , whose album Beware summarized five years of experiments in mixing samples, epileptic beats, disco grooves and Kraftwerk s electronic pop, and defined the genre called electro . Afterhours are an Italian band that helped shape the national scene of the 1990s. They debuted as a rather traditional rock n roll outfit with the the effervescent mini-album All The Good Children Go to Hell , the mediocre album During Christine s Sleep , the transitional mini-album Cocaine Head , and the even less exciting album Pop Kills Your Soul . They redeemed themselves with the elegant noise-rock of Germi , and went on to coin a unique compromise between Tuxedomoon s new wave and Black Flag s hardcore, particularly with the tour de force of Hai Paura del Buio? They lost a bit of verve with Non E Per Sempre , and Quello Che Non C e closed the circle by returning to a more accessible format, and Ballate Per Piccole Iene reignited the punk bonfire of their first album. A Short Apnea blurred the borders between post-rock, free-jazz and electronic avantgarde in the three jams of their second album, Illu Ogod Ellat Rhagedia .Florida s Against Me, led by vocalist and guitarist Tom Gabel, specialize in punk-folk of the Billy Bragg tradition, via alt-country, the Dropkick Murphys and southern blues-rock. Following the EP Crime as Forgiven , that contained the powerful I Still Love You Julie and Walking is Still Honest, the album Reinventing Axl Rose announced a screaming bard, whose philosophy of life was expressed by the desperate Pints Of Guinness, the anthemic Those Anarcho Punks are Mysterious , the catchy Reinventing Axl Rose, and We Laugh at Danger. Following the horns-tinged single The Disco Before the Breakdown , the 26-minute album As the Eternal Cowboy showed a more mature outfit, recalling the Clash as it shifted from T.S.R. to the political sermon Mutiny On The Electronic Bay, from the driving Slurring The Rhythms, to the reggae Turn Those Clapping Hands Into Angry Balled Fists, even imploding into the acoustic ballad Sink Florida Sink. Searching for a Former Clarity was musically even more professional, with longer songs and progressive arrangements. The political rant From Her Lips To God s Ears harked back to their roots, but the dance-punk number Unprotected Sex With Multiple Partners and the reggae-infected Justin slowed down the proceedings while deepening the context.Air is a duo of French musicians, Nicolas Godin, with a degree in architecture, and Jean Benoit Dunckel, with a degree in classical music. They started playing alternative rock in the 1980s in Paris, but reached maturity composing music that harks back to the heyday of Europop and Eurodisco, albeit transfigured by retro-futuristic arrangements. Their musical itinerary was marked by a batch of delightful singles: Modulor Mix , Casanova 70 Les Professionels , J ai Dormi Sous l Eau, Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi , that have been collected on an EP, later expanded to a mini-album, titled Premiers Symptomes . You can hear the soothing melody behind the plastic mix of digital beats and electronic reverbs of Modulor Mix, but only when the horns moan it louder it becomes the center of the song, and only for a few songs.The nocturnal lounge music of Les Professionels, wrapped in tides of gentle melodies, and the dreamy music box of J ai Dormi Sous l Eau, whose repetitive patterns border on minimalism and raga, push the melody to the forefront. Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi continues the slide towards a more conventional song. Air s music belongs to the easy listening side of the spectrum: jazzy and laid-back, sensual and melodic.Moon Safari is a vastly more professional and ambitious proposition than the early funny singles. Korg keyboards, Moog synthesizers, Fender Rhodes electric piano, and vocoders bestow a zany campiness to the kitscy pop of Air s electronic dance music. The tracks exude Pink Floyd s psychedelic majesty, jazz s subdued ambience, random quotations from the history of soul, funk and disco music, and more than a passing mention of Burt Bacharach s and Ennio Morricone s scores. The suave and uplifting jazz-rock theme of La Femme d Argent, played and counterpointed on a plethora of timbres by the electronic keyboards, whirls like one of Terry Riley s minimalistic dervishes before mutating into a driving movement for piano and orchestra. Their knack for post-modern revisions of commercial music is in full display. Sexy Boy is culled from France s easy listening of the 1960s but augmented with bizarre sounds and a robotic tone. A similar treatment awaits the bubblegum motiv of Kelly Watch The Stars , the catchy novelty Remember , the joyful parody of orchestral movie soundtracks Ce Matin La. Gli Air sono un duo di musicisti francesi, Nicolas Godin, laureato in architettura, e Jean Benoit Dunckel, laureato in musica classica. I due hanno incominciato dedicandosi al rock alternativo nella Parigi degli anni 80, ma hanno raggiunto la maturita componendo una musica che riporta all epoca del massimo splendore di Europop ed Eurodisco, quantunque transfigurata da arrangiamenti retro-futuristici. Il loro percorso musicale e caratterizzato da una sequenza di singoli deliziosi: Modulor Mix , Casanova 70, Les Professionels , J ai Dormi Sous l Eau, che sono stati raccolti su un EP, piu tardi ampliato a mini-album, intitolato Premiers Symptomes . Dato che tutti gli strumenti sono suonati dal vivo e che non e impiegato alcun tipo di campionamento, il suono risulta fresco e per niente artificiale. Moon Safari è un progetto molto più professionale e ambizioso rispetto ai primi divertenti singoli. Il suono vecchio stile delle tastiere analogiche è preponderante, secondo la scuola di Moog-revival che sta prendendo piede negli Stati Uniti. Le tastiere Korg, il Moog, il piano elettrico Fender Rhodes ed i vocoders conferiscono una claunesca effeminatezza al pop kitsch della dance music elettronica degli Air. I brani trasudano la maestosità psichedelica dei Pink Floyd, le atmosfere sommesse del jazz, menzioni casuali dalla storia del soul, del funk e della disco music, e più di una fuggevole citazione delle partiture di Burt Bacharach e di Ennio Morricone. Il tema soave e cadenzato di La Femme d Argent, suonato e contrappuntato su una moltitudine di timbri dalle tastiere elettroniche, si avvita come uno dei dervish minimalisti di Terry Riley prima di mutare in un movimento incalzante per piano e orchestra. La loro passione per le revisioni postmoderne della musica commerciale e all apice. Un trattamento simile attende il motivo bubblegum di Kelly Watch The Stars , la novelty orecchiabile di Remember , la gioiosa parodia delle colonne sonore orchestrali Ce Matin La.The film soundtrack Virgin Suicides is not up to the masterpiece. A dozen Pink Floyd-ish instrumental tracks and one vocal piece, Playground Love, merely scratch the surface of their postmodern technique of layering kitschy and retro sounds. Helped by Moog and Mellotron, Air forge an evocative and nostalgic score in which the story matters more than the merit of each song. 10.000 Hz Legend , Air s second album , is a more sophisticated and colder portion of catchy and soft 1960s-infected arias. The dreamy, Pink Floyd-ian Radio 1, the Beatles-esque How Does It Make You Feel, the glam-rock melodrama of People In The City rank among their most consummable moments. The French revisionists have lost something in arrangements, despite a pastoral flute or a psychedelic guitar or a Macintosh computer voice occasionally surfing the soundscape. It may not be a coincidence that Air asked distinguished guests to help out pen The Vagabond and Sex Born Poison . Everybody Hertz is the customary, tedious album of remixes. City Reading is the musical soundtrack to a reading by Italian writer Allessandro Baricco.Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin returned to a relatively warmer ambience on Talkie Walkie . If their specialy remains the classy but pointless easy-listening of Run and Alone In Kyoto , or the elegant bubblegum music of Cherry Blossom Girl or the joyful instrumental novelty Alpha Beta Gaga, i.e. the numbers that highlight their inventive fusion of Brian Wilson and Brian Eno, a deeper sense of existential spleen radiates from the slightly neurotic Alpha Beta Gaga and the oddly funereal Venus, songs that cast a dark shadow on their paradise lounge, or from the postmodernist revisions of the space boogie Surfin on a Rocket and the space country Biological. Occasionally, Air s art evokes the dark-humorous vision of a paradise set inside a videogame, a vision that is worth a philosophical essay. Aislers Set is a San Francisco-based combo that plays retro-pop, often bordering on imitation of Tin Pan Alley and girl-groups. Terrible Things Happen was a lame example of Brit-pop translated into American, but The Last Match offered a batch of inspired, effervescent ditties worth of Sixties girl-groups . The single Action, Attraction, Reaction simply upped the ante and third album How I Learned To Write Backwards indulged in a denser, layered Phil Spector-ian production than ever, both on the upbeat side and on the downbeat side .Aki Peltonen is a Finnish accordionist who fused folk, classical, jazz and post-rock elements on Radio Banana . Just like the bluesy and romantic second track , the 14-minute fourth piece, ostensibly a waltz, is a long series of melodic variations over a touching nocturnal leitmotiv.Los Angeles-based composer Akira Rabelais builds a bridge between classical romanticism and digital composition.Spellewauerynsherde and EN OF 031 manipulated found samples to produce eerie, almost gothic, atmospheres.New York s folk psychedelic quartet Akron Family debuted with Akron Family , an album of soundscape-oriented instrumental background for warbling surreal elegies and litanies of metaphysical loss. Their touching Before and Again, Part of Corey, Afford, I ll Be on the Water showed how the post-rock aesthetic could be applied to Sufjan Stevens-like folk-rock melody. The eight-minute Italy is an exercise in rubber-band aerodynamics, a lengthy slumber slowly accruing tension that is eventually released in a fit of grandeur. The split album Akron Family Angels Of Light continued the experiment of Angels Of Light s Sing Other People: Michael Gira backed by Akron Family.Mitchell s raw and basic southern-soul productions also propelled the erotic hymns of Al Green: Green s own Tired Of Being Alone and Mitchell s Let s Stay Together , Look What You Done To Me , I m Still In Love With You , as well as Green s own Take Me To The River .Even if he was not particularly successful on his own, Al Kooper was one of the most influential artists of the 1960s and one of the most accomplished keyboardists of all times.Al Kooper, a New York native, came to rock music via pop group Royal Teens, who had a minor hit with Shorts Shorts . After writing Gary Lewis hit This Diamond Ring , Kooper was called to play organ on Bob Dylan s Like A Rolling Stone and remained throughout Blonde On Blonde, continuously perfecting that atmospheric, dreamy, melodic style. Kooper formed Blues Projections and Blood Sweat Tears, both influential in their respective fields .Scottish folksinger Al Stewart began his career as an introverted minstrel of love songs on Bedsitter Images , particularly gifted in Swiss Cottage Manoeuvers and Clifton In The Rain. Love Chronicles , backed by the Fairport Convention, delivered the 18-minute autobiographic epic Love Chronicles that stands as his masterpiece. Zero She Flies was perhaps a stronger set of songs, thanks to the electrical Electric Los Angeles Sunset, the soulful Small Fruit Song and the historical narrative Manuscript. Orange completed his romantic phase and transitioned to the historical phase of Past Present And Future , a concept devoted to historical themes and Modern Times , that includes the title-track. Stewart s newly-found mass appeal peaked with Year Of The Cat, the chart hit from the album Janus , produced by Alan Parsons.24 Carrots returned to his passion for history coupling it with thick, almost symphonic arrangements. Famous Last Words and Between The Wars were collections of persoal and historical odes arranged for small chamber ensembles. To Whom It May Concern is an anthology of the period between 1966 and 1970.Alabama Thunderpussy is a band from Richmond that plays stoner-rock full of colossal riffs and screamed vocals, but at a faster tempo. One of the inspirations of Rise Again seems to be Motorhead, and that sets the band apart from the pack of stoner wolves . After the EP River City Revival , containing Dryspell, the album Constellation offered a more sophisticated version of their style and betrayed another key influence, Lynyrd Skynyrd .Staring At The Divine alternates between old and new, between Pantera-like sludge-fest Shapeshifter and rockers like Ol Unfaithful , between the dejavu riffs of Whore Adore and Esteem Fiend and the full-throttle charge of Motor-Ready .S.D.D.Vocalist Johnny Throckmorton, guitarists Asechiah Bogden and Erik Larson, drummer Bryan Cox and bassist Sam Krivanec constitute a formidable line-up that can take up much tougher challenges than the ordinary stoner sludge stereotypes.Alan Parsons worked as a sound engineer on the Beatles Abbey Road and the Pink Floyd s Dark Side Of the Moon, two of the most lushly arranged albums of all times. In 1976 he and keyboardist Eric Woolfson formed the Alan Parsons Project and released Tales of Mystery and Imagination , a concept album based on Edgar Allan Poe s stories.After the gothic theme of its debut album, the Project proceeded to deal with sci-fi on I Robot , whose instrumentals are among the most intriguing of Parsons career. Pyramid , dedicated to ancient Egypt, which still features some I Robot-style instrumentals , and Eve , which includes the instrumentals Lucifer and Secret Garden, were lame imitations of the early albums. The progress towards soft-rock and MOR balladry began with The Turn of a Friendly Card , their most electronic album yet, that contains the hits Games People Play and Time, and peaked with the awfully commercial Eye In The Sky , whose Eye In The Sky became Parsons best seller.Parsons decided to restore a bit of artistic prestige to his career with Stereotomy , whose lengthy ballads and futuristic instrumentals are probably Parsons most elaborate compositions, and Gaudi , which sounds more like a philosophical treaty than a pop album . Freudiana , Try Anything Once , The Time Machine are the later albums. A flood of anthologies covers Parsons career: The Best of The Alan Parsons Project , The Best of The Alan Parsons Project - vol. 2 , The Instrumental Works , Anthology , The Ultimate Collection , The Best of The Alan Parsons Project , The Definitive Collection , Gold Collection , Encore Collection , etc.Before turning to commercial pop music, Italian singer-songwriter Alan Sorrenti crafted the free-form psychedelic concept Aria , with the 20-minute title-track, in the vein of Tim Buckley, perhaps the most accomplished and innovative album of the Italian cantautori . He tried to repeat that miracle on Come un Vecchio Incensiere, that includes the 23-minute title-track, but, despite the veteran session-men who helped out, he could never quite muster the same magic. Lowercase is a guitar-drums duo from San Francisco that plays a weird hybrid of lo-fi pop, post-rock and slo-core, a veritable summa of 1990s alternative rock dialects. They debuted with three singles that established a credible record of heavy albeit minimal noise-rock: Sometimes I Feel Like A Vampire , Brass Tacks , and Cadence . The album All Destructive Urges expanded their sound towards more dramatic forms of expression. Occasionally, the duo enters a catchy melody, but As Your Mouth is pop that ends in terrified screaming, and Earth Minus One is pop depressed by suicidal agony. Their normal mood is one of extreme passion and emotion, like in the discordant, unstable Palace Vaccine, like the incendiary atmosphere of Ringbleeder, like the frantic bacchanal of Sometimes I Feel Like A Vampire. The nine-minute psychodrama Because I Can owes to Slint s convoluted harmonies as well as to Built To Spill s free-form counterpoint: the music ebbs and flows, punctuated by a depressed slow-motion raga-like guitar line and disrupted by sudden bursts of grief. As in the best tradition of progressive hardcore, the vocals, the riffs and the beats are artsy as well as demented.A bass player guests on Kill The Lights , but only She Takes Me and Stairways, the two most aggressive songs, benefit from the addition. She Takes Me is like a Rolling Stones song that focuses only on the terrifying groove and reduces the melody to a Nirvana-esque lament howl. Stairways is a two-minute instrumental that builds up a dissonant maelstrom, a sort of the Sonic Youth meet the King Crimson . The rest is a descent into a personal hell. The eight-minute Slightly Dazed is virtually a documentary of a man losing his mind, the guitar repeating an ominous pattern over a funereal beat until it becomes a death toll . Neurasthenia is even less musical, and, by making the most of the least, paints a harrowing picture of claustrophobia and desperation. The lengthy instrumental overture of the nine-minute Rare Anger returns to the Pink Floyd-ian suspense, with an additional dose of guitar noise and dejected melodies, and this time the screaming reaches an apocalyptic intensity. On the other hand, the heaviness of the 12-minute nightmare You re A King owes a lot to the Melvins.The single Imbedded on Ice heralds a more austere phase, that dawns with the hypnotic, droning tracks of The Going Away Present .After Lowercase dissolved, Imaad Wasif formed Alaska with another drummer, Russ Pollard of Sebadoh. Emotions is not all that different from Lowercase, but showcases the most intimate side of the singer, a sort of Jonathan Richman for the new century. Imaad Wasif s first solo album, Imaad Wasif , a calvary of gloomy slocore.The genre had already existed for at least ten years before it became a sensation , and it has at least three inventors . Meade Lux Lewis, who was a cab driver for a same Chicago taxi company recorded Honky Tonk Train Blues in 1927, but the song was released only two years later . Clarence Pinetop Smith lived only 25 years, but, the year before dying, moved to the same apartment with Ammons and Lewis and recorded the archetype: Pinetop s Boogie Woogie , the first recorded song that referred to the boogie woogie . It was announced by Albert Ammons Boogie Woogie Stomp , a cover of Pinetop s Boogie Woogie recorded with his Rhythm Kings, and by Pete Johnson, who teamed up with Kansas City s vocalist Big Joe Turner, the ultimate shouter , for Roll Em Pete , and then exploded after John Hammond assembled the piano trio of Albert Hammons, Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson at New York s Carnegie Hall in 1938. Albert Ammons was the most passionate of the trio, for example in the manic Boogie Woogie Stomp with his Rhythm Kings, Mecca Flat Blues , Shout for Joy and Bass Going Crazy .Shirley Collins was a pivotal figure in the English folk revival movement. Collins pure voice lent itself to interpret old English songs in a mesmerizing tone, as proven by her early albums Sweet England and False True Lovers , and countless EPs. Her third full-length album, Folk Roots New Routes , a collaboration with guitarist Davy Graham, marked a bold departure for the folk movement, as Collins embraced jazz. Accompanied by sister Dolly on piano , Shirley Collins returned to traditional material on The Sweet Primeroses , trying to capitalize on the boom of the folk revival. However, her creative peak was reached with The Power Of The True Love Knot , that featured Mike Heron and Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band, and with the concept album Anthems In Eden .After Love Death The Lady , whose songs sound like classical leaders, Collins put together the Albion Country Band by assembling 25 of the most respected folk-rock musicians of the time, and released No Roses .Shirley Collins closed her career with the relatively conventional collections of A Favourite Garland , Adieu To Old England , Amaranth . For As Many As Will was credited to both sisters. The Albion Band still recorded Rise Up Like The Sun and Lark Rise To Candleford and will continue to exist in the 1990s. Fountain Of Snow collects songs recorded for the Topic label. Within Sound is a 4-cd set compilation.Tristeza is a quintet from San Diego which debuted with the single Foreshadow Smoke Through Glass . The slow, gentle, minimalistic instrumentals of Spine And Sensory presented Tristeza s instrumental rock as new-age music s version of post-rock. The longest piece, When We Glow , is the most challenging of these guitar-driven jams that nod at bluegrass, jazz and surf music but never quite pick a genre.The single Macrame is almost bedroom-pop. The guitars weave their intense prayers by playing tiny variations of a simple theme over geometric and old-fashioned rhythms, and over the distant rumbling of the most humble keyboards in rock history. While the melodic tapestries of Building Peaks and Opiate Slopes are quite catchy, in general their art shuns spectacular moves and favors an intimate, domestic, colloquial style. The colorful scales and trance-inducing cycles of Respira, the tender and delicate tinkling of Shifty Drifty, the dreamy and effervescent resonance of I Am a Cheetah, the peaceful adagio of Chiaroscuro are more in the style of John Fahey than in the style of contemporary post-rock. For a few seconds Aurora Borealis sounds like an outtake from Neu s first album, but the hammering soon turns into pointillism. The fundamental unity of the album is also its only drawback, as the technique does not offer a broad range of variants.The remix album Mixed Signals and the EP These Walls were a poor appendix to the album. Album Leaf is Jimmy LaValle s side project. The music on An Orchestrated Rise to Fall is not too different from Tristeza s, it is merely less structured and less hummable . However, One Day I ll Be On Time , the five-song EP Seal Beach and In A Safe Place were mostly undistinguished. Album Leaf came into its own with Into the Blue Again , coloring LaValle s songs with an existential ambience that was reminiscent of Sigur Ros. Folloowing Jimmy LaValle s split with the band, the 7-song EP Espuma was Tristeza s least inspired work yet, a set of experiments that betray a lack of direction. Tristeza s A Colores was one of their most accomplished festivals of the unpredictable. An impressive number of instrumentals hint at catchy melodies only to implement them in the most awkwardly creative way and to rapidly dismantle them according to some masochistic aesthetic. Somehow the departure of Jimmy LaValle has created a new equilibrium within the band, with bassist Luis Hermosillo and drummer James Lehner providing shaky rhythmic foundations for the twisted flow of stylistic gestures by keyboardist Sean Ogilive and guitarists Christopher Sprague and Alison Ables. Tristeza è un quintetto proveniente da San Diego.Le compozioni jazzate lente e aggaziate di Spine And Sensory presentano il rock strumentale dei Tristeza come una versione new age del post-rock.Il singolo Macrame è quasi bedroom-pop. Le chitarre tessono le loro intense preghiere suonando piccole variazioni di un semplice tema su ritmiche geometriche e demodè, e sul distante brontolio delle più umili tastiere nella storia del rock. Le tappezzerie melodiche di Building Peaks e Opiate Slopes sono alquanto orechiabili, ma in generale la loro arte evita mosse spettacolari a favore di uno stile più intimo, domestico e colloquiale. Le scale coloratissime e i cicli ipnotici di Respira, il tintinnio tenero e delicato di Shifty Drifty, la risonanza onirica ed effervescente di I Am a Cheetah, l adagio pacifico di Chiaroscuro rimandano più allo stile di John Fahey che a quello del moderno post-rock. Raramente i Tristeza sono cervellotici, e, qnche quando lo sono , riescono ad evitare i contrappunti aspri e discordanti del progressive-rock.L unità fondamentale dell album è anche il suo unico svantaggio, dato che la tecnica non offre una vasta scelta di varianti.Album Leaf è il progetto parallelo di Jimmy LaValle. La musica su An Orchestrated Rise to Fall non è molto lontana da quella dei Tristeza, è solo meno strutturato e meno canticchiabile : fatta con tastiere, chitarre e rumori ambientali, rimanda ai The Alchemysts are a British power-trio led by guitarist Paul Simmons and formed in 1990.Over and Out leans too much towards hard-rock , although a few numbers are still madness in music . Zero Zen continued that progression towards hard-rock with jams that were acrobatic intermezzos for riff-heavy songs rather than psychedelic trips. Simeon The Alchemysts documents a 1998 collaboration between Alchemysts and Simeon Coxe of the Silver Apples, particularly the 15-minute Morning Comes.Alec Empire was born in 1972 in West Berlin. Empire formed a punk band called Die Kinder, then started listening to classical music and finally began to experiment with guitar and electronics. After German reunification, the stereotypical teenage rebel found relief in the raves of East Berlin s underground scene, far removed from West Germany s commercial rave scene.Atari Teenage Riot was started in 1992 when Carl Crack , Alec Empire and Hanin Elias , decided to revolt against the state of the techno scene and launch a creative bybrid of industrial, metal and electronica, which they defined digital hardcore . Their singles and EPs were as uncompromising and ultra-aggresive as their manifestos: Hetzjagd AufNazis , Not Your Business , which includes the epic riff of Atari Teenage Riot, the childish spasm of Not Your Business , the metal-industrial fit of Into The Death, and Raverbashing, Kids R United , with the nihilistic sermons Kids Are United and Deutschland , the singles Raverbashing and the propulsive, booming techno of Speed , replete with male rap, girlish female counterpoint and male choir, were mostly boycotted by labels, stores, radio stations. For those who had missed the singles, the lyrics on their first album, Delete Yourself , sounded like they were coming straight out of 1977 punk-rock. The album s sound, a very noisy and chaotic mix of guitar samples, distorted breakbeats, 909, manga samples and shouting, and its political overtones , virtually reinvented the mission of dance music in the wake of the triumph of western-style capitalistic values. The pounding, unrelenting, visceral call to arms of Start The Riot and the epileptic orgy of title-track, accompanied by a generous selection of the previous singles, terrorized discos and radio stations around Germany. Empire s solo career, in the meantime, was much more prolific, including: the single Tripmen , the EPs Yobot , SuEcide , with Terror Worldwide, Orgasm Addict and the anthemic SuEcide, the EP SuEcide Pt 2 , the singles Das Duell and Bass Terror , the EPs Limited Edition 1 and Limited Edition 2 , the EP Pulse Code , etc. These early recordings, which will be partially compiled on Limited Editions 1990-94 , show a techno artist still searching for his mission, but Generation Star Wars , the first proper Alec Empire album, displayed an angry young man of techno and hip hop intent on deconstructing the genres through a manic use of distorted breakbeats. The deluge continued with the EPs Berlin Sky , The Wipe Out , with Two Steps Beyond The Terror, Jaguar , with The Past says and Interplanetary Disco Rhythm, and Squeeze The Trigger , with Squeeze The Trigger. The glacial Low On Ice , which included the Kraftwerk-ian single 22:24, was more in the vein of Brian Eno, Aphex Twin and Bill Laswell . Les Etoiles Des Filles Mortes , a fully electronic work and possibly his masterpiece, showed the influence of electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and veered towards gothic ambient music. But Empire changed course again with Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5 , and its slower, relaxed, self-indulging dance music, which employs slightly out-of-time beats to disorient the listener . That was about the same time when Alec Empire put out his album The Destroyer , that recycles material from the EPs The Destroyer , The Destroyer Pt 2 and Death , a milestone in the extreme jungle sound known as drill and bass . Part creative rhythms and part political ego, the album created a personality cult of sort for the angry young man of techno. We All Die and The Peak ripping apart the tender flesh of dance music with the shocking and blind hatred of a terrorist.Then ATR released the EP with Sick To Death , an inferior work but boasting the supersonic title-track, and their second album, The Future of War . Not much had changed, as the disc was still dominated by songs like The Future of War, Heatwave, Fuck All and P.R.E.S.S., i.e. wild, hard-driving punk-rock bacchanals, the rhythm is devastatingly loud and frantic, Elias still screams like Exene Cervenka on speed and the others concoct ferocious choirs. Outside the canon, the heavily distorted Death Star and, above all, the hip-hop hurricane Destroy 2000 Years Of Culture, with heavy-metal riffing and loud drumming, half Public Enemy and half Run DMC, prove that Empire does not rely on only one trick. If the result has less impact than the debut, it is only because the debut also included so many of the early singles. The best of their repertory was then compiled on Burn, Berlin, Burn , which introduced a much wider audience to the band s criminal career. In June of 1997, ATR picked up their fourth member, Nic Endo, a young Japanese-American who specializes in noises.In the meantime, Empire also released We Punk Einheit , credited to the Nintendo Teenage Robots and entirely composed from samples of videogame music. The Geist of Alec Empire is a three-disc set collecting material from the five LPs recorded for Mille Plateaux between 1990 and 1996. Alec Empire and Techno Animal s Kevin Martin have recorded together The Curse of the Golden Vampire , a nightmarish experiment in free-jazz electronica. The No Attitude returns Empire to his middleground, the slower, atmospheric variations on Atari s music.Alec Empire s Miss Black America does not display the violence of Atari Teenage Riot or The Destroyer.On her first solo, In Flames , singer Hanin Elias sets the angry young woman s lyrics of Girl Serial Killer and In Flames to a futuristic soundscape, sounding like a Bjork who joined a guerrilla movement. Rage is a single recorded by Atari Teenage Riot with Tom Morello on guitar. Alec Empire s Intelligence And Sacrifice is a double album that is divided in a first half of dense, intense, angry, desperate, violent techno-hardcore music, reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails , and a second half of experimental soundscapes . Redefine the Enemy collects rarities. Hanin Elias first solo album, No Games No Fun , is old-fashioned disco-punk bordering on synth-pop. Live CBGB s NYC 1998 documents a performance with Merzbow. Alec Empire s Futurist harks back to the age of aggro and industrial metal with little imagination.As an adult, Alejandro Escovedo, who had played punk-rock with the Nuns, country-rock with Rank And File , and roots-rock with the True Believers became one of the most solemn voices of his generation.The repertory of the Tall Dwarfs, almost entirely recorded at vocalist Chris Knox s house, excels at skewed, drum-less melodies. The EPs, Three Songs and Louis Likes His Daily Dip , the mini-album Canned Music and the EP Slugbucket Hairybreath Monster specialize in kaleidoscopic collages of ideas that rarely coalesce into a regular song but often waste enough cleverness worth an entire career. Throw A Sickie , their first album, was still a madhouse of improbable pop music, but subsequent albums adopted a more traditional format. Throughout the ages of hard-rock, progressive-rock, punk-rock and the new wave, Alex Chilton has been the prophet of power-pop, of unadulterated melody, of four-part vocal harmonies, of jingle-jangle guitars, of hard-rock riffs, and of crystal-clear production.Born in Tennessee, Alex Chilton was the guitarist and vocalist for the Box Tops, a Memphis-based band. Their elegant variant of blue-eyed soul yielded the hit The Letter , written by Wayne Carson Thompson, when Chilton was only 17 years old. After a few more hits in that vein , and a last album, Dimensions , featuring Chilton s first compositions, the Box Tops disbanded, and in 1970 Chilton joined Chris Bell s Big Star, another Memphis band, that played ebullient, straightforward pop music. 1 Record is very much the product of Bell s passion for the catchy refrains and engulfing choruses of Mersey-beat, although the band used jingle-jangling guitars a la Byrds .After Bell left the group, Chilton became the undisputed leader. Chilton s style is different from Bell s: Chilton s pop relies on a philosophy of life, on a vision, on psychological depth, whereas Bell was all sound for the sake of sound. Third , recorded in 1974 but released only four years later, and reissued with additional material as Sister Lovers , was harder and bleaker . The material he had recorded was collected on I Am The Cosmos , and shows a far superior songwriter than Chilton. Big Star broke up in 1975 and Chilton, relocated to New York, began a solo career with the EP Singer Not The Song , the single Bangkok and the album Bach s Bottom , a 1975 session that includes part of the EP. The problem is that there was a reason if he had been forgotten: he was not the most original or prolific of composers. Chilton is a late-night entertainer in the tradition of saloons and road-houses, not a singer-songwriter in the tradition of the Greenwich Village.In fact, the following decade produced very little.Lost Decade is a bad anthology. A Man Called Destruction has an unusual good dose of original.1970 collects the recordings that Chilton prepared for his first solo album, before he joined Big Star.Loose Shoes And Tight Pussy , reissued as Set , is another dreadful set of covers. Story is an anthology. Big Star returned with their first studio album in 27 years, In Space . The new line-up randomly sample the pop landscape of the early 1970s with Dony, Turn My Back on the Sun and Hung Up With Summer.The English blues of the 50s was a strange brew of instrumental jazz and Chicago style rhythm and blues.In 1954, two musicians from Barber s orchestra, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, opened up a club in Soho - The Barrelhouse - that for a while served as the home base for the musicians of that community. In 1957, following the failure of their project, they went back to Barber s orchestra, that in the mean time was roaming Britain in the company of American bluesmen imported as the need arose. In 1961 the same duo formed an electric band, Blues Incorporated, with a young drummer - Charlie Watts.The importance of Blues Incorporated was enormous. The band of Korner and Davies was the vehicle by which the blues could express itself, mature, develop a more sophisticated audience, find distribution channels, and spread its message. Within the ranks of the band were gathered just about all the fine musicians of the time: terrific bandleaders such as John Baldry and Graham Bond, future jazz-rock giants such as John Surman and John McLaughlin, future stars of the Merseybeat such as Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richard, Eric Burdon, Paul Jones, future leaders of progressive-rock such as Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Dick Heckstall-Smith.That great tree yielded many branches. Graham Bond, for instance, a jazz sax player who had switched to the organ for Korner , in 1963 formed the Organization with Bruce, Baker and sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith . The Organization was the first ensemble to fuse jazz and rhythm and blues, and to open the path for English jazz-rock, as shown in Solid Bond , recorded in 1963 with McLaughlin at the guitar, The Sound Of The Organization , the first album with the mellotron, and There s A Bond Between Us , which includes Walkin In The Park.In 1962 Davies became the leader the All Stars, who showcased the instrumental Country Line Special, a debut for Nicky Hopkins at the keyboard and Jeff Beck at the guitar. After the death of Davies , the lead shifted to John Baldry who took on Elton John, Rod Stewart, and Brian Auger.Korner went on to form several progressive-rock bands in the 70s.Mali s blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure debuted at 37 with Farka and became a star when he was almost 50 with Ali Farka Toure , a collection of originals, including the lengthy Amandrai, and African Blues . He carved a niche in the territory of Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder with The River , that adds saxophone and fiddle and scavenges the ancient repertory of Mali , The Source , which abandoned the solo format for a real band and guest stars, Talking Timbuktu , a collaboration with Cooder, the traditional Radio Mali , and Niafunke .Red And Green collects two rare recordings.Toure died in 2006.Alice Cooper became the first star of horror-shock rock, relying on the most truculent and ridiculous show of the era. But Cooper had been a disciple of Frank Zappa s satirical operettas, mainly on Pretties For You , and later became, first and foremost, a terrific craftman of teenage anthems in the tradition of Chuck Berry. Epically defiant, Under My Wheels and School s Out represent the authentic, subversive spirit of rock n roll, while albums such as Love It To Death continued to recycle and borrow themes from the vaudeville, Broadway showtunes, horror movies, and the Grand Guignol. Alio Die assembles electronic pieces that are inspired by the slow, soothing ambient melodies of Brian Eno s Music for Airports and by early Harold Budd: Sit Tibi Terra Levis , the angelic Under an Holy Ritual , with Reflections of A Dawn, The Door of Possibilities , The Flight of Real Image , and Password for Entheogenic Experience , perhaps the culmination of the early phase, a stately 64-minute drone-based composition. The Hidden Spring collects rarities. Collaborations include Suspended Feathers , with Vidna Obmana, Fissures with Robert Rich, the mini-album Descendre Cinq Lacs au Travers d une Voile with Yannick Dauby, Healing Herb s Spirit with Antonio Testa, A Tapestry for Sorceres and Mesmeric Revelation with Raffaele Serra , Echo Passage with Vidna Obmana, Ad Infinitum and Mother Sunrise with Opium , Aquam Metallicam with Nick Parkin, Apsaras with Amelia Cuni, a mediocre incursion in Indian music, etc. Le Stanze della Trascendenza Incantamento Leaves Net Son-Dha is the duo of Alio Die and Red Sector A .Expanding Horizon is a double-disc collaboration between Alio Die and Mathias Grassow .The prolific Italian artist has also released: the elegant Il Tempo Magico di Saturnia Pavonia , Khen Introduce Silence , built around the processed sounds of Khen , Sunja , a collaboration with Tommaso Zeit Cimo in two lenghty tracks , the biological concept Sleep of Seeds , a collaboration with Saffron Wood, Sol Niger , originally recorded in 2001.Angel s Fly Souvenir is a collaboration with multimedia artist Francesco Paladino and one of Alio Die s most sophisticated productions. Il Sogno di un Piano Veneziano a Parigi was a collaboration with Festina Lente on prepared piano. Aqua Planing is a collaboration with German sound sculptor Werner Durand on self-made wind instruments.Alison Goldfrapp is a gothic, decadent, chanteuse that sings cryptic lyrics in the chilling tone of an agonizing lover over Will Gregory s subtle, gentle, noir arrangements of electronic and acoustic instruments. There is something stately about her dejected crooning in the singles Lovely Head , superbly contrasting nostalgic whistling and futuristic synths, and Utopia , as if she was fighting the forces of human destiny, not just describing her private sorrow. The similarities with the greatest metaphysical chanteuse of all times, Nico, stop here, as the singer s vocal range is amazingly broad , while Gregory s scores are inspired by Angelo Badalamenti, Barry Adamson, horror-film soundtracks, classical music, electronica Squarepusher s drum n bass and Portishead s trip-hop. The album Felt Mountain is simultaneously less creepy and more elegant, sexier and slower. Human and Deer Stop are the new gems, but for true magic one has to check the surreal fairy-tale atmospheres of the instrumental Oompa Radar and the closing Horse Tears. Very little can be salvaged from Black Cherry .Supernature is not as awful as its predecessor but it is even more derivative of synth-pop and disco-music of the early 1980s.Alkaline Trio, a Chicago trio formed by vocalist and guitarist Matt Skiba, debuted with the catchy emo-pop of the singles Sundials and For Your Lungs Only , and of the entire razor-sharp album Goddamnit . Maybe I ll Catch Fire adds Fuck You Aurora and Maybe I ll Catch Fire to their punk canon, but the trio failed to stand up to their debut. The Alkaline Trio is an anthology of their singles. From Here to Infirmary and Good Mourning were major disappointments.The split Alkaline Trio and One Man Army is not exactly state of the art punk-rock. Crimson boasts a more mainstream sound. The Poison and Mercy Me mark a sort of punk-pop maturity, but the rest of the album is unbearable to anyone who has spent 29 years listening to punk-rock. Falcon, that debuted with Unicornography , was a supergroup made of Brendan Kelly of the Lawrence Arms, Dan Andriano , Tod Mohney and Neil Hennessy .All Night Radio are the project of Beachwood Sparks Dave Scher and Jimi Hey . Spirit Stereo Frequency is a sort of tribute to the psychedelic civilization viewed through the eyes of the 21st century. The repertory runs the gamut from baroque psychedelic pop to space-folk a la Byrds to languid Pink Floyd-ian ballads . The closing track All Night Radio is their personal anthem, a sonic tornado that recycles a broad range of elements from the psychedelic age. Now that the Flaming Lips have become mainstream, All Night Radio can restore credibility to the format of the ever-mutating psychedelic song. Allan Holdworth, one of the great British guitar virtuosos, has taken an oblique path in which he has collaborated with the giants of the Canturbury school, with the monsters of Heavy Metal, and with the visionaries of jazz-rock. It was not this experimentation which defines him, but rather his unique, fluid, free-form style, often using abstruse scales, in which his notes sometimes fall like like a cloudburst. His first major assignment came when, while still a member of the Blue Mink, Holdsworth played the distorted riff on Donovan s Hurdy Gurdy Man . His career began in Igginbottom, where he released Wrench in Sunship with leader Alan Gowen, and later with Nucleus, Soft Machine and U.K. In 1975 he joined Tony Williams Lifetime, and shocked the jazz world with his incendiary guitar work on Believe It .O.U.His technique continued to evolve, culminating in in a spectacular series of records for small ensemble which continue the tour de force of soloist Jeff Beck. Holdsworth s fusion matured with Metal Faticue , particularly with Devil Take The Hindmost and Metal Fatigue, even if those records were marred by their vocal parts.The mini-album Road Games marked a return to a stronger sound, but the material was weak and erratic. Atavachron brought mixed news. The bad news is that Holdsworth embraced an electronic guitar-like instrument called synthaxe , which allows him to produce symphonic sounds but also overloads the arrangements .That format was improved on the six pieces of Sand and reached a baroque sort of peak on Secrets , whose subtle and sophisticated compositions are soothing the way soft jazz used to be without ever sounding moronic. The guitarist mostly abandoned the synthaxed and returned to a rocking sound with Wardenclyffe Tower . Subsequent albums Hard Hat Area , None Too Soon , with the title-track and Gordon Beck on piano, Heavy Machinery , a trio with Anders Johansson and Jens Johansson, The Sixteen Men Of Tain , with Above And Below, and Flat Tire-Music For A Non-Existent Movie , continued to display his skills and a unique vision of genre decomposition. All Night Wrong was Holdsworth s first live album. Against the Clock is a career retrospective.Allen Toussaint, pianista leggero e sincopato, alla fine degli anni 50 chiuse la stagione del sound duro e veemente, debuttando con l album strumentale The Wild Sounds of New Orleans , ed apri quella del nuovo soffice New Orleans sound , popolarizzandolo attraverso gli hit dei suoi cantanti: Ooh Poo Pah Doo di Jessie Hill, Mother In-law di Ernie K-Doe, I Like It Like That e Land of a Thousand Dances di Chris Kenner, I Know di Barbara George, It Will Stand degli Showmen, Whipped Cream di Herb Alpert, Ruler of My Heart di Irma Thomas, Ya Ya e Ride Your Pony di Lee Dorsey, il piu dotato, Tell It Like It This di Aaron Neville. Le sue canzoni costituiscono un repertorio a cui hanno attinto decine di complessi rock, da Fortune Teller a Southern Nights , da Brickyard Blues a Night People , i capolavori della maturita . After toying with funk music on Lee Dorsey s Yes We Can , which Toussaint almost entirely composed and arranged, he finally released a solo album in the vein of the singer-songwriter, Toussaint , that reprised several of his old compositions. Life Love And Faith and especially Southern Nights refined Toussaint s light touch to blues, boogie, funk and soul music.Allerseelen, the project launched in 1989 by Austrian exoteric writer Gerhard Kadmon, began in a style close to industrial music with Cruor , an anthology of recordings from 1989-1993, and Gotos Kalanda , that collects recordings from 1992-1994.Neuschwabenland continued to streamline the compositions but also introduced military beats.Abenteuerliches Herz and Flamme capitalize on all those experiments to concoct sophisticated post-industrial ballads. Archaische Arbeiten and Heimliche Welt are compilations.Allied Vision debuted with a sound akin to :Wumpscut: on Unburied . Cup of Sorrow, Demon Sect, Unforgiven and All the Dead compose Storm s abrasive rosary, but they are hardly revolutionary in stylistic terms. Increasing the dose of violence, Man Must Be Overcome tried to establish a more personal identity.Canadian composer Allison Cameron specializes in chamber music, some of which was collected on Raw Sangudo . There is something threatening, sinister and macabre about Cameron s compositions for unusual ensembles. The feeling in The Chamber of Statues is almost gothic: sparse piano notes, a haunting clarinet theme, random percussion beats. Raw Sangudo , with its melodic fragments that buzz like insects , highlights the intrinsic frenzy and manic tension of her compositional style. Runa s spacey anguish , that transfers the long languid droning of the Part Ligeti school to a slightly dissonant and very sleepy context, and the distorted beauty of Gibbons Moon s baroque counterpoint are virtual primers in the art of emphasizing the colors while maintaining a delicate balance of tones and rhythms. The high point is A Blank Sheet Of Metal , 26 minutes of claustrophobic kammerspiel haunted by the ghosts of Edgar Varese and Pierre Boulez. Piano, organ, synthesizer, tuba and bass roam the soundscape in an inscrutable manner, while adding a dramatic quality to the proceedings.Each new listening brings forth new elements of relish from this music of infinite possibilities and interpretations.The Allman Brothers, featuring two lead guitars , were the first major band since the Grateful Dead for whom the live performance was more relevant than the studio album. Their debut album, The Allman Brothers Band , introduced a form of loose, guitar-intensive blues-rock ballad, a southern version of the Band s roots-rock, but it was the live albums, Live At Fillmore East and Eat A Peach , that transformed those ballads into epic sonic excursions. Almamegretta coined a new form of world-music with an ambitious encyclopedic revision of traditional codes that bridged the ancient folk tradition of Napoli , electronic dance music, dub production techniques and Middle-Eastern scales. The EP Figli di Annibale and debut album Animamigrante enhanced the group s melody with arrangements that borrowed elements of funk, reggae, pop sprayed them all with atmospheric electronics. After Fattall , an awful collection of rarities, the group found a magic balance of all those elements on Sanacore , a work that was more electronic and drenched in the sound of dub music.Alog is the Norwegian duo of Espen Sommer Eide and Dag-Are Haugan.Duck-Rabbit further refined Alog s electroacoustic pop muzak, although it lost a bit of the debut s gentle emotional drift. Miniatures is a diligent retelling of their aesthetics with no particular insight into how it could evolve.Oak Or Rock Catch That Totem collects other people s music remixed revisited by Alog.Aloha hail from Cleveland and debuted with the EP The Great Communicators , five brief and intriguing blasts of jazzcore. The album That s Your Fire successfully merged progressive-rock, free-jazz, minimalism and post-rock in intricate pieces such as A Hundred Stories and Saint Lorraine. Tony Cavallario on vocals and guitar, Matthew Gengler on bass, Cale Parks on drums, Eric Koltnow on vibraphone and piano display the technical prowess of a fusion combo and the imagination of a Canterbury outfit.Sugar is better structured although a little less adventurous. They See Rocks, Let Your Head Hang Low, It Won t Be Long are still impeccable performances but tend to reward the musicians, not the audience. Aloha is moving from emocore to progressive-rock, increasing the doses of jazz , alienating the rhythm and indulging in subtle counterpoint. Some Echoes is a more structured work that distances itself from the previous album s jazz leanings.Alquimia is a Mexican female multi-instrumentalist and vocalist with a background in electronic and classical music.Her recordings are: Coatlicue , Wings of Perception , Dead Tongues with Jose Luis Fernandez Ledesma, Move Resonate with Roedelius, A Separate Reality , Underwater with Zinkl. The best moments on Dead Tongues are probably the four instrumental pieces titled Road To Santiago, particularly the first one, Night, a nocturnal scene in which a saxophone mourns over static piano pattern, and the fourth one , a circus-like bacchanal propelled by a demented disco beat.Angaelic Voices Alternative TV was one of the bands that expanded punk-rock s vocabulary with keyboards and experimental touches. Mark Perry, a radio disc jockey and the editor of one of the first punk fanzines, Sniffin Glue , started the band in March 1977 with Alex Ferguson on guitar, Micky Smith on bass, John Towe on drums. The singles Love Lies Limp , Knights of the Future Alternatives to Normal Eating and How Much Longer You Bastard heralded a new era for British rock music, an era that would soon revel in the modernist sounds of XTC and Magazine. The Image Has Cracked is a milestone of that era, as are the singles Life After Life Life After Dub , Life Love Lies Limp and Action Time Vision Another Coke . Only Perry and the bassist were left on the album Vibing Up the Senile Man , a much more experimental album at the border between free-jazz and electronica, while the market also received a couple of live albums and a bootleg or two.Perry also released a solo album, Snoppy TUrns and released records under the names Good Missionaries and Here And Now. The original line-up reformed for the album Strange Kicks and the singles The Ancient Rebels Dub in Bed and Communicate Obsessed . Perry used different line-ups for the album Peep Show and the EP Sol . Splitting in 2 is an anthology of material from the first album and the singles. Alex Fergusson joined Psychic Tv and later started a solo career devoted to a baroque and psychedelic pop sound with Perverse Ballads .Alternative TV resurrected for the single Purpose In My Life Company Of Lies and the album My Life As A Child Star , mostly in the vein of 1970s pub-rock. Yet another incarnation of the band would convert to trip-hop with Punk Life .Chicago-based post-rock act Aluminum Group, formed by brothers Frank and John Navin, debuted with a slab of easy-listening muzak and Sixties bubblegum, Wonderboy Plus , but derailed that genre with electronic and acoustic arrangements on Plano , occasionally bordering on Pink Floyd-ian languor and sometimes achieving real melodrama . The band became even more intellectual on Pedals , produced by Jim O Rourke and virtually a spoof of Burt Bacharach s sophisticated orchestral pop. Stalwarts of simplicity in the age of post-rock complexity, the Aluminum Group harks back to the pre-rock years and attempt to recreate the feeling of safety, security and mindless happiness of those years.For better and for worse, More Happyness is a senseless repetition of the senseless pop ballads of the previous albums. Featuring many of Chicago s post-rock intellectuals , it embellishes its crooning litanies with synths and horns that basically photocopy the old easy-listening orchestras.Alva Noto is the code for Carsten Nicolai s recordings. His audio installations employ music of a special kind, music which is not meant to be music in the traditional sense of the word.Carsten was the instigator behind the audio journal 20 to 2000 : a series of CDs designed by a team of design artist and performed by artists of Carsten choice to provide a snapshot of the state of the art at the end of the millennium, including his own contribution, the EP Time..dot . His early musical recordings include Spin , Mikro Makro , which is a collaboration with Mika Vainio, and the flexidisc track Polyfoto . His mature season began with Kerne and peaked with the EP Empty Garden and the album Prototypes . The music employs techniques as diverse as minimalistic repetition, a musical form of abstract painting, musical pointillism, industrial music , quantum mechanics , glitch music and dissonant electronic music . Wohltemperiert is another collaboration with Pansonic. Transform is another demonstration of his audio construction techniques, a sort of summary of his entire career so far, from deconstruction of techno to LaMonte Young-ian wandering ambient drones . The EP Telefunken is an attempt to replicate his installations by plugging the stereo into the tv set and letting the sounds create the images. The limited-edition EP Uniform documents a fragment of a three-hour collaborative exhibition by Nicolai and Robin Rimbaud in San Francisco. Carsten Nicolai returned to his Noto moniker for the double EP Endless Loop . The EPs Transall Cycle Part One: Transrapid , Transall Cycle Part Two: Transvision and Transall Cycle Part Three: Transspray form a trilogy of music for the age of digital globalization, restless and chaotic. The marriage of Alva Noto s alien electronic soundscapes and Ryuichi Sakamoto s ambient piano vignettes yielded the mediocre Vrioon , Insen and Revep . For collected recordings of the 200s dedicated to various composers.American-born composer Alvin Curran , a student of Elliott Carter , relocated to Rome in 1964. In 1966, Curran and two other American expats, Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, founded the collective Musica Elettronica Viva, an agit-prop avantgarde and improvising group. On his own, Curran crafted intensely-spiritual works that mixed natural sounds, live electronics, improvised voice and keyboard patterns: Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico , his most lyrical collage, scored for for tape, voice, flugelhorn, synthesizer and tape of natural sounds ; Fiori Chiari Fiori Scuri for or ocarina, voice, piano, toy piano, synthesizer, and tape; Libri D armonia for conch shell, zither, voice, piano, synthi, and tape; and especially Canti Illuminati , a vast sonic montage based on the human voice. Alvin Lucier has been active since 1962 in the field of concrete music. He has introduced new paradigms to the field, by employing bold and radical methods to process unusual sources of sound and to perform scores in ever more unconventional manners. Works such as Music For Solo Performer , that used the performer s brainwaves, Clocker , for performer with galvanic skin response sensor; I Am Sitting In A Room , that used the room s background noise, and Music On A Long Thin Wire , that used the vibrations of a metallic wire, basically merged research in ambient, minimalist and concrete music, and found a common meaning behind the teachings of John Cage, LaMonte Young and Pierre Schaeffer. Amazing Blondel were formed by John David Gladwin and Terry Wincott to play the uninspired soft rock of Amazing Blondel . Somehow the duo came up with a better idea, teamed up with guitarist Edward Baird and recorded Evensong , a folk album that harked back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Madrigals and ballads performed on period instruments became their specialty and the trio s creative ideas led to the concept album Fantasia Lindum , which belongs more to progressive-rock than to folk-rock.Gladwin left and the surviving duo veered towards Steeleye Span s hard-folk with Blondel , entirely composed by Baird, Mulgrave Street , Inspiration , Bad Dreams . The band reunited 21 years later for Restoration .Arto Lindsay s atonal guitar and Ikue Mori s tribal drumming gave DNA the quality of utter nausea.The adult career of former DNA guitarist Arto Lindsay focused on a convoluted form of Latin-funk-jazz fusion. Ambitious Lovers, the combo he formed with Swiss keyboardist Peter Scherer, penned works such as Envy and the formally impeccable Greed that merged Brazialian music, disco-music and avantgarde. The ballet music for Pretty Ugly marked the zenith of this phase, which soon evolved in a pop phase, with Lindsay crooning his Latin roots in the jungle of orchestral arrangements, as on Lust . Lindsay ended up wedding the appeal of abrasive, intellectual noise and the appeal of sensual, languid Brazilian music on albums such as Prize , which were post-rock s version of world-music.The Amboy Dukes were formed in Chicago by guitar prodigy Ted Nugent, a native of Detroit and already the former leader of two bands, the first begun when he was only twelve. Their historic anthem, a version of Baby Please Don t Go, from The Amboy Dukes , is a passionate blues screamed against a wall of unrelenting rhythm and guitar dissonance, played at supersonic speed. Feedback, distortion and electronic sound effects are also the main ingredients of Journey To The Center Of The Mind and Dr. In the earlier albums, including Migration , Nugent s destructive emphasis is restrained by Steve Farmer s composing talent, managing to release its full fury on very few occasions, namely in the instrumental Migration and in Prodigal Man. With Marriage Of The Rocks Nugent prevails as the absolute boss of the group, directing the production towards the eclectic suite, such as The Inexhaustible Quest For The Cosmic Cabbage, a surf parody Bartok s second quartet atonal jazz heavy strumming by Nugent, in accordance with a progressive rock that is is rowdy, long winded, exhibitionist and violently stirred. In 1971 they recorded a twenty minute pyrotechnical live version of Prodigal Man on Survival Of The Fittest, perhaps their masterpiece. A new lineup produced the album Call Of The Wild , featuring wild hard rock instrumentals, notably Renegade. In the 1975 Nugent began a prolific solo career. The monster guitarist archetype, the champion of Hendrix s orphaned style, situated at the crossroad between psychedelic rock and heavy metal, Nugent continued the excesses of the Amboy Dukes last albums, in the same epic but much too rambling style. Fame reached him through his excessive histrionics, that led him to boast about his wild hunger for sex and violence, and compelled him to engage in stage duels with colleagues of the caliber of Wayne Kramer and Frank Marino, as documented in Double Live Gonzo .American Music Club stood apart in the late 1980s as one of the groups that transformed roots-rock into an intimate, almost transcendental experience. Mark Eitzel s laconic pessimism, halfway between Gram Parsons s calm despair, Nick Drake s funereal lament, and Tim Buckley s dreamy agony, acted as the center of mass for the atmospheric psychodramas of Engine . The dialectics between instruments and vocals punctuated the otherwise evanescent melodies of Big Night, At My Mercy, Outside This Bar, in a manner that was also reminiscent of Van Morrison. Eitzel s stream of consciousness reached for a visceral tension on California , a work that was both more austere and more introverted. It was also a vocal tour de force of Eitzel, who followed his stories modulating both anger and romance, impersonating both the crooner and the shouter. The bleak and lyrical United Kingdom seemed to complete Eitzel s spiritual self-flagellation, besides absorbing more of the jazz, soul and gospel eloquence for tracks as adventurous as The Hula Maiden and Heaven Of Your Hands. The nightmare relented on Everclear , the album that marked a transition from the closed landscape of the first phase to the open landscape of the second phase. Less intense but more humane, only a couple of moments recalled past agonies, but the playing was more accomplished and the arrangements more articulate. The more complex, dense and atmospheric sound Mercury , which features The Hopes And Dreams of Heaven s 10,000 Whores, and the sophisticated soul-pop of San Francisco , capitalized on Eitzel s ability to merge elegant melancholy and roaring passion. Formed in the early 1990s in Providence , Space Heater was an odd ensemble of two bass players and a percussionist, that eventually expanded to a small chamber ensemble and changed name to Amoebic Ensemble. Led by accordionist and composer Alec Redfearn, and featuring trumpet player Shawn Wallace, Jonathan Thomas on cans and kitchenware, Matthew Everett on bouzouki and mandolin, Laura Gulley on violin, Steve Jobe on bassons, Paige Van Antwerp on drums, they recorded Limbic Rage , that contains brief surreal vignettes such as Tertullian Waltz and Waxing Neuralgic , and Amoebiasis , again at the border between progressive-rock and cartoon music. Jonathan Thomas has released Septimania , featuring Rick Brown , Chris Nelson and former Amoebic Ensemble members. The album contains divinely cartoonish kitchenware novelties such as Don t Worry About Rupture and Bali Hoo, as well as the organ-driven proto-surf music of In Praise Of Crabgrass, the demented fanfare of Here Come The Cool Jerks and the cosmic free-jazz of Visitors 1 Univers 0. The Pianosaurus used to do something similar with toy instruments, but Thomas could turn even your kitchen utensils into an orchestra.Amon Duul II were perhaps the most teutonic among the great German masters of the 1970s.They soon abandoned the most blasphemous and provocative stances, and their sound more clearly revealed the influence of Californian acid-rock.Amon Duul 0 were a free-jazz trio, formed in 1966 in Munich by guitarist and violinist Chris Karrer, by bassist Lothar Meid and by drummer Christian Burchard . Amon Duul were instead the musical expression of a commune that included both artists and political activists, and in particular Karrer. The early Amon Duul were perhaps the most politicized group of Germany s 1968 . A 48-hour session, improvised towards the end of the year, yielded enough material for three albums: Psychedelic Underground , reissued as This Is, Collapsing and Disaster , besides the bootleg Experimente. Paradieswaerts , instead, comprises only three pieces and sounds like the work of another band, so different is its paradisiac sound from the anarchic mess of the other albums. Towards the end of 1968, Karrer decided to leave the commune and start a rock band.For Amon Duul II s debut album, Phallus Dei , the line-up increased to seven or eight units, absorbing bassist Dave Anderson and drummer Dieter Serfas. The album, mostly instrumental, set a new standard for black music, and remains one of the most infernal bacchanals in the annals of rock music. Phallus Dei, a 20-minute suite, begins with muffled electronic sounds and Stockhausen-like dissonances, while the vocalist rattles in an overdose trip. A killer violin riff, that seems to come out of a square dance, resumes the bacchanal that soon delves into an orgy of African percussions. Finally the wild, chaotic sabbah coalesces in a solemn march, and the voice screams terrible formulas that echo in the caverns of hell. The violin plays the role of a call from hell, that leads the crowd of the damned towards the eternal fire. The album s black mass is rounded up on the other side by the witches dance of Kanaan and the incontrollable pow-wow urge of Luzifer s Ghilom . On the other hand, the driving gypsy rhythm and the satanic screams of Dem Guten Schoenen Wahren hide the first hints of spirituality . The whole album is played in a naive and casual tone that pales compared with the austere and calculated approach of British progressive-rock.The CD reissue added Freak Out Requiem I - III and Cymbals In The End The macabre excesses and the instrumental diarrhea of the early days found new meaning with the double-LP Yeti , another masterpiece notable for its Wagner-ian intensity and monumental undertaking. The album is vastly more professional than the first one. On the other hand, the conceptual, structured pillar of the album is Soap Shop Rock, a fast-paced suite whose four movements mix elements of hard-rock, guitar-driven raga, middle-eastern tones, operatic singing, and the usual gypsy violin improvisations.The album covers a broad stylistic spectrum and reinvents progressive-rock as a less brainy and more open genre.The third album, Tanz Der Lemminge , is a more sophisticated work, but no less terrible . The 16-minute Syntelman s March of the Roaring Seventies is an odd fusion of Stravinsky s ballets, Bob Dylan s narratives and and Frank Zappa s tempo shifts. The instrumental passages are more atmospheric than apocalyptic, and they are typically sustained by the gentle strumming of the acoustic guitar. A virulent Hendrix-ian electric riff and a deep groove open the 20-minute Restless-Skylight-Transistor-Child in a more aggressive vein, but soon the the male vocals engage the sitar in a psychedelic duet, under the threatening shade of eerie Stockhausen-ian electronics. At 11:30 the piece mutates into a frenzied boogie, the groove getting bigger and bigger, the guitar work echoeing the Allman Brothers or Grateful Dead. The title of the seven parts are: Landing in A Ditch, Dehypnotized Toothpaste, A Short Stop At The Transylvanian Brain Surgery, Race From Here To Your Ears, Riding On A Cloud, Paralized Paradise, H.The all-instrumental jam The Marilyn Monroe-Memorial-Church is the album s masterpiece, and has little in common with the rest of Amon Duul II s career. An organ echoing Pink Floyd s A Saucerful of Secrets prevails for a few minutes, but then the music falls apart again, leaving the instruments to test the limits of free improvisation.The dance concludes with three shorter pieces, of which the psychedelic futuristic blues-rock instrumental Toxicological Whispering is the most disturbing. Amon Duul II had mastered the fusion between rock n roll, avantgarde and world-music, using such fusion to pen long and dynamic post-psychedelic musical journeys that reinvented the form of the classical fantasia in the age of post-modernism. It wasn t meant to last. As if afraid of the complexity of these three albums, Amon Duul II soon reneged on its own style and retreated to a more traditional sound. Influenced by Popol Vuh, with Carnival In Babylon the band adopted a hippie-spiritual stance, suddenly indulging in celestial choirs and ethereal atmospheres. The line-up now included Danny Fichelscher of Popol Vuh on drums, Lothar Meid on bass, Olaf Kubler on saxophone and Karlheinz Hausmann on electronic keyboards.I.D. In Uruk is a fragile song that features gentle guitar strumming and a la-la choir, until a group of female voices appears that seem to recite a prayer. The tune All The Years Round recalls both the gentle psychedelic folk of the Incredible String Band and the solemn hippie odes of the Jefferson Airplane. Kronwinkl 12 is an embryonic Phallus Dei, but is now entrusted to the male-female vocal harmonies of the leaders: the jamming is only a brief coda. The rhythm picks up slowly, but then dies away and the voice is left in a Pink Floyd-ian outer space of loose drumming and organ noises.The group retreated to a gothic house that became the reference point for a group of hippies and freaks. Wolf City , only 34 minutes long, was an attempt at selling out that kind of mystic acid-rock. The album as a whole is a more cohesive and less acid set of songs , and it boasts a superior production. Knaup s operatic vocals and Karrer s galopping gypsy violin create a charged atmosphere that the rest of the band sustains with thick and intense playing. The raga Wie Der Wind Am Ende Einer Strasse has the most surreal arrangement , that warps the folk tune sung by the guitar.Elsewhere, the band offers a simpler brand of progressive-rock. Green Bubble Raincoated Man features a melody and a tempo that recall the Eagles Desperado and a synthesized choir in the background. The martial and Wagner-ian Deutsch Nepal has the gothic overtones of their early days, but the realization recalls Emerson Lake Palmer at their most pompous. The first three minutes of Sleepwalker s Timeless Bridge feature perhaps the best prog-rock passage of the album, a fusion of folk, hard-rock and Eastern music a la Led Zeppelin. The other two compositions are light-weight, to say the least. A similar sense of humour leads them to Wolf City, which is simply a sustained boogie groove while Karrer recites his lyrics. Technically speaking, this is the most accomplished of their albums.Vive La Trance is not only even more structured but it is also melodic. The exception is the new multi-part suite, Mozambique, but that, too, sounds like a melodic fantasy: no exotic tempos, no gypsy violin, and, instead, a piano leading the melody and a loud guitar riff. If innovation is not its forte, the album at least excels in variety: Apocalyptic Bore recalls early Bob Dylan; Fly United alternates between Velvet Underground-ian boogie and Cream-like blues jamming, and contains a sax and piano interlude; Pig Man is a country-rock novelty; Trap is a gentle ditty; Jalousie belongs to Brech Weill s operatic cabaret; Fly United is a folk-rock ballad with Rolling Stones overtones; Manana and Ladies Mimikry wink at glam-rock. Hi Jack continued the decline, but the concept album Made in Germany , originally a double LP , was a decent follow-up to Vive La Trance s pop course amid fits of hard-rock and remnants of space-rock .Following albums got more and more conventional: Pyragony X , Almost Alive , Only Human . Yet another line-up recorded the last Amon Duul II s albums: Meeting With Menmachines , Hawk Meets Penguin, Die Losung, Fool Moon, and Airs On a Shoestring. The original six members of Amon Duul II reunited for a 1992 concert and then recorded Nada Moonshine In the annals of rock, only the Velvet underground moniker was so badly abused by unscrupulous musicians.Amon Tobin, born in Brazil but active in London, is a classical composer of the hip-hop age.Under the moniker Cujo, Tobin debuted with the album Adventures in Foam . Hip-hop is the main influence in Cat People, Break Charmer and Sighting, but the rhythmic element is more often reined in to let the superimposed sounds flow naturally. Ornette Coleman s bass-driven funk is another influence, and, while few tracks sound like funk, that praxis is often encountered in Cujo s songs.The singles Creatures, Mission, Chomp Samba marked further progress in his compositional technique, and led to the monumental Bricolage , credited to Amon Tobin.A loud bass line opens Stoney Street, mimicking a rhythm and blues theme. The surface of the song is a dialogue between a jazz trumpet and decadent violins, and it keeps merely looping, one voice alternating to the other, each voice merely repeating its tune. A new structure arises in which the leitmotiv is assigned to the bass, while the other instruments simply embellish the atmosphere, although it is the other instruments that are actually laid out in the front. Easy Muffin is hypnotic and dreamy, as different weeds alternate at uttering simple melodic patterns, but never reaching the consistency of a refrain, while the drum machines erect a bush of impenetrable beats. Creatures is another highlight, a cloud of ghostly free-form noises segueing a geometric shower of piano notes over machine-gun beats, while a grotesque and languid trumpet lingers by. The hawaian guitar of Yasawas, the cool-jazz trumpet of The New York Editor, the romantic sax line of The Nasty, are all counterposed and juxtaposed to disorienting textures, and revitalized by a process of musical introspection.In Chomp Samba it is the frantic, tribal rhythm itself to be subjected to such a treatment, and the result is a futuristic ode to primal insticts. Tobin s studies on timbre should also not be overlooked. Tobin warps the distinctive tone of an instrument to produce a new kind of instrument, and then weaves a few of them into an organic flow of sound.Dream Sequence exploits that techique to lay all sorts of bridges between genres, as the tones mimick country and raga, while its essence is kosmische musik. Needless to say, jazz fuels and dresses these compositions. However, Tobin does to jazz what Picasso did to impressionism: it uses only discrete fragments of the image to reconstruct the whole. For example, the sax solo of Wires And Snakes coexists with industrial metronomic pulses and with soothing ambient waves of electronics. The jazz feeling is pervasive throughout One Small Step, and the choppy bossanova of One Day In My Garden is the only regular, hummable, linear song on the album.With this album, Tobin unified classical, jazz, rock and dance music in a genre and style that is universal. Permutation was not as innovative as the earlier albums, mainly because his experiments blending jazz and noise or exotica and noir were not as groundbreaking. Tobin kept refining his art of producing amazingly sophisticated and seamless puzzles and crafted Supermodified , whose Get Your Snack, Rhino Jockey and Chocolate Lovely represent the equivalent of baroque art in the sampling world. Out From Out Where marks another peak of creativity. His artsy manipulations of jungle music would be nothing new, but his dressing for Back From Space , Chronic Tronic , El Wraith , and Verbal , show his perverted genius still progressing towards ever more daring abstractions. Searchers is another peak of unbridled imagination: a chaotic crescendo of strings , drums, bells, cheeping electronics, warped lyric-less vocals and middle-eastern flute. The noisy sci-fi vignette Triple Science, with machine-gun beats worthy of grindcore, the marching robots of Rosies, the simulation of exotic dancing of Cosmo Retro Intro Outro, the atmospheric jazz shuffle of Hey Blondie, that sounds like an instrumental remix of a Pink Floyd track from Dark Side of the Moon, emanate from the same, unfocused center. The album s closer, Mighty Micro People, that dumps a gentle melodic theme inside a confused container with a piano that echoes tv-series music and the electronic simulation of a shy quavering voice, is perhaps a tribute to himself. It appears that Tobin is carrying out several philosophical debates at once, while entertaining his audience with catchy numbers of an extra-terrestrial music hall. Tobin is debating on the meaning of music itself, on the nature of composition, on the viability of communication, on the ultimate constituents of sound. His neglect for form is a new kind of form, a form that has reduced form to the annihilation of form. The dualism of content versus form was resolved by the post-modernists as a non-issue: Tobin redefines it as a process, a process of form-abatement by which content is created, as if content and form were the same substance, and more of one means less of the other one. Tobin s music is also unique in evoking a broad range of moods, from witty amusement to sheer paranoia .After the mediocre Verbal Remixes Collaborations and the awful live dj set Solid Steel , Tobin worked on Tom Clancy s Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 , the soundtrack to a videogame that recycles his cliches with an impressive lack of imagination or variety.Amp is the project of London-based musician Richard Walker, a project vaguely related to Bristol s psycho-ambient tribe of Flying Saucer Attack and Third Eye Foundation. Walker recorded his first cassette under the monicker Amp, Green Sky Blue Tree , with help from friends such as Dave Pearce of Flying Saucer Attack .Sirenes contains both songs and avantgarde pieces. The two songs quite different in nature, although the basic reference point is Flying Saucer Attack : the distorted whispered shoegazing melodies of Souvenir, versus the spoken-word recital of Merry Go Down floating in a whirlwind of electronic drones. The more ambitious compositions attempt different strategies of soundsculpting, but they have in common the result: a chaotic ambience that is not quite relaxing chill music, but rather a claustrophobic and almost apocalyptic meditation on the post-industrial world. The instrumental Frieze harks back to the archetype of the British cosmic-psychedelic raga, Pink Floyd s Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun. Rave Mantra is the fresco of a terrifying land, in which Scharff s voice appears to mumble senseless words while being engulfed in a boiling magma of senseless noises. Its counterpart is the brief piano sonata that closes the album, So Be It, a glimmer of hope in a broadly hostile universe. The first venture into dance music, Mathilda s Shorts Wave, is perhaps the most un-emotional of all tracks: its protagonist is a frantic drum-machine set against a ghostly breeze of echoes. The second one, Eternity, boasts an equally hysterical beat, and even more syncopated, set against a wall of guitar noise a la My Bloody Valentine. The first album was preceded by the single Get There Remember and was followed by an intense sequence of singles: Frise Le Petit Chat , Ombres , Beyond Lutin , later collected on Passe -Present .The double EP Perception , almost totally improvised, is made of four extended pieces for a total of 88 minutes. While the self-indulgent pieces do not achieve the nirvana of the major works, they do show a more languid and placid attitude towards ambient music. On Stenorette Walker proves that he knows how to learn from his past mistakes. The piano leaves a strong mark on the music, thanks to melancholy patterns that are reminiscent of Brian Eno s Music For Airports and invent a rarified form of lounge balladry .On the other hand, while Robert Hapmson helps fill the blanks with his sampled guitar loops.The Nico-esque lament of You Are Here is set against an almost symphonic backdrop that even borrows ideas from Pink Floyd . Zoe is the most experimental piece: loud distorted guitar and keyboard utter melodies that are juxtaposed with a sample of disconnected vocals over a dub-like industrial rhythm. Sunflower, that adapts Cocteau Twins dream-pop to Walker s hypnotic guitar shuffle, sounds like pop music compared with the rest. Stenorette has a heart and a mind, whereas Astral... This marks a return to form for an artist who is easily prey to fashionable sounds, but who displays true talent when challenged by new ideas. A.M.P. Syzygy offered a bizarre mixture of ambient and psychedelic music, and the two suites of the mini-album Lost Found , also known as Unconscious Country, steered towards avantgarde music, but Alien Registration Office returns to the rock song format, albeit with a German twist .Recorded in 1999 during their European tour, Amp s Saint Cecilia Sinsemilla recycles some tracks of Stenorette and adds a few new songs.Amp s L Amour Invisible does not break any new ground, but offers the usual dose of classy, dreamy trip-hop. The reformed Amp is quite a different ensemble than it used to be, much more eclectic and specializing in surreal ambience . Kinski formed in 1998 in Seattle as the trio of guitarist Chris Martin, bassist Lucy Atkinson and drummer Dave Weeks. The technique is a mad compromise between British shoegazing and Japanese noise, which ultimately lands them in the netherland inhabited by Acid Mothers Temple. Armed with a second guitarist, Matthew Schwartz, Kinski recorded Be Gentle With the Warm Turtle , that features more experiments with droning counterpoint and betrays the influence of Roy Montgomery. Chris Martin is also active as Ampbuzz. His This Is My Ampbuzz is a bit immature and indulgent, but pays homage to the masters of modern instrumental music in an almost devotional manner. The album alternates cosmic soundpainting in the vein of Klaus Schulze s Irrlicht , ecstatic oscillations of the kind introduced by Brian Eno s Music For Airports , electronic sound collage and sheer psychedelic folly . Kinski s Airs Above Your Station explores the idea of fusing stoner-rock and ambient psychedelia. The problem with these lengthy jams is that they rehearse the same pattern, which is anchored to the suspense of waiting for the rubber band to snap as it is being stretched. Escaping the cliche if not the process, the understated tinkling of Your Lights Are creates an atmosphere of Eastern-style meditational concentration, before being accelerated into a swirling dervish dance, and the pulsing cartilage of Waves of Second Guessing unleashes perhaps the most intense two minutes of the album.Kinski, Paik and Surface Of Eceyon share Crickets And Fireflies . Its highlights are Kinski s 20-minute jam Keep Clear Of Me I Am Maneuvering With Difficulty and Surface of Eceon s 30-minute droning concerto. The highlights of the collaboration between Acid Mothers Temple and Kinski are Kinski s 10-minute Fell Asleep On Your Lawn and AMT s Virginal Plane 5:23. Kinski s Don t Climb On And Take The Holy Water is an album built around the 29-minute monolith The Misprint in the Gutenberg Print Shop. It takes eight minutes for the decline to stop, and then it s only to launch into a chaos of distortions a la Astronomy Domine.The other songs are mostly filler. The subliminal noises of Crepes the Cheap, the cingulate nightmare of Bulky Knit Cheerleader Sweater, There s Nothing Sexy about Time are songs built out of sound effects. While no less redundant, Alpine Static was at least played with a modicum of brainy finesse. Thankfully, amid all the formulaic riffage Kinski also indulges in a few moments of uncontrolled creativity, the eight-minute The Party Which You Know Will Be Heavy and Passed Out on Your Lawn.Andre Duchesne was the guitarist in legendary Canadian progressive-rock band Conventum, which released A L Aff t d un Complot and Le Bureau Central des Utopies , and whose work is collected on Re-Edition 1979-80 .Le Temps des Bombes and Le Royaume Ou L asile displayed a surreal synthesis of classical music and jazz . Duchesne was also one of the Les Quatre Guitaristes de l Apocalypso-Bar, that released World Tour and Fin De Siecle . In 1989 he composed L ou L , his most ambitious work, a suite that alternates between different styles and different chamber ensembles. Polaroide , also composed in 1999, is a set of improvisations for trio of guitar, viola and percussion. From 1991 till 1995 he was also a member of Locomotive, an ensemble a la Henry Cow which released Locomotive . He has also composed the opera Le Reve de Marguerite Belley and La Symphonie du Mill naire . Reflexions is an album of solo acoustic guitar.Andrea Parker is a classically trained cellist, a disc jockey of the drum n bass scene and, last but not least, an electronic composer with a penchant for analog synthesizers who collaborated with Philip Glass and Steve Reich. After recording Melodious Thunk in an ambient drum n bass vein, the following single The Rocking Chair was more like a concert for 40-piece orchestra and creative samples than a hip-hop track.The twelve tracks of Kiss My Arp better highlight her passion for David Sylvian s decadent exotic elegance and Dead Can Dance s eerie gothic atmospheres. The minimalistic Elements of Style , the suspenseful voodoobilly of Going Nowhere and the ritual music of Clutching At Straws , three elaborate compositions that bridge several different genres, coexist with the instrumental Kraftwerk-ian ballets of In Two Minds and Some Other Level, with the pounding syncopated dance music of Breaking The Code, and with the ethereal cantillation, the futuristic polyrhythms and the baroque orchestration of The Unknown .The EP The Dark Ages is equally engaging.Chicago-based violinist Andrew Bird, who played with the Squirrel Nut Zippers, debuted solo with Music of Hair . His albums with the Bowl of Fire offer a brilliant mixture of cabaret, dancehall music, jump blues, Appalachian folk, swing bands, and orchestral easy-listening: Thrills and Oh The Grandeur , featuring Candy Shop. The Swimming Hour marked the formal apex of the band , whether they were indulging in garage-rock , blues , Caribbean music , rhythm n blues , or orchestral ballad , or penning ditties such as Way Out West and Waiting to Talk. The spartan mini-album Weather Systems failed to introduce new elements, and in fact reduced the stylistic range of the previous album, but still offered the gloomy Tom Waits-ian meditation I and the Mark Kozelek-ian litany Lull. Bird returned to the sound of the Bowl of Fire with the dizzying stylistic whirlwind of The Mysterious Production Of Eggs , a collection of elegant and catchy ditties that sound like the ultimate synthesis of the decade. Will Oldham is the troubadour of alt-country, Jeff Buckley was the imtimate psychologist, Devendra Banhart is the gentle psychedelic bard, Rufus Wainwright is the sophisticated popsmith. Andrew Bird is all of them at the same time: master of deeply-felt singing, master of layered arrangements, master of lyrical imagery, master of celestial melodies, master of the bizarre and of the subtle.British audio-visual technician Andrew Lagowski launched both Legion the dark ambient project of Legion, that released False Dawn for found sounds and white noise, and especially Leviathan , a six-movement symphony of exoteric electronica, and the project SETI, at the border between techno, ambient and dub. Andrew Lagowski started his career of experimental electronic artist in 1990 with two self-produced cassettes, Nadir and Lagowski . The following year he began releasing the singles that would make him famous in the world of techno music: Vermillion , Storms , Formant , Blue Sparks , Artificial , Europa , In The Steel Room . Legion is Lagowski s dark ambient project.Under the monicker SETI, Lagowski has released The Geometry Of Night , where he experimented with a sophisticated muzak at the border between techno, ambient and dub.Lagowski s Ashita features the moody cosmic music of Replicator, but little else noteworthy. S.E.T.I.TZ and Digital Force Planning came out under his last name, Lagowski. Legion returned with Zodiac . The Fuschia DVD contains the video used for live shows.Sexy Detroit-born poster-boy Andrew W.K. offers party music that is a hilarious, almost parodistic, mixture of heavy-metal, garage-rock, disco-music and Tamla-soul, like Ted Nugent, the New Bomb Turks, Chic and the Supremes performing together. The results on I Get Wet were mildly entertaining: Party Hard, Party Til You Puke, It s Time to Party, Ready to Die, Fun Night, etc. The party is mostly over on The Wolf . Except for flashes that transpire from the rapid-fire cliches of The Song, Long Live the Party, Free Jumps, and Your Rules, Andrew W.K.Kletka Red is the project of guitarist and vocalist Leonid Soybelman and guitarist Andy Moor .The instrumental Fist Of Leg and Persecution Complex display the apocalyptic jamming that the two guitarists can concoct on Hybrid . In the meantime, Andy Moor had also launched a prolific solo career, particularly collaborations with avantgarde composers.Angel Corpus Christi is a San Francisco singer and accordionist, who started recording with guitarist and husband Rich Stim . The early works were mainly covers, as documented by self-produced cassettes on debut album I Love New York and on Accordion Pop Vol I . Wake Up Cry and Dim The Lights were the first original albums. The 80 s is an anthology of the decade. White Courtesy Phone was her first major recording, although it assembled mainly old songs played anachronistic new wave style .Even if less powerful overall, IV shows further progress. The same solemn drumming and dark guitar riffs sustain the longest track, Fate, with a touch of Siouxsie Sioux s dark punk. There are no precedents in the world for a band that plays this kind of rock and roll with this kind of classical-music attitude.Alla fine degli anni 80 Adam Grossman e Danny Lohner suonavano nel gruppo Angkor Wat, titolari di When Obscenity Becomes The Norm e di Corpus Christi . Innocence 89 si apre con un pianto di bimba in folate spettrali di elettronica, stoccate di chitarra elettrica, cigolii, un arpeggio di chitarra classica, linee di basso jazzate... Brani come Seat Of Power e The Search sono animati da una ferocia subumanoide e postnucleare, tutta scatti isterici e urla miasmatiche. Il loro sound discende in realta dal punk-rock dei Dead Kennedys, come dimostrano Prolonged Agony, rabbiosa ma anche epica e Emotional Blackmail, tutta d un fiato. Al tempo stesso il gruppo ostentava una sperimentazione quasi progressive . Nel picchiare e urlare bestiale di Warsaw trovava spazio un intermezzo strumentale quasi classicheggiante e il complesso melodramma della conclusiva Circus Of Horrors si avvaleva di una lunga ouverture strumentale, seguita poi da continui cambi di scena. Album tetro e spaventoso, in cui la disperazione dell adolescente punk acquista i toni della profezia apocalittica, rimane uno dei piu potenti affreschi della generazione hardcore. Il canto di David Brinkman, il basso di Mike Titsworth, la batteria di Dave Nuss, le chitarre di Grossman e Lohner componevano un commando temibile. Il secondo si spostava verso un sound piu industriale, per esempio nelle scansioni metronomiche alla Nine Inch Nails di Indestructible Innocence 1990, e psichedelico, nel lungo e tormentato incubo di Sour Born, anche se il cuore continuava a battere truculenze grindcore come Corpus Christi e Golden. Il capolavoro, nonche il brano piu sperimentale della loro carriera, e Ordinary Madness, sette minuti di riff selvaggi, loop in cascata e campionamenti di chitarra acustica Perso il batterista, Grossman assunse una drum machine e ribattezzo il gruppo Skrew. Con tastiere, campionamenti e tutto l arsenale techno-industriale gli Skrew registrarono nel 1992 Burning In Water Drowning In Flame , album in cui fusero le sonorita grunge dei Black Sabbath a torrenziali ritmi da discoteca, pervenendo pertanto alla stessa sintesi a cui era appena giunto Jourgensen. Ma anche la minacciosa cadenza da officina di Cold Angel Press, l hip hop di Prey Flesh, e la piu ballabile del lotto, Poisonous, sono cerimoniali del male che non accettano mezzi termini. L arte di collage di Grossman non e da meno di quella di Satana: un twang atmosferico di chitarra sovrasta il grugnito malvagio di Charlemagne prima che muti in un trapano grindcore infiltrato da campionamenti.Dusted , registrato da un sestetto , e uno dei dischi dell epoca che nascono al confine fra musica industriale e heavymetal. Brani tanto terrificanti quanto smaliziati come Seeded sanno spronfondare in un minaccioso heavymetal e al tempo stesso librarsi in un ritornello wagneriano alla Type-O Negative. I riff di heavymetal puntellano il rap animalesco di Picasso Trigger , i trucchi elettronici e percussivi massacrano il proclama di Skrew Saves, sempre con effetti devastanti.Il vasto repertorio di gesti vocali di Adam Grossman e il metodico lavoro ai fianchi della chitarra di Clay Campbell costituiscono soltanto la punta dell iceberg. Tutto e coreografato nelle scansioni tempestose delle tastiere di Jim Vollentine e delle percussioni di Mark Dufour, che insieme producono tornadi sonori degni delle aberrazioni Foetus. L insieme ha il senso tragico e l impeto selvaggio dei momenti migliori dei Cop Shoot Cop, ma nella luce ancor piu bieca di questo death metal per filosofi .Nel complesso il disco e un diario dell imminente follia di un reietto disperato, relegato nello squallore di un mondo che e comunque condannato alla distruzione.Grossman ha continuato quel programma da cardiopalmo con Shadow Of Doubt , forte di Bobby Gustafson alla chitarra, che segna un ulteriore avvicinamento all heavy-metal. Lavoro oppresso dai temi del sesso e della morte, trionfa nelle atmosfere sulfuriche di Dark Ride e nel gran finale sadomaso di Crawl.Angel Seed continua l evoluzione tecnologica ma riprende la ferocia degli esordi, e in tal modo abbozza un sound piu variopinto e trascinante .Ani DiFranco is a folksinger from Buffalo who emerged as one of the most important voices of the 1990s.Her staccato acoustic guitar is no less original, a fusion of Delta-blues and Appalachian folk picking that was originally a voice of its own and later was integrated in the small ensemble of Julie Wolf , Daren Hahn , and Jason Mercer . Selling over one million copies of her albums in a decade, despite limited air play and without the marketing of a major label, DiFranco became a hero to her generation, a symbol of a quiet revolution and ended up gracing the covers of countless teenage magazines. She was only 19 when she recorded her debut album, the strictly acoustic and drum-less Ani DiFranco , but that album already contained everything she d be known for, and at least two of her classics: Out of Habit and Both Hands. Not So Soft was a showcase for her percussive, almost punk style at the guitar , but the material is probably the weakest of all her albums. More percussions appear on Imperfectly , that features a bunch of memorable songs: In Or Out, Coming Up, Served Faithfully, Every State Line. Puddle Dive is another minor album, whose standout is the scathing Egos Like Hairdos. Like I Said is a re-recording of songs from the first two albums. Out Of Range , widely considered her masterpiece, added Face Up And Sing, Out Of Range, Diner to the canon. DiFranco first bent to the rules of the studio on Not A Pretty Girl , her first album that one can defined arranged . Socio-philosophical parables like Tiptoe and post-feminist rants like 32 Flavors , agit-prop songs like Crime For Crime and romantic confessions like Sorry I Am, Asking Too Much, Shy find a natural balance that shows a maturing artist.Dilate is rich with arrangements and guitar noise but still features the usual fare of angry young woman s cries, notably Untouchable Face, which borrows the riff from Velvet Underground s Sweet Jane to unleash a vicious attack on her partner. DiFranco s songwriting skills shine when she rips her heart open: the guitar sketches out frenzied bossanova lines to propel the agonizing melisma in Superhero; the sparse and bluesy Dilate is pure anger and inner tension that explodes in a wordless howl; the cinematic litany of Done Wrong slowly delves into the psyche of the narrator; the lengthy dirge Adam and Eve serves a harrowing account of a relationship. Dilate signals an impressive maturity and an ever more eclectic talent. Living in Clip is a live album, that contains, among the other: Willing to Fight, Joyful Girl, Hide and Seek, I m No Heroine, Anticipate, Shameless, Distracted, Adam and Eve, Fire Door, Travel Tips, Wrong with Me, We re All Gonna Blow, Letter to a John. Little Plastic Castle presents a kinder, gentler folksinger who is less at war with society and more at ease with her life. The music is unusually sprightly and even goofy: Little Plastic Castle boasts a feverish caribbean rhythm and a bouncing, ska-ish horn fanfare; Deep Dish jumps like swinging 1920s big-bands and stops for an out-of-tune music-box. Whether she harks back to Alanis Morissette s tenderly unsettled mood or exploits her vocal virtuosism or returns to her best hysterical tone , the album is a carefully crafted statement of emotional and ideological balance. DiFranco gives everything she got in the 14-minute free-form spoken-word jam Pulse , which is both hypnotic and pensive. The anthemic track of the album is the martial bolero Glass House, with a guitar arpeggio vaguely recalling House Of The Rising Sun and vocal acrobatics a la Grace Slick. That childish exuberance is even less controlled on Up Up Up Up Up Up . The problem is that two albums in 12 months may be too much for her and most of the songs sound like leftovers from the previous one. However, two parables of personal evolution, the eight-minute, trip-hoppish Come Away From It and Angry Anymore, plus the catchy Everest, would have been standouts on most albums of that year.On The Past Didn t Go Anywhere Di Franco set to music some of Utah Phillips spoken-word shows. Credited to both her and Utah Phillips, Fellow Workers is a collection of Phillips rants set to the music of DiFranco and friends, something that recalls the militant sessions of the 1960s. DiFranco s continuing learning program led to the sophisticated scores of To the Teeth . Maceo Parker on sax and flute was but the cherry on the pie of a work that toys with funk and jazz the way a veteran sessionman would. The album is a formidable collection of intriguing ballads: the smoky, bluesy Soft Shoulder, enhanced with a calculated emission of guitar reverbs and feedbacks ; the nocturnal, light, jazzy Going Once, caressed by trumpet and trombone; the swinging piano-based Hello Birmingham; the dreamy, romantic Cloud Blood. Each of them is both a powerful composition relying on original formats and a display of subtle vocal skills. The soul-jazz prowess of Wish I May coins a crying style that is both unique to DiFranco and an extension of of what singers such as Dionne Warwick: have been doing for thirty years .She is no less talented as a composer and arranger. Back Back Back builds up a thick, robust jazz harmony, and the fibrillating funk music of Swing introduces a hip-hop element , and both add Maceo Parker s exuberant saxophone. The Arrivals Gate uses a frantic drum machine, an acoustic guitar and a banjo to create a sort of jig of the digital age. However, DiFranco s genius is mainly in the dramatic intensity created by her Bob Dylan-ian delivery in the relatively straightforward To the Teeth, barely supported by Julie Wolf s gospel organ, only to rise up in the last two minutes to a waltz-like instrumental coda that features her scatting against a jazzy trumpet and a marching band s tuba.The double album Revelling Reckoning was the culmination of a self-searching process that started many years before for the Buffalo singer songwriter. The backing band has further increased the complexity of the arrangements, coining a soulful blend of rhythm n blues, soul, jazz and funk, that counterpoints her noble and passionate vocals. The mixture creates the most arduous compositions of her career, elegant and luxuriant ballads such as Ain t That the Way.K. There are, of course, the vocals, particucularly in the gentle but proud whisper of Garden of Simple and in the spartan violin-tinged Whatall Is Nice. And, finally, there is the melodic talent, as in Heartbreak Even, that almost evokes a Janet Jackson of 1950s rhythm n blues, and Rock Paper Scissors, the semi-Dionne Warwick impersonation du jour. The second CD, Revelling, gives us the arrangements and presents DiFranco in the acoustic format. The vibrant Your Next Bold Move, the crying Revelling and especially the ethereal Imagine That are perhaps the best demonstrations of her vocal prowess. The eloquent Reckoning, the jazzy, almost festive So What and the lulling Subdivision attest to DiFranco s eclectic persona, who is capable of extracting emotions even from the country-ish Sick of Me and the very plain Grey While impressive as a whole, none of the tracks on this album matches the emotional or inventive level of To the Teeth.Evolve continues DiFranco s exploration of atmospheric, noir, beatnik jazz . Relying on lush brass arrangements, mellow syncopated beats, liquid keyboards, mournful trumpet, sleepy clarinet, oblique scat and melisma, DiFranco solves the dilemma cerebral vs visceral in favor of the former, particularly with the sprawling 10-minute political sermon Serpentine, but, at the same time, displays her romantic side in Promised Land and Slide, and swims through solid rhythm n blues fanfares in In the Way and Here for Now.DiFranco disposed of her eclectic band and played all instruments herself on the stripped-down Educated Guess . Unfortunately, this means that the music is to be judged on the strength of the lyrics, and, DiFranco, like most musicians, is no Shakespeare.Knuckle Down , produced by Joe Henry, was released after the breakup of her marriage and the death of her father. Even by Ani DiFranco s standards, it is a deeply introspective album, while being also a lot more musical than its predecessor.Having calmed down, DiFranco delivered a combination of humility and complexity on the spartan Reprieve that is typical of her artistic persona, alternating the catchy Hypnotized and the confessional Half Assed with the nonchalance of someone who doesn t have anything left to prove.The core of the Animal Animal Collective are New York-based guitarist Avey Tare and drummer Panda Bear Panda Bear had already presented a bizarre program of electronic folk music, at the intersection of Nick Drake, Syd Barrett and Brian Eno. The duo debuted with the tenderly dissonant post-psychedelic electronica of Spirit They re Gone Spirit They ve Vanished .Tracks: Spirit They ve Vanished, April The Phantom, Untitled, Penny Dreadfuls, Chocolate Girl, Everyone Whistling, La Rapet, Bat You ll Fly, Someday I ll Grow To Be As Tall As The Giant, Alvin Row. Danse Manatee , recorded by Tare, Panda Bear, and keyboardist Brian Geologist Weitz, adds more pop vocals but, in general, it is less song-oriented and more abstract, evoking Bugskull and the Residents. Tracks: A Manatee Danse, Penguin Penguin, Another White Singer, Essplode, Meet The Light Child, Runnin The Round Ball, Bad Crumbs, The Living Toys, Throwin The Round Ball, Ahhh Good Country, Loblakely Dress, In The Singing Box. The double personality of Danse Manatee was resolved on Campfire Songs in favor of the folk-pop ego. The collection is just what the title implies: acoustic campfire songs, recorded live outdoors; but the psychedelic factor is as high as ever Here Comes The Indian , finally credited to the Animal Collective, is even more erratic and amoebic. Tracks: Native Belle, Hey Light, Infant Dressing Table, Panic, Two Sails On A Sound, Slippi, Too Soon. The Animal Collective tempered its quirkiness on Sung Tongs , but losing quite a bit of its credibility on the bossanova-sounding kitsch of Leaf House, the singalong acoustic folk of Winters Love, the baroque harmonies of Who Could Win A Rabbit, and the 12-minute nostalgic fantasia Visiting Friends, in a vein that updates the Beach Boys high-pitched multi-part harmonies to the post-rock world. Despite the percussive nightmare of We Tigers, the demented psalm of Mouth Wooed Her and the psychedelic ditties Kids on Holiday and Whaddit I Done, the album s streamlined and simplified approach almost negates everything the Animal Collective stood for. Noah Panda Bear Lennox s mini-album Young Prayer contains nine somber untitled elegies for the death of his father.Terrestrial Tones is a project of abstract electronica by Avey Tare and Black Dice s Eric Copeland that debuted with Blasted . The four-song EP Prospect Hummer is a collaboration between Animal Collective and Vashti Bunyan. Jane, a collaboration between Noah Panda Bear Lennox and Scott Mou, released Berserker , a rather confused collection of aimless songs. Feels , featuring guests of honor such as Arto Lindsay Mum and John Zorn, was Animal Collective s most accessible album yet, the equivalent of Sonic Youth s Sister , replacing the usual landslide of childish musical errors with a new canon of musical counterpoint. The lullaby Loch Raven and the charmingly mutant Banshee Beat retained the Animal Collective s transgressive opportunism in a much more compromising folk or pop context. I m Not Comfy In Nautica was a single released by Panda Bear .Acid Mothers Temple is a Japanese project of ultra psychedelia, led by guitarist Makoto Kawabata , who was already the leader of Ankoku Kakumei Kyodotai at the end of the 1970s, as documented on Dark Revolution Collective , for electronics and synthesizers, and Psychedelic Noise Freak , both originally recorded in 1978.Kawabata s Baroque Bordello cassettes from the 1980s, such as First Trip , continued Dark Revolution Collective s program. Acid Mothers Temple The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.Acid Mothers Temple The Melting Paraiso Ufo includes the first version of Pink Lady Lemonade. Pataphysical Freak Out Mu , whose 5 is half an hour of Hendrix-ian slo-core , is probably their masterpiece. After the alleged movie soundtrack Wild Gals A Go-Go and the Live In Occident , which documents their 1999 world tour, came La Novia , played by Cotton Casino , Higashi Hiroshi , Tsuyama Atsushi and Koizumi Hajime , and containing two deranged excursions into world-music . Troubadours From Another World , their third official album, is a relatively calm work, containing the 20-minute Heroin Heroine s Heritage and the 32-minute Acid Heart Mother . The fourth studio album, New Geocentric World , is equally divided between rave-ups a la Hawkwind and Amon Duul II , spaced-out folk and spiritual meditational ambient cosmic music . The double-LP Absolutely Freak Out , reissued with a lot of additional material, runs the gamut from wild space-rock orgies to droning cosmic music . The mini-album 41st Century Splendid Man , featuring Tatsuya Yoshida of the Ruins, contains two extended, celestial, psychedelic trances, bordering on ambient and cosmic music. Creation Of Human Race is virtually a Jimi Hendrix medley, as it lines up a series of references to Hendrix s first album.In C In E contains their version of Terry Riley s In C and a wildly dissonant new composition . Kawabata has also released albums under his own name: guitar tour de forces like You Are The Moonshine ; Inui 2 , containing four pieces for violin, kemenje, zurna, electronics, sarangi, taiko, gong, water, bouzouki, cello, vibes, organ, and sitar; Inui 3 , containing three tracks ; and Extreme Onction , featuring French guitarist Jean-Francois Pauvros, and mad world-music pastiches like INUI 2 . On I m In Your Inner Most he plays keyboards, harpsichord, violin, percussion and tambura in the vein of Terry Riley s minimalism.Kawabata also recorded four untitled duets with Richard Youngs, released on an untitled album , duets with Mason Jones on Within A Golden Moment , electric guitar duets with Miyamoto Naoaki on Electric Guitars . Kawabata, bassist Higashi Hiroshi and drummer Emi Nobuko formed Tsurubami and recorded: the cassette Tsurubami , Tenkyo No To , named after their previous band, Kaina , and Hansho No Omoi . Kawabata also released an album credited to Father Moo The Black Sheep . Kawabata also played in Nishinihon with Tsuyama and Ichiraku. Acid Mothers Temple s three CD box-set Do Whatever You Want contains a hour-long version of Pink Lady Lemonade and compositions by other bands and assorted Kawabata projects.The louder and faster version of AMT is on display on Electric Heavyland , a spasm of full-tilt noise . Kawabata s The Wrong Cage is a collaboration with an Italian band, the Jennifer Gentle. Univers Zen Ou De Zero A Zero is one of Acid Mothers Temple s best albums. It explodes with the frantic opener, Electric Love Machine, and then finds its way to the stars with two 20-minute colossi: the werewolf lament of Blues Pour Bible Noire and the Gregorian acid trip of Soleil de Cristal et Lune d Argent. St Captain Freak Out And The Magic Bamboo Request , on the other hand, is a weak work. Unfortunately, the cheap cost of making discs allows this band to follow each good album with a pathetic piece of junk. The Mothers of Invasion released the psychedelic freak-out Hot Rattlesnakes . AMT s Magical Powers From Mars is a trilogy .Kawabata s I m Here Still Now is a 38-minute piece for droning guitar and sarangi recorded live in France. Rebel Powers is a collaboration between Acid Mothers Temple and Telstar Ponies guitarist David Keenan, and Not One Star Will Stand the Night is their first release. Tsurubami returned with Tsukuyomi Ni , that contains four totally improvised jams: the 26-minute Tsukuyomi Ni Kogu, Ariake Naredo Sayani Terikoso, Mumyou e Iran, Itsushika Muragiyu. Tsurubami s Gekkyukekkaichi , on the other hand, contains just two colossal jams, Gekkyukekkaichi and Seiitenrinengi. That almost-religious intensity carries over to the second jam , but this is a more cacophonous and tumultuous piece, reminiscent of the chaotic introduction to Pink Floyd s A Saucerful of Secrets and of Jimi Hendrix s wildest overdoses. The Rebel Powers Not One Star Will Stand The Night is a collaboration between Acid Mother Temple and Telstar Ponies guitarist David Keenan, originally recorded in 1998. The hypnotic, sinister, 25-minute piece We Are For The Dark feeds on the dialogue between a chiming guitar and a squealing guitar. The other half of the album, the 24-minute Our God Is A Mighty Fortress, juxtaposes Keenan s tinkling, one-note guitar prot-lines and Kawabata s deliriously wailing guitar.Musica Transonic is a trio of Kawabata Makoto with Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida and High Rise s bassist Nanjo Asahito. The highlights of the collaboration between Acid Mothers Temple and Kinski are Kinski s 10-minute Fell Asleep On Your Lawn and AMT s Virginal Plane 5:23. Acid Mothers Temple s female vocalist and keyboardist Cotton Casino debuted solo with We Love Cotton , a much more melodic and song-oriented effort. Ueh is yet another collaboration by Kawabata Makoto.A Thousand Shades of Grey is a split album with Escapade which contains Acid Mothers Temple The Melting Paraiso Ufo s 28 minute European Sun or sitar, violin, bamboo flute, voice and electronics. Last Concert In Tokyo is a limited-edition live from 1999. The 10 EP In G documents a live performance with Ultrasound. Born To Be Wild In The U.S.A.Mantra Of Love delved into a new genre, medieval spacerock , with Le La Lo, inspired by the music of the French troubadours, and L Ambition Dans Le Miroir. Venus collects three improvised jams by Kawabata Makoto and French guitarist Jean-Francois Pauvros. Hypnotic Liquid Machine From The Golden Utopia is mainly devoted to the colossal title-track. Guru Zero , credited to Makoto Mango , is just one long hallucinogenic track. Acid Mothers Temple s Does The Cosmic Shepherd Dream Of Electric Tapirs?Higashi Hiroshi s Solo is devoted to sleepy Pink Floyd-ian ballads. Kawabata s O Si Amos A Sighire A Essere Duas Umbras? contain two lengthy solo ragas to Sardinia .Minstrel In the Galaxy , that features female vocalists but not Cotton Casino, contains three tracks . Kiss Over is a colossal collaboration with Maquiladora. Cotton Casino had left AMT and started her own project, Bird Birds Birds, a collaboration with Norwegian musician Per-Gisle Galaen.AMT s Goodbye John Peel: Live In London 2004 was their personal tribute to the famous dj. Just Another Band From The Cosmic Inferno , credited to AMT The Cosmic Inferno , contained the lengthy 38-minute Cosmic Funeral Route 666 in a feverish space-rock freak-out style. The same line-up delivered the 44-minute title track of Anthem Of The Space , reminiscent of early pagan ritual Amon Duul II, the colossal single track of Iao Chant From The Cosmic Inferno , OM Riff from The Cosmic Inferno, and the two lengthy improvisations of Demons From Nipples . We Are Acid Mothers Afrirampo was a collaboration between Acid Mothers Temple and Afrirampo. The trio Acid Mothers Temple The Pink Ladies Blues that recorded Featuring The Sun Love And The Heavy Metal Thunder does not actually feature Kawabata Makoto. Acid Mothers Temple s Starless And Bible Black Sabbath is a tribute of sorts to King Crimson and Black Sabbath. Kawabata s Your Voice From the Moon had three lengthy jams that leaned more on the ambient side of things. The highlight of ACM s Have You Seen The Other Side of the Sky was the 30-minute Tale of the Solar Sail-Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky. Day Before the Sky Fell In is alive album that contains Space Age Ballad La Novia and La Novia-Speed Guru.Kawabata Makoto s Inui series started with Inui 1 , mainly highlighted by the use of ethnic instruments .German electronic and digital musician Achim Wollscheid was originally active as SBOTHI, a project of musique concrete which released Swimming Behavior Of The Human Infant , And , Last and the double album Nichts Niemand Nirgends Nie , a collaboration with P16D4. In the late 1990s, Wollscheid became a visual artist and composer whose visual installations use computer-driven interaction with external events and whose compositions are usually part of those installations. His electronic roots were still visible on Eleven Live Collaborations , a free improvisation with Merzbow, but Moves , that used household objects as percussion instruments played according to a computer algorithm, Acts , which employed different events and techniques to produce sound, Airs , a live performance in which Wollscheid played simultaneously several different works of electronic music, and Shifts , a one-hour exercise in vivisecting two minutes of a CD, invoked a radically different aesthetic. Accordingly, The music on 60 x X was produced by synthesizing and distorting sounds found on a variety of other people s songs.Ace Of Base is a Swedish quartet that became an international phenomenon in the 90s dance scence with their debut album The Sign , that will go on to sell over 10 million copies. Ace Of Base s debut album basically collected their 1992 smash hits: All That She Wants, the reggae jingle sung with fatalistic attitude that established the standard, The Sign, that copied the idea with a stronger reggae step and a more relaxed melody, and Don t Turn Around, with an even more syncopated beat and an even more conventional melody.Max Martin produced The Bridge , that included the anthemic and disco-fied Beautiful Life and Lucky Love, a surreal flamenco boasting an arrangement worthy of Madonna. Cruel Summer , that features the Bananarama song, contains an ethereal techno ballad, Every Time it Rains, and lots of filler.Greatest Hits collects all the hits.AC DC are one of the greatest heavy-metal bands of all times, and one of the most authentic acts of rock and roll. They were the opposite of the intellectual singer-songwriter or the brainy progressive-rock or the decadent glam-rock of the 1970s: they were not the brain and not the heart but the guts of rock and roll.Hoarse and feverish vocalist Bon Scott and Scottish brothers Angus and Malcom Young formed AC DC in Sydney in 1973. The hard and frenzied blues-rock of High Voltage , whose reissue contains their early anthems The Jack and It s A Long Way , TNT , Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap , perhaps their best engineered frenzy , Let There Be Rock , with the ferocious Whole Lotta Rosie , and Powerage defined their ethos, if not their sound .Abunai! is a quartet from Boston, featuring guitarist Brendan Quinn, keyboardist Kris Thompson , bassist Dan Parmenter, drummer Joe Turner, that debuted with a fresh and invigorating tribute to early Pink Floyd s cosmic psychedelia, Universal Mind Decoder , including the jam 77 Gaza Strip. The Mystic River Sound , a fake compilation of obscure psychedelic bands a la Turtles Battle Of The Bands, was a display of their eclectic potential, but a little inconsistent in each of the styles approached . Round-Wound was their most ambitious work, a collection of progressive jams that scoured a vast harmonic territory. The band seemed to dissolve but returned with the EP Two Brothers .Absolute Zero, formed by veteran American bassist Enrique Jardines in Boston , with keyboardist and vocalist Aislinn Quint and drummer Paul Roger, took a long time to reach the threshold of the full-length recording. In between Absolute Zero only released the EP A Live in the Basement , containing Paradigms and An I to An Eye. Crashing Icons , originally composed and recorded in 1997 but reworked three years later with ex-Gong Pip Pyle on drums, presents a formidable trio venturing into lengthy, complex and composite suites. Bared Cross is a rapid-fire parade of energetic, convoluted structures a la Matching Mole, passages of Hatfield The North s jazz-rock, operatic vocals a la Art Bears, dissonant staccato piano figures reminiscent of Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic at their most experimental, etc. It all collides in a sequence of chaotic Albert Ayler-ian jamming, and it all disappears in an abstract soundscape made up of fragmented melodies and riffs, which, led by piano hysteria, erupts into a percussive frenzy, worthy of a Brazilian batucada.The opening of Further On is epically propulsive: gamelan-like percolating percussions set a thich polyrhythmic tribal beat mixed with jazzy drums. The minimalistic repetition turns into a comical intermezzo which, in turn, soon reveals a gothic, witchy undercurrent of distorted voices, as the rhythm becomes obsessive. Then the piece enters a phase of liquid jazz-rock, with the usual emphatic vocals, and a divine organ solo on the most metallic tones of the keyboard.Stutter Rock opens with a loud, rocking Cream-like bass riff , soon looped around a romantic trumpet solo.Suenos Sobre un Espejo opens with notes that evoke an Eastern psychedelic feel, but soon the pace speeds up, thus creating a circus-like atmosphere.Overall, this is a not a revolutionary work, but a major addition to an established canon, delivered three fabulous musicians.Absolute Grey was one of most underappreciated American groups of the 80s. The group began in the inception of garage rock that spread to New York with Green House , a profound and sincere work, but by their second album, What Remains broke out of those narrow confines, exploiting the harsh sound of garage rock to dramatic ends. Elbowing her way to the front of the pack was Elizabeth Brown, forerunner of the chanteuses of the 90s, whose vocals were candid confessions of her own insecurities, delusions, and solitude. The EP Painted Post and the final album Sand Down The Moon , released in 1987, boasted an atmosphere still more personal and two of the group s most intimate gems: Abandon Waltz e Don t Close That Door.The anthology Broken Promise recounts the work of the group in its entirety, from 1984 to 1987. Drummer Pat Thomas later released several albums influenced by his idol, Van Morrison: It s A Long Long Way , Too Close To The Ground , Fresh .Martin Fry was one of the few auteurs of British dance music of the 80s. With ABC he produced smooth songs full of 50s pop-soul arrangements, with a crooning melodramatic and decadent style in the vein of David Bowie. With Poison Arrow and Look Of Love, let alone the famous record The Lexicon Of Love , they consecrated a place for themselves among the stars of 1982. Bred by a sudden infatuation for Roxy Music, Fry upset the equilibrium of his guitar, saxophone and keyboard sound on the successive disc Beauty Stab , which featured the song That Was Then And This Is Now. That crisis became more acute in the following years, with the reduction of the band s personnel to a duo . In reality, the central figure of their resurgence of 1985, How To Be A Zillionaire, was Keith LeBlanc of Tackhead, who changed their course once again, this time toward hip hop.Alphabet City, with When Smokey Sings, and Up, with One Butter World, signaled a belated return to the soul characteristic of their origins. Yet in spite of having the means, Fry did not ever succeed in securing another place in the public eye and was swallowed up by his frenetic accumulation of styles.Abba were the reigning champions of pop during the 1970s. They began with effervescent vocal harmonies coupled with catchy upbeat refrains, notably Waterloo and Fernando , but then proved to excel also in the discos, with Dancing Queen and Gimme Gimme Gimme , and finally ventured into the romantic melodrama with Knowing Me Knowing You and Winner Takes It All . Supertrouper returned them to their naive-pop glory, and, after Abba disbanded, their leaders and songwriters managed to top all of this with a superb exotic pastiche, Murray Head s One Night In Bangkok . Detroit-raised teen-idol Aaliyah Haughton was the model for all the African-American teen-idols of the 1990s. Produced and written by Tim Timbaland Mosley and Melissa Missy Elliott , One In A Million came out before Aaliyah graduated from high school.Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001 at the age of 22.Surprisingly, the band achieved some notoriety with their subsequent albums, that emphasized both the melodic and the gothic elements in their hardcore. Black Sails in the Sunset , Art of Drowning and Sing the Sorrow kept increasing the doses of arrangements and singalongs, approaching the atmospheres of doom metal and the pathos of grunge. Their progression towards mainstream music was crowned by the single Miss Murder and the album Decemberunderground .New York s Native Tongues posse, perhaps the most creative of them all was best epitomized by A Tribe Called Quest: rapper Jonathan Q-Tip Davis, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Malik Phife Taylor. Their People s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm , that sampled both rock and soul musicians, and featured brilliant arrangements and smooth narratives , and especially their second album The Low End Theory were two of the earliest attempts at jazz-hop fusion. Beats Rhymes and Life marked a turn towards more conventional songwriting, with plenty of quotations from pop and rock music, and and soul-infected hit singles; and The Love Movement was even more predictable. The Native Tongue movement heralded the advent of a generation of intellectual, philosophical, sociological rappers that investigated the condition of the African-American soul rather than the street epics of gangsters. Q-Tip showed all the limits of his abstract aesthetic on his solo albums Amplified and Kamaal the Abstract . Ali Shaheed Muhammad released the solo Shaheedullah and Stereotypes , which is basically easy-listening music for rappers.Godspeed You Black Emperor, a large ensemble from Montreal, revolutionized instrumental rock with the three slow-building compositions of f a Infinity : they were not melodic fantasies , they were not jams , and they were not symphonies , but they were something in between. The four extended tracks of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven were more lively, but no less enigmatic, alternating baroque adagios for chamber strings, majestic psychedelic crescendos, martial frenzy, noise collages and, for the first time, tender melodies. Yanqui UXO was a collection of glacial, colorless holograms with no dramatic content, massive black holes that emitted dense, buzzing radiations. Three members of Godspeed You Black Emperor contributed to the two lengthy multi-part suites of Silver Mt Zion s He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Sometimes Grace The Corner Of Our Rooms , which presented a more humane face of Godspeed s music.The four extended tracks of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven mark further progress towards more lively compositions. Storm is basically a revised version of Moya: a baroque adagio for chamber strings leads to a driving, pounding crescendo that dies out and then returns as a majestic psychedelic progression. The ensemble s skills in concocting and assembling subliminal noises shine in Static, an electronic suite that is the antithesis of ambient but for several minutes flirts with the format, only to turn into a spoken opera and then into more cello-paced chamber music and then into louder, hard-rocking psychedelic outburst. The dual attack of rock and roll and free-form noise loses some of its impact because the two formats are never fused , only appended one to the other.The band s potential shows only in the last, and more experimental, piece.Drummer Aidan Girt also plays in Exhaust , a trio with Mike Zabitsky and Gordon Krieger.A Silver Mt Zion is a side-project that involves three members of Godspeed You Black Emperor . They debuted with the album He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Sometimes Grace The Corner Of Our Rooms , that contains two lengthy suites, one consisting of four movements and one of three movements. The World is Sick is particularly striking in its quasi-spiritual intensity, violin and cello and organ creating an ethereal mood worthy of the best of new-age music. Lonely As The Sound of Lying On The Ground Of An Airplane Going Down is more cerebral and perhaps less enchanting. The band expanded to six units and renamed itself Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra Tra-La-La Band, and released the sophomore album, Born Into Trouble As Sparks Fly Upward . The departure is more visible in the seven-minute sermon Take These Hands And Throw Them In The River and the catchy The Triumph Of Tired Eyes, but also the thick textures of This Gentle Hearts Like Shot Bird s Fallen and Built Then Burnt., Could ve Moved Mountains and C Mon ComeOn, are marginal to the new dynamics of the ensemble, a sort of Penguin Cafe Orchestra for the post-rock age. Members of Godspeed You Black Emperor recorded Sings Reign Rebuilder , credited to a 13-unit orchestra, the Set Fire To Flames. Dynamics is crucial in Omaha, that resembles the ebbing and flowing of a concerto, whereas Shit-heap Gloria of the New Town Planning is the closest thing here to GYBE s crescendos. The band nods only once to the melancholy post-rock credo and its funk-jazz innuendos, in There is No Dance in Frequency and Balance. Members of Godspeed You Black Emperor played on the albums credited to Molasses, and mainly composed and orchestrated by Scott Chercnoff with help from an army of musicians: You ll Never Be Well No More , a relatively spartan folk album for banjo, guitar, piano and strings, Trilogie - Toil Peaceful Life , a single that was extended to EP-length by adding some filler, and the almost symphonic 26-track double-CD A Slow Messe , half sung and half instrumental, featuring Thalia Zedek on guitar and clarinet, Chris Brokaw on guitar, David Michael Curry on strings and horns, Efrim Menuck on harmonium, Bruce Cawdron on marimba, etc.Despite the agit-prop emphasis, Godspeed s Yanqui UXO is an album of instrumental music for relaxation, a parade of still images that tells no story, a collection of delicate holograms that have no dramatic content Each of the five lengthy instrumental tracks of this 74-minute disc engages in a process of self-replication that displays little interest in development. There is only one notable exception: Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls, one of the few pieces to match the intensity of Gordon Mumma s nightmarish war requiem, Dresden Interleaf . The second part of Motherfucker Redeemer is rarified and dissonant like a Pierre Boulez piece without the sharp tones and the tempo changes. Previous Godspeed compositions would ebb and flow, and eventually explode via a dramatic sequence of volume shifts: now they simply catalog their own existence. It is not difficult to imagine how this works. The band meets in the studio with a database of sound effects and arrangements that they want to introduce in the song. The song is shaped not based on a concept of what the song should be but on the database of sounds.This is no longer a rock band in search of a sensational effect: this is a chamber ensemble in search of transcendental counterpoint. Mike Mya, a Godspeed founding member and a member of Set Fire To Flames, is also the brain behind Hrsta, a project which released the much inferior L Eclat Du Ciel Etait Insoutenable . Mya assembled a real band for Hrsta s follow-up, Stem Stem In Electro , influenced by the majestic productions of latter-day Swans. Set Fire To Flames monumental Telegraphs In Negative Mouths Trapped In Static , recorded in a barn, is indulgent at best, but also contains a wealth of ideas for the future of instrumental music. The third album by the Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra Tra-La-La Band, This Is Our Punk , changed style dramatically, offering psychedelic pagan folk a la Incredible String Band and Comus. Their fourth album, Horse In The Sky , dresses up their pagan folk music in a more musical manner, despite the attempts of Efrim Menuck s lamenting vocals to bog it down into excessive recitation. The requiems that frame this anti-war concept, God Bless our Dead Marines and Ring Them Bells, are emblematic of the maturation of the musician, if not of the singer. The fact is that Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra has mutated into a different beast: not a brainy post-rock slo-core machine but a simple, emotive soul. Thierry Amar, Jessica Moss and Gabe Levine also play in Black Ox Orkestar, a klezmer tribute band that released Ver Tanzt .Italian band A Short Apnea blurred the borders between post-rock, free-jazz and electronic avantgarde in the three jams of their second album, Illu Ogod Ellat Rhagedia . The dark atmosphere of that album was continued by Xabier Iriondo and Paolo Cantu in their following project, Uncode Duello . Tool was the most innovative band to emerge from grunge s second generation. The lengthy and brainy suites of Aenima displayed a shimmering elegance that was almost a contradiction in terms, but that was precisely the point: Tool s art was one of subtle contrasts and subdued antinomies, one in which existential rage and titanic will competed all the time. Lateralus expanded on that two-level approach, with tracks that, musically, were multi-part concertos or mini-operas, and, lyrically, were Freudian sessions that elicited all possible interior demons. Aenima , featuring new bassist Justin Chancellor, presents Tool as mature composers and austere performers, engaged in lengthy and convoluted suites . Aenima is, in many ways, a natural evolution from the previous work: the songs exhibit the same vanity of visceral eccentricity, but, instead of merely rumbling and whirring, they display an elegant vocal-guitar-rhythm dialectics. Tool carefully balances the canon of grunge and the melodramatic structures of the 1990s. Stinkfist s epic fatalistic tone and melodic catastrophic dynamics evokes Jethro Tull s Aqualung, but the nervousness is all theirs: the song stops and seems to die countless times, regardless of the propulsive energy that boils underneath. Eulogy, which borrows the percussive intro from the Who s Magic Bus, is, musically speaking, an essay on uncertainty: the riffs ebb and flow, while the instruments sink in a swamp of loose, free-form sounds.It doesn t always work: at 10 minutes, Pushit is a bad case of progressive-rock gone beserk. The album is Keenan s satori and a sort of diary of his primal angst. The sense of claustrophobia, which always was their trademark, envelops the more experimental tracks like a poisonous fog: Die Eier Von Satarn , the electronic poem Ions, and the 13-minute colossus Third Eye, an exercise in noise, chaos and random riffs. This is certainly not their most focused work, but Aenima stands as a significant effort nonetheless, one that opens new horizons for the entire genre. A Perfect Circle is the project of sound technician Billy Howerdel and Tool s singer Maynard James Keenan, who teamed up with guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen and a seasoned rhythm section to record an album of avantgarde grunge, Mer De Noms . Occasionally super-heavy and catchy , but most often bordering on prog-rock , the album incorporates Nine Inch Nails and post-rock in the format of heavy-metal. The strength of the band is particularly visible in songs such as 3 Libras that are both gentle and experimental and songs such as Rose that are both brutal and experimental. Thirteenth Step backs up Howerdel and Maynard with former Smashing Pumpkin s guitarist James Iha, drummer Josh Freese, Marilyn Manson s bassist Jeordie White . The music of The Package and The Noose is heavy metal drenched in the claustrophobic feeling of early Killing Joke and of Steve Albini s groups. The neurotic tension of The Noose, Blue and Lullaby is balanced by the relative linearity of Gravity and Weak and Powerless. Alas, the pop ballad The Nurse Who Loved Me, written by professional songwriters, not by the band, betrays the commercial ambitions that keep the project from fulfilling its ambitious promises. A Perfect Circle s eMOTIVe is an album of cover songs.After two years of legal fights, Tool returns with Lateralus , their most experimental and visceral album: lengthy songs, convoluted counterpoint, ethnic undercurrents, gothic atmospheres, melodramatic solos. Guitarist Adam Jones, vocalist Maynard James Keenan, bassist Justin Chancellor and, best of all, drummer Danny Carey, one of modern rock s true virtuosos.Most tracks are actually multi-part suites, each movement preparing and defining the next one, following a praxis made popular by 1970s progressive-rock . The Grudge , Schism and Lateralus are mini-operas that search the bottom of the soul for active volcanos of passion. Some of these songs are freudian sessions that elicit all possible interior demons: Parabol and Parabola , Ticks and Leeches and finally the almost sacred triptych of Disposition, Reflection and Triad . This is an imposing work, that inspires respect and admiration. After a five-year hiatus, Tool s fourth album, 10,000 Days , came as a massive disappointment, almost as if Tool had turned into a A Perfect Circle side-project. Wings For Marie, dedicated to Keenan s late mother, and 10,000 Days, with sitar and tabla, which together make up the emotional core of the album, have none of Tool s proverbial power and fire. Vicarious and Right in Two are entertaining and competent and elegant, but certainly nothing that stands out in the age of nu-metal.The most radical were New Zealand s Dead C, i.e. The primitive, guitar-based cacophony of DR503 evolved into Trapdoor Fucking Exit , which harmonized raga-rock, acid-rock, the Velvet Underground s Sister Ray and the Grateful Dead s Dark Star, and into the improvised chamber psychedelic jams of Harsh 70s Reality , whose rhythm-less, droning, electronic soundscapes evoked both Lou Reed s Metal Machine Music and Gordon Mumma s sonic scupltures. If Brian Eno invented music that should not be listened to, Dead C invented music that is impossible to listen to. However, blurred shapes of ballads appeared behind the thick, magmatic mist of White House , one of their most emotional sculptures , Repent and Tusk . Morley s project Gate indulged in hyper-abrasive and dilated ballads on Dew Line , but progressively evolved towards the gentle, languid computer-generated electronic music of The Lavender Head . Russell s collaboration with violinist Alastair Galbraith, A Handful Of Dust was best represented by the two lengthy improvisations of The Philosophik Mercury and by The City of God, off Jerusalem Street Of Graves .Bruce Russell s trilogy of solo albums, Project For A Revolution In New York , Maximalist Mantra Music and Painting The Passports Brown , focused on the atmospheric quality of his extended compositions for distorted guitars and bedroom electronics Bruce Russell s Maximalist Mantra Music pays his homage to Lou Reed s Metal Machine Music with three extended compositions for bedroom electronics . As cacophonous as its predecessor, Russell s album, like all concept art, is more about the whole than its parts: sounds grow and move, like living organisms, but the overall structure remains the same, a subdued psycho-industrial symphony. The War Between Desire And Technology is almost new age music but On Certain Obsolete Notions will make Lou Reed proud of his disciple. Painting The Passports Brown completes the trilogy of solo albums and increases the atmospheric quality of his music.Dead C , a sprawling double-CD album, covers material ranging from 1995 till 1999.Dead C s New Electric Music is a mixed blessing: the gigantic Forever ranks among their masterpieces, but the other four tracks are negligible.The Damned is a more confused work that alternates between free noise and song structures. Vain, Erudite And Stupid is an odd career retrospective that omits some of their best material . A Certain Ratio gave life to one of the most original and forward-thinking British experiences of the period immediately following the punk rock boom. The group brought the suicidal pathos of Joy Division to a harmonic camp more cultivated and sophisticated, renouncing the role of lyric afflatus in favor of a more futuristic cut to their figure. Introduced by their single Thin Boys as the nth dark-electro-intellectual collective from Manchester , under the influence of the Talking Heads, A Certain Ratio evolved almost immediately toward a greater emphasis on rhythm with the successive Shack Up . The addition of drummer Donald Johnson proved fundamental in defining the sound of their classic era: together with bassist Jeremy Kerr, Johnson created one of the most original rhythm sections of the period. The product of that collaboration was Fox , the most complete of their afro-funk-jazz works, disfigured by the distorted trumpet blasts of Simon Topping, and the mechanical rhythms of Do The Du . Other important stopping places were Blown Away , immersed in a chaos of Caribbean percussion and galactic vocalizations, and And Then Again , sullen and hypnotic, with the languid wailing of the trumpet and spiritualistic vocals. Their defining style had been a hybrid of refined electronica embroidered with imperceptibles disturbances, a rhythm section of ghostly accented jazz rock, with funky guitar riffs and atonal and cadaverous vocals. The album To Each , one of the most interesting of those years, formalized those experiments in a cerebral and angular sound . There were, however, already the seeds of the decadence toward the eclectic techno-funk that followed, expressing itself in austere and weary harmonies on Sextet and I d Like To See You Again , with passages of nerveless dance retracting the more intellectual instances.At the end of the decade Topping would be also the instigator of local house, first with T-Coy and later with the new version of A Certain Ratio . The EPs of their golden era were anthologized on Old And The New . Early is a career retrospective, but actually does not focus on the early period.Out of the first crowd of New York s negative bands also came the band A Certain General, featuring Parker DuLany and Phil Gammage , whose music, exemplified by the EP Holiday Of Love in 1982, revealed the dues owed by the authors of the British new wave to funk music. A Certain General later deviated from a more commercial sound with November s Heat moving in the direction of a demented homage to raga rock and acid rock of the 60s , and would continue a mediocre career in Europe with These Are The Days . The double CD An Introduction To War collects unreleased material, including the entire second album, Dead Rabbit Gang, that never found a label, and a live performance. Gammage, meanwhile, in 1985 had already formed the Corvairs, who had released two highly crafted EPs, Temple Fire and Sad Hotel .Gammage continued solo with Night Train and Kneel To The Rising Sun , gloomy and crepuscular albums inspired by Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Nick Cave. Cry Of The City humanized his brand of rock for solitary souls, with lyrics populated by desert highways and motels paid for by the hour. Gammage s country baritone makes him a natural storyteller in song, but his melodic skill is lacking and his imagination in arrangement is non-existent.Ben Harper, raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, obsessed since childhood with Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, is actually an eclectic African-American folksinger who started playing old-fashioned blues in old-fashioned coffehouses and making himself a reputation for his style at the bottleneck guitar. Discovered by Taj Mahal, and after a stint in the Chicago blues scene, Harper released Welcome To The Cruel World , a monumental exercise in stylistic excursions. The instrumental The Three Of Us opens the album on a nostalgic note, as if to signal a journey through the past of the American nation. He cries Whipping Boy in a smooth voice halfway between falsetto and mournful, and plays the guitar in a hiccupping style that leaves some notes floating in the air for surreal seconds. He intones the singalong Like A King in a tone reminiscent of old slave songs, while the drums beat a voodoo-like rhythm. A cello lulls the tender meditation of Pleasure And Pain, while the guitar sings a heartbreaking melody in the style of Leonard Cohen. The album runs the gamut from pensive to festive , compromising between extremes in the uplifting and almost anthemic How Many Miles Must We March. Compared with that much musical proficiency, Fight For Your Mind was a disappointment. Alas, only the lush Power Of The Gospel, the guitar-organ duet of By My Side and the majestic, Hendrix-ian, 11-minute God Fearing Man show the rest of his skills. The Will To Live restored some of the debut s charisma with at least three gems: the mellow grunge ballad Faded , the spirited blues shuffle Homeless Child , and the gospel hymn I Want To Be Ready, In these songs that are both full of pathos and carefully arranged, Harper achieved a powerful balance between the poet and the musician . The tender horn-tinged mexican waltz Ashes and the humble folk song Roses From My Friends capture his adult sensibility in a vein worthy of Cat Stevens , and the thoughtful dirge of Widow Of A Living Man seems to come out of Donovan s Fairy Tales: if senile has to be, these low-key songs do a much better job of painting him as a wise and sorrowful old man.Burn To Shine is his worst album and the definitive surrender to radio-friendly soul . Diamonds on the Inside displays what Harper does best: Bob Marley imitations , Lenny Kravitz imitations , Bob Dylan imitations .There Will Be A Light is a collaboration with the gospel group Blind Boys of Alabama. The double-CD Both Sides Of The Gun , which is as long as a regular CD, is divided into a rock disc and a bluesy disc.The fact that so many books still name the Beatles the greatest or most significant or most influential rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all times are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Rock critics are still blinded by commercial success: the Beatles sold more than anyone else , therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past.In a sense the Beatles are emblematic of the status of rock criticism as a whole: too much attention to commercial phenomena and too little attention to the merits of real musicians. If somebody composes the most divine music but no major label picks him up and sells him around the world, a lot of rock critics will ignore him. If a major label picks up a musician who is as stereotyped as one can be but launches her or him worldwide, your average critic will waste rivers of ink on her or him. This is the sad status of rock criticism: rock critics are basically publicists working for free for major labels, distributors and record stores.Hopefully, one not-too-distant day, there will be a clear demarcation between a great musician like Tim Buckley, who never sold much, and commercial products like the Beatles.Beatles aryan music removed any trace of black music from rock and roll: it replaced syncopated african rhythm with linear western melody, and lusty negro attitudes with cute white-kid smiles. Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for a good reason.The Beatles sold a lot of records not because they were the greatest musicians but simply because their music was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. If somebody had not invented beatlemania in 1963, you would not have wasted five minutes of your time to read a page about such a trivial band. The Beatles most certainly belong to the history of the 60s, but their musical merits are at best dubious. The Beatles came to be at the height of the reaction against rock and roll, when the innocuous teen idols , rigorously white, were replacing the wild black rockers who had shocked the radio stations and the conscience of half of America. Their arrival represented a lifesaver for a white middle class terrorized by the idea that within rock and roll lay a true revolution of customs. The Beatles tranquilized that vast section of people and conquered the hearts of all those who wanted to rebel without violating the societal status quo. The contorted and lascivious faces of the black rock and rollers were substituted by the innocent smiles of the Beatles; the unleashed rhythms of the first were substituted by the catchy tunes of the latter. The Beatles represented the quintessential reaction to a musical revolution in the making, and for a few years they managed to run its enthusiasm into the ground. Furthermore, the Beatles represented the reaction against a social and political revolution. They arrived at the time of the student protests, of Bob Dylan, of the Hippies, and they replaced the image of angry kids with their fists in the air, with their cordial faces and their amiable declarations. In this fashion as well the Beatles served as middle-class tranquilizers, as if to prove the new generation was not made up exclusively of rebels, misfits and sexual maniacs. For most of their career the Beatles were four mediocre musicians who sang melodic three-minute tunes at a time when rock music was trying to push itself beyond that format .The Beatles belonged, like the Beach Boys , to the era of the vocal band. Undoubtedly skilled at composing choruses, they availed themselves of producer George Martin , to embellish those choruses with arrangements more and more eccentric. Thanks to a careful publicity campaign they became the most celebrated entertainers of the era, and are still the darlings of magazines and tabloids, much like Princess Grace of Monaco and Lady Di. The convergence between Western polyphony and African percussion - the leitmotif of American music from its inception - was legitimized in Europe by the huge success of the Merseybeat, in particular by its best sellers, Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Beatles, both produced by George Martin and managed by Brian Epstein. To the bands of the Merseybeat goes the credit of having validated rock music for a vast audience, a virtually endless audience. They were able to interpret the spirit and the technique of rock and roll, while separating it from its social circumstances, thus defusing potential explosions. Mediocre musicians and even more mediocre intellectuals, bands like the Beatles had the intuition of the circus performer who knows how to amuse the peasants after a hard day s work, an intuition applied to the era of mass distribution of consumer goods. Every one of their songs and every one of their albums followed much more striking songs and albums by others, but instead of simply imitating those songs, the Beatles adapted them to a bourgeois, conformist and orthodox dimension. The same process was applied to the philosophy of the time, from the protest on college campuses to Dylan s pacifism, from drugs to the Orient. Naturally others performed the same operation, and many produced melodies even more memorable, yet the Beatles arrived at the right moment and theirs would remain the trademark of the melodic song of the second half of the twentieth century. Their ascent was branded as Beatlemania , a phenomenon of mass hysteria launched in 1963 that marked the height of the teen idol mode, a extension of the myths of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.Musically, for what it s worth, the Beatles were the product of an era that had been prepared by vocal groups such as the Everly Brothers and by rockers such as Buddy Holly; an era that also expressed itself through the girl-groups, the Tamla bands and surf music. What the Beatles have in common with them, aside from almost identical melodies, is a general concept of song: an exuberant, optimistic and cadenced melody. The Beatles were the quintessence of instrumental mediocrity. The Beatles had completely missed the revolution of rock music and were still trapped in the stereotypes of the easy-listening orchestras.Theirs were records of traditional songs crafted as they had been crafted for centuries, yet they served an immense audience, far greater than the audience of those who wanted to change the world, the hippies and protesters. Their fans ignored or abhorred the many rockers of the time who were experimenting with the suite format, who were composing long free-form tracks, who were using dissonance, who were radically changing the concept of the musical piece. The Beatles fans thought, and some still think, that using trumpets in a rock song was a revolutionary event, that using background noises was an even more revolutionary event, and that only great musical geniuses could vary so many styles in one album, precisely what many rock musicians were doing all over the world, employing much more sophisticated stylistic excursions. While the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, the Doors, Pink Floyd and many others were composing long and daring suites worthy of avant garde music, thus elevating rock music to art, the Beatles continued to yield three minute songs built around a chorus. Beatlemania and its myth notwithstanding, Beatles fans went crazy for twenty seconds of trumpet, while the Velvet Underground were composing suites of chaos twenty minutes long. Actually, between noise and a trumpet, between twenty seconds and twenty minutes, there was an artistic difference of several degrees of magnitude.Beatlemania created a comical temporal distortion. Many Beatles fans were convinced that rock and roll was born around the early 60s, that psychedelic rock and the hippies were a 1967 phenomenon, that student protests began in 1969, that peace marches erupted at the end of the 60s, and so on.The Beatles had the historical function to delay the impact of the innovations of the 60 s . Between 1966 and 1969, while suites, jams, and long free form tracks became the fashion, while the world was full of guitarists, bassist, singers and drummers who played solos and experimented with counterpoint, the Beatles limited themselves to keeping the tempo and following the melody. Their strength was perhaps being the epitome of mediocrity: never a flash of genius, never a revolutionary thought, never a step away from what was standard, accepting innovations only after they had been accepted by the establishment. And maybe it was that chronic mediocrity that made their fortune: whereas other bands tried to surpass their audiences, to keep two steps ahead of the myopia of their fans, traveling the hard and rocky road, the Beatles took their fans by the hand and walked them along a straight path devoid of curves and slopes. Beatles fans can change the meaning of the word artistic to suit themselves, but the truth is that the artistic value of the Beatles work is very low. The artistic value of those songs is the artistic value of one song: however well done , it remains a song, precisely as toothpaste remains toothpaste.The Beatles are justly judged for the beautiful melodies they have written. But those melodies were beautiful only when compared to the melodies of those who were not trying to write melodies; in other words to the musicians who were trying to rewrite the concept of popular music by implementing suites, jams and noise.The melodies of the Beatles were perhaps inferior to many composers of pop music who still compete with the Beatles with regard to quality, those who were less famous and thus less played. The songs of the Beatles were equipped with fairly vapid lyrics at a time when hordes of singer songwriters and bands were trying to say something intelligent. The Beatles lyrics were tied to the tradition of pop music, while rock music found space, rightly or wrongly, for psychological narration, anti-establishment satire, political denunciation, drugs, sex and death. The most artistic and innovative aspect of the Beatles music, in the end, proved to be George Martin s arrangements. Perhaps aware of Beatles limitations, Martin used the studio and studio musicians in a creative fashion, at times venturing beyond the demands of tradition to embellish the songs. Between 1959 and 1962 Martin had produced several tracks of British humor with heavy experimentation, inspired by the Californian Stan Freiberg, the first to use the recording studio as an instrument. As popular icons, as celebrities, the Beatles certainly influenced their times, although much less than their fans suppose. Even Richard Nixon, the American president of the Vietnam war and Watergate influenced his times and the generations that followed, but that doesn t make him a great musician. Today Beatles songs are played mostly in supermarkets. But their myth, like that of Rudolph Valentino and Frank Sinatra, will live as long as the fans who believed in it will live. Through the years their fame has been artificially kept alive by marketing, a colossal advertising effort, a campaign without equal in the history of entertainment. Their history begins at the end of the 50s. Indirectly they had also started the fashion of naming a band with a plural noun, like the doo-wop ensembles before them, but a noun that was funny instead of serious.Assembled to bring to Europe the free spirit, the simple melodies and the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys more than for any specific reason, the Beatles became, despite their limitations, the most successful recording artists of their time. While acknowledging that neither the Beatles nor the Beach Boys were music greats, it must be noted that both were influential in conferring commercial credibility to rock music, and both inspired thousands of youngsters around the world to form rock bands. Although far from being a great musician, he too had inspired thousands of white kids, among them both the Beatles and the Beach Boys, to become rockers. The swinging London of the 60s was a mix of renewal, mediocrity, conformity, non-commitment, cultural rebirth, tourist attraction and excitement, a locus of rebellion drowned in shining billboards, of young men with long hair and girls in mini skirts, of wealth and hypocrisy about wealth, a city of indifference.The Beatles birthplace was Liverpool. John Lennon was a rhythm guitar player with a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, founded in 1955, before forming the Beatles in 1960 with Paul McCartney. George Harrison, hired when he was still a minor, played lead guitar, with a formidable style inspired by the rockabilly of James Burton and Carl Perkins. They rose through the ranks playing rock and roll covers in Hamburg, Germany, then made their debut at The Cavern, in Liverpool, on February 21, 1961.In 1962 two phenomena exploded in America: the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons. Both truly sang, in vocal harmony derived from 50s doo-wop, which they introduced to white audiences, with arrangements imitating the Crickets. That was the year the Beatles began the transition from covers to original, melodic, vocal harmonies. One of the first recordings of the Beach Boys had been a revision of one of Chuck Berry s songs, one of the first recordings of the Beatles had to be a revision of one of Chuck Berry s songs.Brian Epstein was the man who scouted them and secured their contract with EMI in November 1961, and also the man who created their image,their clothes, their hairdos .1962 was the year of Bob Dylan, of peace demonstrations, of songs of protest. Precisely in 1962, far removed, diametrically opposed really, to the events that dominated American society, the Beatles debuted with a 45, Love Me Do, recorded in September 1962, a jovial rhythm and blues led by the harmonica in the style of Delbert McClinton. Records sold out before the recording sessions actually began, mass-media detailed step by step chronicles of the four heroes, the world of fashion imposed a new hairdo.The overflow of fanaticism around them demanded refinement of their style. Through From Me To You, the rowdy She Loves You , and I Want To Hold Your Hand , all number one on the charts of 1963, they fused centuries of vocal styles - sacred hymn, Elizabethan song, music hall, folk ballad, gospel and voodoo - in a harmonious and crystal-clear format for happy chorus. For the most part it was Buddy Holly s jovial, childish, catchy style that was copied, speeding the tempo to accommodate the demands of the twist .In the USA nobody had caught on yet, and only mangled versions of Please Please Me and With The Beatles had been released. In January 1964 EMI decided to invest significantly and I Want To Hold Your Hand reached the top of the charts together with the Beatles first American album Meet The Beatles . In the States, cleansed at last of the perverted and amoral rock and roll scum of the 50s, the charming and polite Merseybeat of the Beatles delighted the media. After their first tour in February 1964, and their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show , their 45s were solidly on top of the American charts. After all, their sound was drenched in American music: their vocal style was either that of the hard rockers like Little Richard, or the gentler call-and-response of the Drifters , the choruses were Buddy Holly s, the harmonies were the Beach Boys and the instrumental parts were remakes of twist combos. The secret of the Beatles success, in the USA as in the UK, was the simplicity of their arrangements. Whereas the idols of the time were backed by complex, almost classic arrangements, at times even by studio effects, the Beatles employed the elementary technique of surf music, completely devoid of orchestral support and surreal effects. American youths recognized themselves in a style that was much more direct than the manufactured one of their teen idols , and by default recognized themselves in the Beatles, precisely as they had recognized themselves in Elvis Presley after having become accustomed to the artificiality of pop music in the 50 s. The Mersey sound was designed to tone down rock and roll.The captivating style of the Beatles had already been pioneered by Gerry The Pacemakers . They reached the charts with their first three 45s : very melodic versions of rock and roll with sugar coated versions of rock s rebel text. They replaced the rough and crude beat of the blues with the light and tidy rhythms of European pop songs; they exchanged the slanted melodies of the blues with the catchy tunes of the British operetta; they substituted the provocative lyrics of Chuck Berry with the romantic rhymes of the teen idols. Epstein and Martin simply continued that format with the Beatles.The first student protests took place in Berkeley, California in 1964. The Beatles knew nothing of this when they recorded Can t Buy Me Love, a swinging rockabilly a la Bill Haley, the first to reach 1 simultaneously in the States and in Britain, A Hard Day s Night and I Feel Fine, using the feedback that had been pioneered in the 1950s by guitarists such as Johnny Watson and used in Britain by the Yardbirds. All three are ever so exuberant songs carrying ever so catchy refrains, that reached the top on both sides of the Atlantic. The Beatles were still a brand new phenomenon when A Hard Day s Night - the first surreal documentary about their daily lives was released, and their two first biographies were published. In the USA the marketing was intense: EMI was inundated by contracts to solicit the sales of Beatles wigs, Beatles attire, Beatles dolls, cartoons inspired by the Beatles. America was saturated with images of four smiling boys, the creation of a brand new myth that served to exorcise the demons of Vietnam, of the peace marches, of the civil disorders, of the student protests, of the racial disturbances, of the murder of JFK, of Bob Dylan, of rock and roll, of all the tragedies, real or presumed, that troubled the American Dream.Sure enough, hidden behind those smiling faces were four mediocre musicians, and also four multimillionaire snobs in the proudest British tradition. People, kids in particular, had a desperate need to believe in something that had nothing to do with bombs and upheaval. The Beatles put to music the enthusiasm of the masses and in return, in a cycle that bordered on perpetual motion, were enthusiastically acclaimed by the same masses. The best of their cliches is summarized in a famous anecdote. , Lennon answered, We turned left at Greenland! .From 1965 the LP, in the preceding years not as important as the 45, became the new unit of measure of their work. The American releases had 12 cuts including the hits, the British versions had 14 cuts and generally none of the hits. Help , with The Night Before and Ticket To Ride, marked the transition from the Merseybeat to a sound oriented more toward folk and country, though some of the songs bring Buddy Holly to mind. The Beatles of these days showed a formidable talent for the melancholy ballad, such as You ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, and most of all Yesterday, the slow song par excellence written by Paul McCartney, to which Martin added a string quartet. However, their best work is to be found in more aggressive songs, such as Help, a gospel full of life adapted to their surreal style. Rubber Soul completed the transition from the 45 to the 33, and also from Merseybeat to folk-rock.S. The rock and roll beat in Drive My Car and Run For Your Life, the exotic mood of Norwegian Wood , and the timid psychedelia of Nowhere Man and Rain cover a vast repertoire of harmonies for their standards. In spite of the fact that the Beatles sought success within rock and roll, it was evident that their best work was expressed through melodic songs. The tender ballads Girl and Michelle are truly excellent songs in their genre, but because they lack both rhythm and volume, they were considered minor at the time. 1965 was the year of the San Francisco hippies, of psychedelic music, of Indian gurus and experimental LSD. It all seemed to go unnoticed by the Beatles, who recorded another melodic masterpiece, We Can Work It Out, ground out on barrel organ and accordion, inspired by French folk music. They pursued the mirage of the rave-up with the hard riff of Day Tripper , a pathetic response to Satisfaction by the Stones and You Really Got Me by the Kinks.The Beatles finally freed themselves from the obsession of emulating others in 1966, with Revolver, an album entirely dedicated to sophisticated songs. The psychedelic Tomorrow Never Knows , the vaguely oriental Love You Too, the classic Eleanor Rigby, the Vaudevillian operetta Good Day Sunshine, the rhythm and blues of Got To Get You Into My Life and Dr. The few jolts of rhythm are kept at bay by a tender effusion in I m Only Sleeping , There And Everywhere and For No One. With this album the Beatles left behind rock and roll to get closer to pop music, the pop music of the Brill Building, that is, a genre of pop that sees Revolver as its masterpiece. That same year Dylan had released Blonde On Blonde, a double album with compositions fifteen minutes long, and Frank Zappa had released Freak Out, also a double album, in collage format. Rock music was experimenting with free form jams as in Virgin Forest by the Fugs, Up In Her Room by the Seeds, Going Home by the Rolling Stones.The formal perfection of their melodies reached the sublime in 1967 with two 45s: the baroque electronic Penny Lane Strawberry Fields Forever, released in February, an absolute masterpiece that never reached the top of the charts, and the hard rocking Paperback Writer, backed with the sophomoric Yellow Submarine, a mosaic full of sound gags and barroom choruses.1967 was the year that FM radio began to play long instrumentals.This concept album was released while the Monterey Festival was consecrating the sanctifiable, the big names of the times. The Beatles soar in the ethereal refrain of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, utilizing the sitar, distorted keyboard sounds and Indian inspired vocals; they indulge in Vaudevillian tunes such as Lovely Rita and When I m Sixty Four , and they showcase their odd melodic sense in With A Little Help From My Friends. They scatter studio effects here and there, pretending to be avant garde musicians, in Fixing A Hole and Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, but in reality these are tunes inspired by the music halls, the circuses and small town bands. It represents the happy marriage between Martin s sense of harmony, employing a 40 piece orchestra in which everybody plays every note, and Lennon s hippie existentialism, that dissects the alienation of the bourgeoisie. Everything was running smoothly in the name of quality music, now entrusted to high fidelity arrangements and adventurous variations of style, from folk ballads to sidewalk Vaudeville, from soul to marching bands, from the Orient to swing, from chamber music to psychedelia, from tap dance to little bands in the park.Rather than an album of psychedelic music , Sgt. Pepper was the Beatles answer to the sophistication of Pet Sounds, the masterpiece by their rivals, the Beach Boys, released a year and three months before. Through their entire career, from 1963 to 1968, the Beatles actually followed the Beach Boys within a year or two, including the formation of Apple Records, which came almost exactly one year after the birth of Brother Records. Pet Sounds had caused an uproar because it delivered the simple melodies of surf music through the artistic sophistication of the studio. Pepper, disregarding two important factors: first that Pet Sounds had been arranged, mixed and produced by Brian Wilson and not by an external producer like George Martin, and second that, as always, they were late. Pepper a year after Pet Sounds had hit the charts, and after dozens of records had already been influenced by it. Legend has it that it took 700 hours of studio recording to finish the album. One can only imagine what many other less fortunate bands could have accomplished in a recording studio with 700 hours at their disposal. Pepper was assembled with the intent to create a revolutionary work of art, if one dares take away the hundreds of hours spent refining the product, not much remains that cannot be heard on Revolver: Oriental touches here and there, some psychedelic extravaganzas, a couple of arrangements in classical style. Were one to skim off a few layers of studio production, only pop melodies would remain, melodies not much different from those that had climbed the charts ten years before.The truth is that although it was declared an experimental work, even Sgt. The Beatles of 1967 were still producing three-minute ditties, while Red Crayolas and Pink Floyd, to name two psychedelic bands of the era, were playing long free form suites - at times cacophonous, often strictly instrumental - that bordered on avant garde. In 1967, the band that had never recorded a song that hadn t been built around a refrain began to feel outdated. They tried to keep up, but they never pushed themselves beyond the jingles, most likely because they couldn t, just as Marilyn Monroe could not have recited Shakespeare. Sgt. Pepper is the album of a band that sensed change in the making, and was adapting its style to the taste of the hippies. It came in last , after Velvet Underground Nico , The Doors , the Byrds Younger Than Yesterday , and the Jefferson Airplane s Surrealistic Pillow to signal the end of an era, after others had forever changed the history of rock music.With Sgt. Pepper, the sociology course in melodic rock and roll that Lennon and McCartney had introduced in 1963 came to an end. The music of the Beatles was an antidote to the uneasiness of those times, to the troubling events that scared and perplexed people.Every arrangement of that period - the harpsichords and the flutes, the prerecorded tracks and the electronic effects - was the result of George Martin s careful production. He knew that avant garde musicians made music by manipulating tracks, that instruments with unusual timbre existed, that rock bands were dissecting classic harmonies. His background, not to mention his intellectual ability, was of the circus, the carnival, the operetta, the marching band, London s second-rate theaters. The results might not have been particularly impressive - after all he was neither Beethoven nor Von Karajan - but they were most certainly interesting. The Beatles filled newspapers and magazines with their declarations about drugs and Indian mysticism, and how they converted those elements into music, but it was Martin who was doing the conversion, who was transforming their fanciful artistic ambitions into music. Around the time of Sgt. He was the man who had given fame to the Beatles, the fundamental presence in their development, the man who had invented their myth. The Beatles were four immature kids who for years had played the involuntary leading roles in an immensely successful soap opera, a part that paid them with imprisonment. As Epstein s control began to lessen they began to look around, to take notice of the drugs, the social disorder, the ideals of peace, the student protests, the Oriental philosophies. Epstein s absence generated chaos, exposing problems with revenue, representation and public relations that eventually caused the demise of the group, but it also gave them the chance to grow up. Sgt Pepper represents a breaking point in their career on several levels.Two projects realized with unusual wit also belong to the same period, a period that bridged two eras: the television movie Magical Mystery Tour and the cartoon Yellow Submarine. The grotesque schizoid nightmare I Am The Walrus and the kaleidoscopic trip It s All Too Much are exercises of surrealism and psychedelia applied to the Merseybeat. Magical Mystery Tour also includes the bucolic ballad The Fool On The Hill, the psychedelic Blue Jay Way, and the mantra Baby You re A Rich Man. Meanwhile the shower of hits influenced by the experimental climate continued: Magical Mystery Tour, the movie soundtrack, with trumpets, jazz piano, changes in tempo, and a circus huckster-style presentation, Your Mother Should Know another vaudeville classic, the anthem All You Need Is Love, Hello Goodbye, a catchy melody distorted by psychedelic effects, Lady Madonna, the boogie inspired by Fats Domino. But the Beatles still belonged to the era of pop music: unlike Cream they didn t pull off solos, unlike Hendrix they strummed their guitars without real know-how, unlike Pink Floyd they didn t dare dissect harmony.Hey Jude , a long jam of psychedelic blues-rock, in reality another historic slow song by McCartney, came out after Traffic s Dear Mr. Paradoxically, Hey Jude established a new sales record; it was 1 on the charts for nine weeks and sold six million copies. Having established the melodic standard of the decade, the quartet implemented it in every harmonic recipe that arose from time to time. The albums of the third period fluctuate in fact between collages of miniatures and melodic fantasies, but always skillfully keeping a harmonic cohesion between one song and the other, in the step with - consciously or unconsciously - the structure of the operetta. By the time of their next LP release they were leading separate lives, each indifferent to the ideas of the others, and their album reflected the situation. It was clear that this new batch of recorded songs was not the effort of a band, but the work of four artists profoundly different from one another. The double album The Beatles , very similar in spirit to the Byrds Notorious Byrd Brothers , is a disorganized heap of incongruous ideas. As a consequence of this fragmented inspiration, the record includes a cornucopia of genres: classical , acoustic folk , the campfire sing-a-long , ballads , the usual vaudeville-style parade , and melodic rock . The album wraps up with a long jam, more or less avant garde, two years after everybody else, and three years after the eleven minutes of Goin Home, by the Stones. The so called White Album sampled the mood change of rock music toward a simpler and more traditional way to make music. It was released three months after Sweetheart Of The Rodeo by the Byrds, which in turn had followed Dylan s John Wesley Harding.In 1968 Great Britain became infected by the concept album rock opera bug, mostly realized by Beatles contemporaries: Tommy by the Who, The Village Green Preservation Society by the Kinks, Ogden s Nut Gone Flake by the Small Faces, Odyssey and Oracle by the Zombies, etc. Abbey Road , is a vaudeville-style operetta that combines every genre in a steady stream of melodies and structurally perfect arrangements. It s a series of self-mocking vignettes, mimicking now the circus worker , now the crooner , now the baby-sitter , culminating in the overwhelming suite of side B. Starting with the primitive exuberance of You Never Give Me Your Money and Mean Mr Mustard, the suite comes in thick and fast with Polytheme Pam and She Came In Thru The Bathroom Window, and dies melancholically with yet another goliardic chorus, Carry That Weight .As was the case with their contemporaries - Who, Kinks, Small Faces and Zombies - this late album thesis runs the risks going down in history as the Beatles masterpiece. The result is formally impeccable melodic songwriting, although it must be noted that the best songs, both written by George Harrison, are also the most modest.All efforts at cohesion notwithstanding, their personalities truly became too divergent.The Beatles adapted their music to suit the styles in fashion: doo-wop, garage-rock, psychedelia, country-rock. Cream did all they could to make the Merseybeat sound terribly old, precisely what the Beatles had done to the sound of Elvis Presley. Since they used melody as a lever, the Beatles had a relatively easy time in following every shift in fashion , until hard-rock - the antithesis of Beatlemania - came about. Suddenly the idol was no longer the singer but the instrument, the excitement was generated by the riff and not by the refrain, concerts were attended by multitudes of long-haired men on drugs who gathered on the street, not by hysterical teenage girls who assembled in theaters.In 1970 the Beatles broke up and every member began a solo career. Had it not been for his personal and political involvement, and his past as a Beatle, he would not have made it by his music alone. His solo career actually began with Two Virgins , an album he made when he was still a Beatle, in collaboration with his famous second wife. Yoko Ono was the heiress to a dynasty of Japanese bankers, she held a degree in philosophy, had been a United States resident since 1953, was a member of the avant garde movement Fluxus, and a world renowned performance artist throughout the 60s. The album was followed by the more experimental Life With The Lions and Wedding Album , and also a live album with Give Peace A Chance . Perhaps the best of Lennon can be found in the autobiographical album John Lennon Plastic Ono Band , with a vibrant production by Phil Spector. Lennon found much more commercial success with the album that followed, Imagine , which contains Imagine, his most famous song, besides Power to The People and Happy Christmas.McCartney managed a few albums worthy of the Beatles , except they were not called The Beatles . As a testament to rock consumerism and all the worst the genre embodies, McCartney s songs regularly bounced to the top of the charts. Between boring lullabies , and duets with other singers , McCartney holds the record for 1 songs on the Billboard charts. Each return to form album of the 1980s and 1990s was worse than the previous one until Chaos and Creation in the Backyard , produced by Nigel Godrich but mostly played by McCartney himself on all instruments. While a trivial guitarist and vocalist, George Harrison was perhaps the only one who made songs worthy of notice. First the experimental Wonderwall and Electronic Sounds , with help from Bernie Krause , then the three-record box set All Things Must Pass , produced by Phil Spector, a reprise of the raga-psychedelic theme. A dedicated follower of Hare Krishna, among other platitudes of the 60s, Harrison organized the first grand concert to benefit a nation, Bangladesh, in 1972. After a series of unfortunate albums, Harrison hit the charts in 1987, with I ve Got My Mind Set On You, an old soul song by Rudy Clark.Throughout the 90s McCartney and a few discographers desperately tried to keep the Beatles myth alive by launching new commercial enterprises geared toward nostalgia.After the breakup, the role of George Martin became evident. We ll never know what the Beatles would have been had they not encountered Martin, but we do know who Martin was before he met the Beatles. Even without the Beatles, George Martin would have been himself, a successful producer who reached the top of the charts with a collection of catchy tunes.The Beatles made history for their melodies and their arrangements. Beatlemania was created, justifiably, in response to the exuberant rock and roll they played in 1963 with electrical instruments and drums, that managed to revitalize a genre drowned in sugar coated orchestrations supporting teen idols. Pepper, their most famous album, is nothing more than a hypocritically commercial album, a collection of traditional pop songs masked as psychedelic avant garde music. Similar parallels can be found in almost every band of those times, but few listeners know the records of those bands. Even at their best the Beatles didn t represent the spirit of their generation. Those values were moral, musical, and social order, and respect, the very values attacked in the 50s by rock and roll. Thus the fact that the songs of the Beatles were similar in lyrics, music and arrangements to those of Tin Pan Alley shouldn t surprise anyone. Some of those songs will forever be listed in the annals of melodic music: Love Me Do, Hard Day s Night, I Feel Fine, We Can Work It Out, Penny Lane, Hello Goodbye, A Little Help From My Friends, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. For what it s worth, the everlasting refrains of those songs took rock and roll all the way down to a level of silliness and childish humor, separating it from its violent rebellious roots. With out a shadow of a doubt, the Beatles were great melodists, but at a time when melody was considered a reductive factor. As a matter of fact their melodies marked a regression to the 50s, to the type of singer the recording industry was desperately trying to push on the audience and against whom rock sought to rebel. The Beatles tried every fashion exported by the US: Chuck Berry s rock and roll, the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys, the romantic melody of Tin Pan Alley, the baroque sound of Pet Sounds , the rock opera Absolutely Free , the psychedelic arrangements of the Electric Prunes and the like, the hard riffs of the blues-rock jams , the synthesis of folk-rock , and so forth.The influence of the Beatles cannot be considered musical. Evidently, to the kids who listened to the Beatles, rock music had nothing to say that they were willing to listen to. They were influential, yes, but on the customs - in the strictest sense of the word. Unlike Bob Dylan, they didn t stir social revolts; unlike the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead they didn t foster the hippie movement; unlike Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix they didn t further the myth of LSD; unlike Jagger and Zappa they had no impact on the sexual revolution. In their songs there is no Vietnam, there is no politics, there are no kids rioting in the streets, there is no sexual promiscuity, there are no drugs, there is no violence.The Beatles had the historical function to serve as champions of the reaction. Their smiles and their choruses hid the revolution: they concealed the restlessness of an underground movement ready to explode, for a bourgeoisie who wanted to hear nothing about it. They had nothing to say and that s why they didn t say it.The Beastie Boys integrated punk-rock and hip-hop into an organic whole on Licensed To Ill , while the orgy of samples of Paul s Boutique virtually invented a new way of making music . De facto, the Beastie Boys jumped style attitude and age-group with each of their first three albums: from the juvenile stage of punk n rap and satirical exuberance to the formative creative stage of blaxploitation and intellectual eccentricity to the adult stage of soul-jazz-rock and pensive sophistication . After the orgy of samples of Paul s Boutique, the Beastie Boys returned to guitar, bass and drums on Check Your Head , but the album was perceived as a major disappointment and led to a critical de-valuation of the trio. Stand Together is a half-baked anthem Among the experiments, the organ-powered funk, soul and jazz jams stand out not because of the band s technical prowess but because of their failed musical ambitions.The Beastie Boys broke a lot of new ground with their first three albums, jumping style attitude and age group with each of them: from the juvenile stage of punk n rap and satirical exuberance to the formative creative stage of blaxploitation and intellectual eccentricity to the adult stage of soul-jazz-rock and pensive sophistication . Same Old Bullshit compiles old demos dating from their punk years, the first EP and the first single. Ill Communication is also the quintessential definition of a transition album, as half of the tracks hang on to their witty hard-rock sound and the other half point towards a totally different future and a much more refined sound. On one hand, we are shaken by the manic boogie of Sabotage, the frantic punk-rock of Tough Guy, the instrumental soul-rock jam of Futtermans Rule. On the other hand, we are galvanized by the angry and pounding call-and-response of Sure Shot, and the demented and anthemic recital of B-Boys Makin With The Freak Freak. The hypnotic semi-reggae of Do It and the Tibetan rap of Bodhisattva Vow experiment on the classic form of rap, while several brief interludes seem to belong entirely to another album.Root Down is simply the title-track and a few live songs. The In Sound From Way Out is an all-instrumental album that mocks both electronica and funk and occasionally resembles Frank Zappa s orchestral work .First and foremost, Hello Nasty is a breathtaking carnival of samples.Even their celebrated humour has become a robotic tic.The construction is often the most endearing aspect of the song, i.e. the superb harpsichord break in The Move, the a grotesque rhythm and blues coda in Song For The Man, the sheer cacophony of Dedication. The problem is that, entertainin as they may be, tracks like Remote Control are merely collages of cute samples.What makes it an even more daring experiment is a number of subdued incursions in other genres: the instrumental samba Song For Junior, the instrumental swing Sneakin Out The Hospital, the whispered bossanova I Don t Know, the soul-jazz ballad Picture This, the lounge music of Instant Death, all of them filled with noises and echoes of trip hop, drum n bass and psychedelic dub.Sounds Of Science is a career anthology that also includes the new single Alive. BS2000 is the project of Beastie Boy s Adam Horowitz Simply Mortified , a sort of lo-fi pop record for samplers, drum-machines, cheap keyboards and voices.Money Mark , the man who, more than anyone else, is responsible for the sound of Beastie Boys albums, debuted solo with the effervescent Keyboard Repair , a collection in the vein of Isaac Hayes funk-soul . That was only the beginning. Push The Button , his second solo album, is a more mainstream, pop, song-oriented work, highlighted by the catchy Maybe I m Dead, Too Like You, Tomorrow Will Be Like Today. The instrumental tracks display his skills as a player and an arranger, but here they are sacrificed to the songwriting. Money Mark s third album, the all-instrumental Change Is Coming , is more focused on funk, which is performed with all sorts of creative twists , but is equally versed in odd disco beats , jazzy atmospheres , futuristic dance grooves , and lazy latin rhythms .To The Five Boroughs is the most awkward album of their career.The Beach Boys started the fire: they fused the four-part harmonies of vocals groups like the Four Freshmen with Chuck Berry s rock and roll rhythm and a new genre was born. The Beatles, the Byrds and countless others copied the idea and the history of popular music would never be the same again. Ballads such as Don t Worry Baby were both a synthesis of Phil Spector s wall of sound , Chuck Berry s teenage vignettes, doo-wop s stately four-part harmonies, and the cornerstone of a new form of pop music. That form was born with I Get Around , the greatest of their car songs, Help Me Rhonda , the most acrobatic of their multi-part vocal inventions, Barbara Ann , the most anarchic of their geometric constructions, and Good Vibrations , the first pop hit to employ electronic sounds. Brian Wilson, the genius behind the Beach Boys sound became the quintessential eccentric of melody, particularly on Pet Sounds and the lost album Smile . Brian Wilson created a unique role for himself when he quit playing: basically, he was a composer who had a band to perform his repertory.Unfortunately, his wildly eccentric persona eventually self-destroyed. The sound of Banco del Mutuo Soccorso relied on two keyboards and a thunderous vocalist. Darwin , a concept on life s evolution, was naive but original, while Io Sono Nato Libero contained their instrumental zenith and tour de force, Canto Nomade di Un Prigioniero Politico.The career of Manchester-based disc-jockeys Sean Booth and Rob Brown, better known as Autechre, actually comprised two careers. The first one was about dance music whose beat had been deformed and suppressed, melted into a watery substance, emptied of its narrative content, but relatively warm and organic. The smooth and detached tones of Incunabula , perhaps the most austere and implacable album in the history of dance music, coined a new form of ultra-minimal techno that was expanded on the more colorful Amber , insinuateing those minimal artificial sounds in the most obscure orbits of the subconscious, and on the more claustrophobic Tri Repetae , that resorted to metallic sounds and subsonic frequencies. These works were inspired by Steve Reich s minimalism, Kraftwerk s robotic trance, and Brian Eno s ambient music, but their emotional content was radically different. The menacing texture of digital beats, repetitive noises and dejected melodies mutated into alien beings with a life of their own. Autechre s second career, best represented by LP5 and Confield , was about dissonance, icy ambience, irregular rhythm and non-linear development.The EP Anti, ranging from the cacophony of Flutter to the urban jungle of Djarum, accounced the multi-colored canvas of Amber . Foil and Glitch insinuate artificial sounds in the most obscure orbits of the subconscious. At the same time, these alien sounds come from a shared primitive source. Piezo is a mini-concerto for wadded timbres that seem to come from Peruvian flutes superimposed to a drone that seems to echo a Tibetan mantra. Nil is an elongated dub track mixed with ominous organ and accordion sounds, almost a slow-motion gospel, and a wailing sound reminiscent of Hawaian guitars. Autechre smashes its sources and then uses debris to manufacture music that does not seem to belong to this world s musical traditions. The atmospheric polyrhythms and the looped accordion figures of Furthur betray the pillars of Autechre s disintegration process: Steve Reich s minimalism, Throbbing Gristle s industrial music, Kraftwerk s robotic trance, and Brian Eno s ambient music. There is still plenty of drama and of emotions, though. Compared with the rest, Yulquen has the solemn quiet of a piano sonata: notes and beats have become one and the same, sounds that follow each other to gradually bud into a mood. The duo, in fact, is at the peak of its directorial skills, as proven by the haunting scenarios of Silverside and Nine . On the lighter side, Slip is a simple vignette whose hummable melody is carried by bubbling electronica a la Tonto s Expanding Head Band. In the charming Montreal a melodic fragment, looped around a frantic micro-beat and a languid ambient phrase, spawns a pressing minimalistic repetition. Amber is another monumental work, although less austere and implacable than its predecessor. The monumental Tri Repetae increased the project s claustrophobia by resorting to metallic sounds, subsonic frequencies and dejected melodies. Both the melody and the rhythm are further refined in Rotar, and the way Autechre first builds an elegant pattern and then turns into a mathematical counterpoint resembles Bach s Art of the Fugue. With these robotic, repetitive and subsonic compositions, Booth and Brown coined a new genre of music, almost the exact opposite of what rock music is supposed to be . If the first five tracks are Autechre at their most theoretical, the next five tracks are an abridged, popular version of the main ideas.Pach, the sonic refractions of Gnit, the aquatic echoes of Overand, the exotic dance of Rsdio offer a much easier path to Autechre s weird universe. The common themes here are the frail and atonal sound of the digital percussions and the almost obsessive use of loops.The second CD of the American edition also includes two important EPs. Garbage is a lengthy work, whose highlights are the industrial-shock ballet Garbagemx, the dadaist voice pastiche Piobmx and the warped techno of Bronchusevenmx. Anvil Vapre contains the 14-minute jungle deconstruction Second Bad Vilbel, the slowly shifting clockwork of Second Scepe, the hypnotic undulation of Second Scout, the rhythm-less apotheosis of Second Peng.Tri Repetae simply removed the emotions from that something . From the recording sessions of 1996-97 Autechre derived the album Chiastic Slide , possibly their masterpiece, and the EP Envane , two works that radically altered the perspective on their art. This time around, Autechre s sound-sculpting is an exploration of cacophony, both in terms of timbric dissonance and in terms of rhythmic inconsistency. Basically, Autechre incorporated the psychological and harmonic harshness of industrial music into their aesthetic of rigor, discipline and precision. Cipater is a nine-minute cubist clockwork that slowly undoes a metallic metronome by transforming it into a polyrhythmic ballet which, in turns, decays into pure chaos of beats. Whatever melody was being maimed, the result of Autechre s digital processing is an abstract soundscape of discrete events, like a crowd of terrified animals surfacing from every direction.The brief Rettic AC ventures into even more mysterious lands: frantic ruffling noises disturb the quiet of eerie resonating drones.Unlike the previous pieces, the nine-minute Cichli starts out loud and maintains a high level of electricity. Again, the vertical dimension is defined by the juxtaposition of a floating organic drone and a thick tapestry of bouncing beats . The beat is reduced to a mere trace on the radar of Hub, the most disjointed of these futuristic watercolors, a psychedelic carillon of alien subsonic fragments. After the brief minimalist sonata of loops Calbruc, the ten-minute Recury is the first track to actually sound like a known genre: industrial dub.Pule tries a simpler idea: a table-like beat that fades away as the organic drone expands. The closing 13-minute Nuane is the closest thing to hard instrumental hip-hop.The EP, divided into four quarters , contains the liquid dance-music of Latent Quarter and the lengthy, melancholy and oneiric Draun Quarter.The EP CichliSuite contains Yeesland, Pencha, Characi, Krib, Tilapia. Gescom started in 1994 as a joint project by Autechre, Darrell Fitton and Rob Hall.Compared with Autechre s masterpieces, LP5 is a minor work. Tracks: Acroyear2, 777, Rae, Melve, Vose In, Fold4 Wrap5, above all Under BOAC, Corc, Caliper Remote, Arch Carrier, Drane2. EP7 is actually an album of 11 tracks for a grand total of 60 minutes.1. Tracks: Rpeg, Ccec, Squeller, Left Blank, Outpt, Dropp, Liccflii, Maphive 6.1, Zeiss Contarex, Netlon Sentinel, Pir.After several works of dubious importance, Confield is a more convincing continuation of the program enunciated with Chiastic Slide .The 20-minute EP Autechre contains three pieces that are relatively upbeat and straightforward: Gantz Graf, the six-minute rave-up Dial, and Cap.IV, which sounds like a lengthy remix of the previous track. Consistent with Autechre s previous works, Draft 7.30 didn t break any new ground but sounded like a self-indulgent revisitation of old ideas.Compared with some of their lifeless soundscapes, Untilted is a hysterical work: the music jumps up and down, unrelenting and recklessly indisciplined. If Sean Booth and Rob Brown are trying to make an art out of straddling the border between the adventurous and the confused, many pieces here are highly successful .Aeo3 3hae is a self-indulgent collaboration between Autechre and Hafler Trio.At The Drive-in were formed in 1994 in El Paso , but emigrated to Los Angeles. Their early singles, Hell Paso and Alfaro Vive , as well as the EP El Gran Orgo , displayed a Rage Against The Machine-inspired rap-punk crossover but with a far more prominent emocore approach and without the obnoxious elements of heavy-metal. The album In Casino Out and the EP Vaja completed the maturation of the line-up with Cedric Bixler on vocals, Omar Rodriguez and Jim Ward on guitar, Paul Himojos on bass and Tony Haijar on drums. Foaming at the mouth, Bixlet rides the instrumental fever that propels Alpha Centauri, a mixture of punk epilepsy and country gallop that indulges in tempo shifts and syncopated stop-starts . The band does not hesitate to careen through odd meters and to adorn the melody with dissonant guitars, as in For Now We Toast. The unusual balance of grotesque and tragic employed by these songs is the very raison d etre of A Devil Among the Tailors. Instrumental creativity and vocal pyrotechnics are wed to a relatively catchy chorus in Hulahoop Wounds. The tender and melodic piano-based Hourglass sounds a little out of context, but proves that the preceding chaos was not due to ineptitude albeit to design. While the musical roots of the band are in the tradition of hardcore punk-rock, At The Drive-in are consumed by the fire of Fugazi s progressive-hardcore and develop their songs to the level of the three-minute teen psychodrama, rather than leaving it at the level of embryonic one-minute rant. A more professional production on Relationship of Command helped bring out the ferocity without sacrificing the art. Arcarsenal takes off amid tribal drums and guitar squeaks with a guitar-bass combination that is reminiscent of Guns N Roses and with vocals drenched in MC5-grade emphatic frenzy.Pure punk rage permeates the most personal tracks, such as Sleepwalk Capsules and Cosmonaut, barely touched by melodies that, duely developed would be the envy of Green Day. Unpredictable dynamic and frequent tempo shifts enhance the listening experience, while the band also displays good theatrical skills with the lengthy psychodramas Invalid Litter Dept and Quarantined and even a ballad, Non-zero Possibility. This Station is Non-Operational is an At The Drive In career retrospective.Guitarist Omar Rodriguez and singer Cedric Bixler formed DeFacto, a dub project, and then Mars Volta, a more progressive outfit featuring keyboardist Isaiah Ikey Owens, , that debuted with the EP Tremulant . Featuring Flea on bass, Mars Volta s De-loused In The Comatorium , vastly improves over the original band of chameleon-like vocalist Cedric Bixler Zavala and energetic guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. The only track that sounds like classic prog-rock is Eriatarka , but the lengthy excursions of Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt and Cicatriz Esp owe something to the genre too. On the other hand, the collage-like structures and haphazard dynamics of Roulette Dares are typical of Mars Volta s disorienting praxis, of their songs that always seem to spiral out of control. Possibly the album s zenith occurs with the chaotic and virtuoso playing of Drunkship of Lanterns , and with the three simultaneous guitar solos of Cicatriz ESP .Jim Ward formed Sparta with guitarist Paul Hinojos and drummer Tony Hajjar. They released the single Cut Your Ribbon, the EP Austere , which includes the catchy Mye, and the albums Wiretap Scars , opened by the virulent Cut Your Ribbon, and Porcelain , with the grungey Guns Of Memorial Park and Death In The Family, neither offering a terribly original variation on At The Drive In s emo-core.At The Drive In s guitarist Jarrett Wrenn and keyboardist Kenny Hopper formed Crime in Choir, that also features synth-man Jesse Reiner and guitarist Carson McWhirter, and released a work of ethereal prog-rock, The Hoop . Perhaps the only rock band to be truly unique in 2005, Mars Volta delivered Frances The Mute , an album that matched and surpassed the art-pomp of its predecessor. Except that here they tried to balance the urge to exhibit their astronomical technical skills with the desire to be actually understood by the audience. The intricate, nonlinear art of the first album is bent to more spectacular ends, with mixed results: instead of a brutally disjointed but viscerally effective stram of consciousness, we get a sequence of complete but incoherent fragments. Each of the five tracks is basically an album in itself, made of several sub-tracks that often collide with their neighbors instead of segueing smoothly from and into them. Theodore s drumming, Rodriguez s guitar, and Bixler s vocals seem to embody all the technical progress of the last two decades, from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Phish, from Korn to System Of A Down, as if progressive-rock was attempting to catch up with any relevant style developed after its heyday. The dizzying experience of dissecting Cygnus Vismund Cygnus and the 30-minute Cassandra Gemini is enough to swallow much of the recent history of rock music, like a black hole in waiting. It doesn t mean that everything is essential: one can easily argue that each track could have been trimmed down to make it more effective. It would have also helped focus on the fragments that truly matter, many of which are left in the air without a sensible development and ending.Scab Dates is a live Mars Volta album. The addition of John Frusciante on Amputechture did not benefit Mars Volta. The 17-minute Tetragrammaton is ten minutes too long and the rest is cliched prog-rock that satisfies neither the arena crowds nor the intellectual elite.Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla mixed tango with classical music to compose innovative works such as: Buenos Aires , for symphonic orchestra and two bandoneons, several chamber pieces in the 1950s for his Octeto Buenos Aires , several pieces for quintet throughout the 1960s, Tres Tangos Sinfonicos , the tango opera Maria de Buenos Aires , Balada Para un Loco , the film soundtrack Pulsacion , several works for his Conjunto Electronico, the oratorio El Pueblo Joven , the concept Libertango , the jazz collaboration with with saxophonist Gerry Mulligan Summit , the Concerto For Bandoneon , Le Grand Tango for cello and piano, the Concierto para Quinteto, off the album Tango Zero Hour , the Suite for Vibraphone and New Tango Quintet with jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton, the suite La Camorra, off La Camorra , the theater suite The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night . While most Italian prog-rock bands impersonated the refined intellectual of the 1968 student riots, Area impersonated the saboteur erecting barricades in the streets. Fronted by vocalist Demetrio Stratos , one of the most original singers of his age, guitarist Paolo Tofani and keyboardist Patrizio Fariselli, Area followed the path of canterbury musicians who merged agit-prop and jazz-rock. It is not a coincidence that their sound often evokes the Soft Machine, although Area s structures were looser and more chaotic. Arbeit Macht Frei introduced their demented fusion of raw electronics, primitive rhythms, Middle-eastern innuendos, twisted melodies and Stratos acrobatic vocals.Area moved towards free-jazz with Caution Radiation Area , which also included the electronic poem Lobotomia, but then delivered a calmer, relatively straight-forward Crac , featuring the dance novelty L Elefante Bianco. In the meantime, Stratos launched a solo career with more experimental albums entirely devoted to the human voice such as Metrodora and especially Cantare la Voce , bordering on John Cage s aleatory music and Meredith Monk s vocal exhibitionism. Free-jazz was, though, the inspiration of their later years, particularly of their two swan songs: the title-track from the live Arezione , and Caos, off Maledetti , featuring jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy and percussionist Paul Lytton.The box-set Stratosfera collects all of Stratos solo albums and Revolution collects Area s first five albums.Arab Strap is a duo from Scotland that writes extremely intimate songs, with a manic emphasis on self-loathing, and performs them in lo-fi musical settings. Aidan Moffat, the singer, had been the drummer in Jason Taylor s Bay, whose Happy Being Different and Alison Rae were minor statements in the genre of confessional folk music. Arab Straps debut single The First Big Weekend was archetypical of what was to come. The Week Never Starts Around Here could be the work of Smog: dark, harsh, lyrics, spare arrangements, a sense of desolation and solitude .Philophobia improved the sound and the lyrics, but Moffat was still reciting his funereal homilies in a robotic tone, and multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Middleton employed instruments like the undertaker hammers nails in the coffin.After the live Mad for Sadness , Elephant Shoe suffered from excessive self-quotation, although ballads like Cherubs, Direction Of A Strong Man, Pyjamas, Autumnal and Tanned showcased the usual class.Surprisingly, the single Love Detective has little of Arab Strap s trademark melancholia: on the contrary, it indulges in an upbeat shuffle that adopts the fashionable trip-hop sound. The renewal hinted by that single materialized on The Red Thread , which was basically an artistic u-turn, a compromise between the artist s soul and what the market demanded. This worked well with Haunt Me, but merely exaggerated the unbearable lightness of The Devil-Tips, Infrared, Screaming In The Trees and Scenery.Aidan Moffat and Stuart Braithwaite launched a side-project with the EP Sick Anchors . Malcolm Middleton recorded 5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine , that features Arab Strap-esque trip-hop in a more intimate and pensive setting . Middleton s second solo album, Into the Woods , is a more musical work, particularly the piano-based Leonard Cohen-ian elegy Devastation, the orchestral singalong Solemn Thirsty , the psychological trip-hop of Choir, the folkish Monday Night Nothing, the frantic rigmarole of A New Heart, although less successful when it ventures into noise-pop . Few musicians can write songs that work within the conventions of the genre while using rhythms and sounds that don t normally belong to pop music. The Stolen Singles collects the singles.Aidan Moffat adopted the moniker Lucky Pierre and released instrumental electronic music on Hypnogogia and Touchpool . Monday at the Hug And Pint benefits from the contributions of violinist Stacey Sievwright and cellist Jenny Reeve, Mogwai s Barry Burns and Bright Eyes Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis. The album opens with an artful blend of folk , classical music and synth-pop , The Shy Retirer, which is targeted to the discos, but the real stand-out is Fucking Little Bastards, a lengthy dirge that careens forward with pounding drums, distorted guitar and Iggy Pop-esque vocals. After the psychedelic crescendo of an instrumental break of crashing cymbals and violent strumming, the song restarts on a martial tempo amid romantic strings and neurotic guitars, evoking Neil Young, while the ghostly one-minute coda is their eeriest moment yet. The most atmospheric composition, on the other hand, is Flirt, that opens as a waltz-like lullaby and morphes into a Nick Cave-ian country-rock parable. On the downside, Act of War tries a little too hard to be gentle and touching, and the return of the programmed beat in Serenade ruins the smart counterpoint of piano and violin. It is not the disaster that The Red Thread was, but why not make shorter albums, or wait a few more years before releasing the next one? The Cunted Circus is an Arab Strap live album.Arab Strap s backing vocalist Adele Bethel and drummer David Gow formed Sons Daughters and recorded the EP The Lovers and the mini-album Love the Cup , an innovative work in the folk-rock vein. Drums, guitar and found percussion create the obsessive boogie rhythm of Johnny Cash, ideal soundtrack for a cannibal dance turned instead into a choral anthem to the dead songwriter. The other tracks of this mini-album do not stand up to the three masterworks, but the frantic Blood, the ghostly Start To End, the spastic pop tune La Lune and the Awkward Duet prove that the duo has style even when it doesn t strike gold.Sons Daughters second album, Repulsion Box , is a rather monotonous experience.The 36-minute album The Last Romance , arranged with a plethora of guitars, keyboards, strings and horns, is awfully bombastic by their standards, but, at the same time, bestows a new sense of purpose on Moffat s usual psychodramas while allowing the pop allure of Dream Sequence, Speed-Date and No Hope for Us to shine uninhibited.The general impetus towards intelligent dance-music yielded the grotesque phenomenon of electronic musician Richard James. The three EPs credited to AFX, starting with Analogue Bubblebath contained harsh, abrasive dance-music, sometimes sounding like a disco version of Morton Subotnick s electronic poems . In the meantime, the catchy singles credited to Aphex Twin, Quoth and On , were fusing techno and pop, aiming for the charts, and Polygon Window s Surfing On Sinewaves was traditional, throbbing techno music, aiming for dancefloor appeal. To further confuse his persona, Aphex Twin s Selected Ambient Works 1985-92 and Selected Ambient Works Volume II were experiments in ambient house and abstract electronic concrete composition. I Care Because You Do cleaned up his act, offering atmospheric dance-music with occasional hints to his old virulent style. Drukqs is a double-disc tour de force that spans all of James stages, from the Selected Ambient music to his creative art of the beat . No track stands out and the reason is that all tracks are played well and unusual ideas have been streamlined to produce easier-sounding music. His stature as an innovator has greatly diminished over the years and this album proves that there is little more than hype to sustain his charisma. James invests quite a bit in piano-based avant-classical compositions, but new-age music has been more successful in advancing Satie s century-old intuitions. This album is at the same time too much and too little: it tries to diversify in so many different directions, but ultimately it offers little of substance in each of the different directions. It is not a surprise that so many reviews of this album dealt with the song titles rather than with the music. 26 Mixes For Cash is a double-cd album of tedious, trivial and childish sound effects. Richard James contributed to the dancehall craze with AFX s EP Smojphace , followed by a series of EPs credited to AFX. In 2005 James released eleven AFX singles that were later collected on Chosen Lords .Radiohead, the most hyped and probably the most over-rated band of the decade, upped the ante for studio trickery. They had begun as third-rate disciples of the Smiths, and albums such as Pablo Honey and The Bends that were cauldrons of Brit-pop cliches. It was, more properly, a new link in the chain of production artifices that changed the way pop music sounds : the Beatles Sgt Pepper, Pink Floyd s Dark Side Of The Moon, Fleetwood Mac s Tusk, Michael Jackson s Thriller. Despite the massive doses of magniloquent epos a la U2 and of facile pathos a la David Bowie, the album s mannerism led to the same excesses that detracted from late Pink Floyd s albums . Since thee production aspects of music were beginning to prevail over the music itself, it was just about natural to make them the music. Amnesiac replaced music with a barrage of semi-mechanical loops, warped instruments and digital noises, while bending Thom Yorke s baritone to a subhuman register and stranding it in the midst of hostile arrangements, sounding more and more like an alienated psychopath.Made strong by the success of Creep, Radiohead reappear with a whole new stew of cliches typical of British pop of the last decade: The Bends . Unfortunately Smiths influence is apparent in most songs, from the delicate serenade of Black Star to the pulsing and dreamy single My Iron Lung, simply concealed by manic narcissism. A more modest touch makes Fake Plastic Trees the most original song, while a rather psychedelic content makes Planet Telex the most fashionable one. The problem is the records live off the first hit, Creep, self justified and whose riff flatters on all his songs like a ghost .OK Computer was the album that sanctified their futuristic pop.Airbag is the manifesto of Radiohead s vanity: a psalm warbled in middle-eastern fashion while the guitar strums a raga, a cello fills the harmony with menacing drones, and the drums beat mechanic and synchopated. This tedious litany sets the theme for the rest of the album: Radiohead bridges the Beatles Sgt Pepper and latter-day Pink Floyd, chic pop and languid, transcendental living-room psychedelia. However, the singer s phrasing and the arrangements of Subterranean Homesick Alien hark back to soft-jazz and pop-soul of the 1970s, while the guitar paints Pink Floyd-ian landscapes.Alas, this languid, over-blown manner leads to the same excesses that characterize the late Pink Floyd . The gloomy requiem Exit Music, enhanced with choir of dead men, organ lines and noises, and the mournful hymn and renaissance musicbox of No Surprises, have their moments, but are hardly revolutionary. The trancey litany of Let Down boasts, at least, an undercurrent of Byrds-ian jingle-jangle and a delicate filigree of sub-electronica, and Yorke does a good imitation of Mike Stipe s melisma. The best melodic progression is found in Karma Police. Again, hardly a revolution: a lament a la Bowie, a marching pace a la Sgt Pepper, a romantic piano a la Billy Joel.The noisy rave-up Electioneering is a welcome relief after so much sedative. The second half of the album is difficult to digest: just too much sobbing, and too much drama, among these undulating, cataleptic pop-soul arias. The three-part mini-suite Paranoid Android is the album s tour de force, mixing a Rolling Stones-ian shuffle, the progressive-rock of early Genesis and the gothic atmosphere of the Doors as Yorke intones a desolate yodeling, before, suddenly, the piece veers towards Black Sabbath-esque hard-rock.Critics around the world greeted this album as the masterpiece of the 1990s. Radiohead were ready to abandon pop after OK Computer.The first half of the album is their most ephemeral and artificial work ever: the ethereal vocal psalm of Everything In Its Right Place, the distorted musicbox of Kid A , the controlled horns nightmare over pounding drums and bass of The National Anthem , the new-age orchestration of How To Disappear Completely are songs only because they are sung. What they truly are is flexible structures for creative arrangements; mood-pieces in the vein of late Pink Floyd, with intellectual sprinkles of Brian Eno, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, etc; muzak for those who missed the story of rock music. The second half of the album, following the brief ambient instrumental Treefingers, is more personal, as lyrics start unraveling angst and anger. This sequence, from the distorted guitars and tribal beat of Optimist to the languid jazz-rock breeze of In Limbo to the futuristic, post-industrial spiritual of Idioteque to the Can-meets-Tim Buckley ambiance of Morning Bell to the celestial harps, accordions and synthesizers of Motion Picture Soundtrack, is almost a progression from earthly matters to heavenly matters. In fact, this album is as good as the celebrated OK Computer, if not even more inventive, unpredictable and baroque. Radiohead are masters of the artificial. Their parable crowns a long tradition in British rock music of putting form before content, of concentrating on sound to the expense of music . When it came out, Kid A was saluted as a masterpiece by the international critics, but a few months later critics who were still willing to define it a masterpiece could be packed in a Japanese subcompact car. The interest they generate recalls the frenzy surrounding each of Bowie s masterpieces , works that were manufactured ad hoc to induce intellectual excitement in order to hide what little substance the music had.The following masterpiece of possibly the most over-rated band since the Smiths, Amnesiac , turned out to be actually a significant improvement over Kid A s random cliches. Amnesiac, reportedly recorded during the same sessions that yielded Kid A, is a disorienting album the way Heroes was in Bowie s career. Radiohead started out as innovators of the stalest of styles, Brit-pop. In a sense, they went the opposite way Pink Floyd went: Pink Floyd began with experimental music and their quest for the sound led them to craft sophisticated melodic songs.Radiohead also began as a visceral combo, capable of extracting maximum emotions from the simplest form . First of all, they are virtually hiding the guitars, replacing their emotional content with a barrage of semi-mechanical loops, warped instruments and Autechre-ian digital noises. Then, Yorke s baritone is bent to a subhuman register and often stranded in the midst of hostile arrangements, sounding more and more like an alienated psychopath .As it was fashionable in 2001, suddenly Radiohead showed a keen interest in discordant rhythms and alien sounds: Spinning Plates could be the inspiration for an entire album. That said, the catchiest moments are probably the pop ballads Pyramid Song and You and Whose Army , and the closing Life in a Glasshouse . Compared with this hurricane of overproduction, the regular rock songs sound a little trivial. Yorke s vocals are so downbeat, hazy and dilated that, coupled with the appropriately melancholy guitar and rhythm, they evoke the spectre of Tim Buckley in Knives Out. Dollars and Cents, featuring another impressive tour de force from the rhythm section and more free-form vocalizing, pens a psychedelic and dramatic form of trip-hop. The songs on this set come from the same recording sessions as the songs on the previous album, but the musicians that mixed them and sequenced them are simply more comfortable with the idea. In many ways, Amnesiac is not the logical progression from Kid A, it is simply the same thing done with more confidence. It turned out that both the critics and the masses liked it, so here is more and in a bolder format.On Hail To The Thief the most over-rated band of the 1990s seems to have exhausted whatever inspiration had blessed Amnesiac. A few tracks return to rock n roll while others aim for mass appeal while others still opt for an introspective mood , but little justifies the reputation of the band: most of these songs are simply trivial. The album s only reason to exist are the bits and pieces of arrangements that deform the songs. Unfortunately, Radiohead are above-average Brit-poppers but below-average electronic artists: pedestrian pieces such as Backdrifts can be considered innovative only on albums of pop muzak. The percussive scherzo of Myxomatosis and the neurotic kammerspiel of A Wolf At The Door would hardly be noticed on the albums of really experimental bands such as Mercury Rev or Bardo Pond. A couple of tracks stand out among the mediocrity.Nigel Godrich produced Radiohead s last four albums .Jonny Greenwood s Bodysong is an ambitious and difficult ethnic-jazz-ambient instrumental soundtrack. Each piece stands on its own as a manual of avantgarde rock production, and the whole, while perhaps a bit too austere, feels awe-inspiring. Thom Yorke s The Eraser sounded like a collection of left-overs from Kid A and Amnesiac.The Pink Floyd devised a compromise between the free-form tonal jam, the noisy, cacophonous freak out, and the eccentric, melodic ditty. This amalgam and balance is inspired and nourished by Syd Barrett s gentle madness on their first two albums, which remain their masterpieces: The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn , that includes the pulsating, visionary trips of Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive ; and A Saucerful Of Secrets , that contains the stately crescendo and wordless anthem of A Saucerful Of Secrets and the subliminal raga of Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun. The ambitious Ummagumma , a failed attempt at establishing their credentials as avantgarde composers, and the eponymous suite from Atom Heart Mother , a failed attempt at merging rock band and symphonic orchestra, marked the end of the epic phase. For better and for worse, the Pink Floyd understood the limits and the implications of the genre, and kept reinventing themselves, slowly transforming psychedelic-rock into a muzak for relaxation and meditation . The other half of Atom Heart Mother already hinted at the band s preference for the languid, mellow, hypnotic ballad, albeit sabotaged by an orgy of sound effects. Echoes, the suite that takes up half of Meddle , sterilized and anesthetized the space-rock of Interstellar Overdrive, and emphasized not the sound effects but meticulous studio production. Rather than just endorsing the stereotypes of easy-listening, the Pink Floyd invented a whole new kind of easy-listening with Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here . In the end, the Pink Floyd reshaped psychedelic music into a universal language, a language that fit the punk as well as the manager, just like, at about the same time, jazz-rock was selling the anguish of the Afro-American people to the white conformists. These monoliths of electronic and acoustic sounds, coupled with psychoanalytical lyrics, indulge in a funereal pomp that approaches the forms of the requiem and the oratorio. Eels, the project of Los Angeles-based songwriter Mark Oliver Everett, worked out a storytelling style that was both humble and sophisticated on Beautiful Freak , locating his tone and arrangements somewhere between Beck and the Flaming Lips. Electro-Shock Blues , a bleak concept album and a moving requiem for friends who died, upped the ante by adopting Tom Waits skewed orchestral arrangements and topping Neil Young s manic depression. By exploiting the disorienting sonic events generated by keyboards, samplers and turntables, and by integrating jazz and neoclassical motifs, Everett coined a solemn, disturbing, jarring form of folk music. Cat Power, the project of Chan Marshall, debuted with the somber and spartan Myra Lee and the desolate, suffocating What Would The Community Think . The latter formulated an art that took the shy pessimism of auteurs such as Nick Drake and Laura Nyro to a new dimension of introspection. Its sketchy vignettes and self-analyses coined a subtle and almost embarrassing format, that turned the listener into a voyeaur peeping through the keyhole. Marshall was, at the same time, the cameraman and the actress: she played the role of a tormented heroine while she was filming herself playing that role. Marshall s cinematic genius peaked with the song cycle of Moon Pix , enhanced with the ambient, free-form arrangements of Dirty Three s Jim White and Mick Turner. The emotional intensity packed by her half whisper in the gloomy lieder of You Are Free bordered on the suicidal. Cat Power is the project of Chan Marshall, originally from the deep South , the daughter of a travelling musician, but initiated to music in New York around 1992. The EP Dear Sir was a revelation, thanks to songs such as 3 Times and Headlights, where the protagonist voice is a cross between the rock shaman a la Patti Smith, a psychedelic contralto a la Grace Slick and a bored Lydia Lunch. The album is made dark and ominous not only by lyrics that are ferocious to say the least, but also by the funereal arrangements designed by guitarist Tom Foljahn and drummer Steve Shelley , in particular the hypnotic Redskin tom-tom of Rockets and the insistent strumming a la Velvet Underground of Itchyhead and Headlights, songs where the suspended vocals of the singer induce a harrowing effect.In 1996 Marshall released Myra Lee , recorded in 1995, and What Would The Community Think . Despite the fact that the accompaniment is just her guitar and Sonic Youth s Steve Shelley on drums, the former is the first mature packaging of her art. The setting is only apparently sober and somber: in practice, each song employs a different device to establish an emotional context, and each song evolves rapidly, usually increasing tension and meaning as the sound gets louder and deeper. Enough, full of twists and fits, of ebbs and flows, is the soundtrack to a stream of consciousness that is devastated by angst, frustration, desire, just a few seconds before a nervous breakdown. The forceful We All Die, propelled by a manic beat a la Indian war-dance, soars and sinks, halfway between dream and overdose. Faces reveals the dilated emptiness of Tim Buckley s angelic grief, while Not What You Want is all anger and despair, a series of painful spasms.What Would The Community Think is one of her masterpieces. She begins by proving how an artist can be both subdued and relentless at the same time, with the devastating Nick Drake-ian confession of In This Hole. And that s the land where she dwells for most of the album, spinning the dreadful yarns of The Fate of the Human Carbine, the desolate lament of King Rides By, the suffocating sobs of Water Air . The multiple voices of The Coat is Always On inject an element of schizophrenia in a clinical case that is already worthy of a mental hospital. The music is never trivial, often complex and always to the point. The drums help her austere howling in Nude As The News and the revised Enough, two of the most theatrical and diverse pieces. Her sketchy vignettes and self-analyses coin a subtle and almost embarrassing format, that turns the listener into a voyeaur peeping through the keyhole. Marshall is, at the same time, the cameraman and the actress: she plays the role of a tormented heroine and films herself playing that role.Marshall s cinematic genius peaked with the song cycle of Moon Pix , featuring Dirty Three s Jim White and Mick Turner. Both dejected and warm, haunting and lush lieder like American Flag and Cross Bones Style revive a tradition that was thought extinct after Van Morrison s Astral Weeks. The combo plays them in a detached manner, borrowing from blues and country, and often slumping onto a languid, dirty, psychedelic haze. A softer, gentler Joni Mitchell comes to mind in the piano-based Colors And The Kids, possibly the emotional center of the album.Marshall boasts one of the least remarkable voices in the history of singer songwriters, but at the same time it makes for one of the most moving, mesmerizing and original experiences in rock music, like when she croons the slow, waltzing dirge of No Sense The Covers Record is a disappointing minor work from a musician who was expected to produce a masterpiece.Marshall s return to form and her first collection of original material in a long time, You Are Free completes the ideal trilogy of masterpieces with What Would The Community Think and Moon Pix. Her colloquial tone resonates, more than ever, with the voices of the most haunting and poignant singers of popular music, from Nico to Tim Buckley. The emotional intensity packed by her half whisper in a simple piano-based lullaby such as I Don t Blame You or in a tender country-like mantra such as Half of You is simply harrowing. Not to mention the free-form, mournful trance of Good Woman, that resembles one of Tim Buckley s suspended dirges, or the gloomy portrait of Names, that borders on the suicidal. The overall feeling is of austere chamber music being performed in a smoky cabaret in the years before World War II. The intimate paralysis of these quasi-classical odes is electrifying. Speak For Me is even more virulent and rhythmic, delivered with an attitude that would please both riot-grrrrls and Patti Smith. Regardless of mood, pace and sense, Marshall s songs maintain a delicate and solemn tunefulness . A terrifying sense of loneliness and inertia exhales from the bluesy Baby Doll and Keep on Runnin Appropriately, the album closes with a piano that does not play a melody, but simply ticks like a clock . The lyrics are, by far, her weakest point.Speaking For Trees is a film on DVD, directed by Mark Borthwick, in which Cat Power plays some of her songs and some covers, plus a CD with only one 18-minute long song, Willie Deadwilder with Cat Power on vocals and M Ward on guitar. The song is a tender lullaby of the kind that Donovan used to spin, a melody with echoes of Don McLean s American Pie as well as of Bob Dylan s Blowing in the Wind, and of countless nostalgic laments, over a gentle, luminescent tapestry of guitar strumming. Having set the standard of intimate for the entire decade, Chan Marshall recorded The Greatest with some of Memphis session musicians, a grand gesture that is commonly employed to reconnect the young lion with the old masters, a feat perfectly achieved in Love and Communication , Living Proof , and the saloon atmosphere of Lived In Bars. Generally speaking, Marshall comes through as musically more assertive with the catchy Could We, reminiscent of Tamla s soul music, and two piano and strings showcases, Where Is My Love and The Greatest. Nonetheless, the emotional intensity shifts gear whenever she intones her shy dirges, like the desperate piano and guitar lament of Hate or the subliminal The Moon for plain guitar and otherworldly vocals. Thus, by the end of the album, one misses the old Marshall and regrets that she tried too hard to be someone else.Bruce Springsteen is the epitome of epic . After Bob Dylan and before the Ramones, he was one of the few musicians capable of transforming the mood of an entire generation into a sound . If the rules to judge the significance of an artist are that a he be indifferent to fads and trends; b that his lyrics dig deep into his era and resonate with the souls of millions of people; c that each record be, de facto, a concept album; d that each song send shivers down the spine even without a catchy melody; then Springsteen is one of the greatest of all times. Musically, Springsteen coined the model of the singer-songwriter of the 1980s, bridging the gap between the bluesman of the 1930s, the black shouter of the 1940s, the rocker of the 1950s, the folk-singer of the 1960s, the punk of the 1970s. In many ways, Springsteen was the true heir to Woody Guthrie . But he was also the heir to the blues, in an era in which the black nation was abandoning it for dance music. Over the years, Springsteen grew up to become the eloquent spokesman of middle-class and blue-collar America. The alienated enthusiasm of his early days mutated first into a nostalgic glorification of the past and eventually into resigned grief.Springsteen conveyed all of this in energetic and intense performances that changed the whole meaning of the word concert . The stylistic fusion of The Wild The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle , recalled both Van Morrison and Taj Mahal, while Born To Run introduced his torrential wall of sound . Populist lyrics, granitic group sound, tender confessions, catchy refrains, hard-rock riffs, massive boogie grooves, rock n roll spasms, acoustic ballads: Springsteen and his band were the ultimate manufacturers of good vibrations. Sorrow and pessimism prevailed on subsequent albums , with the notable exception of Born In The USA , another super-charged set of anthemic songs. After disposing of the venerable E Street Band, Springsteen broke a five-year drought of new material with the twin albums Human Touch and Lucky Town . The one notable exception is the spectral gospel of 57 Channels, with swampy, tribal drums and sinister electronic ambience, one of his masterpieces. Lucky Town displays his depressed, pessimistic mood.With The Ghost Of Tom Joad . The album aimed to be a faithful reproduction of the mood of middle-class Americans in the wake of that tragedy, but instead seemed to forgo the sense of loss and focus on rebuilding the American spirit. The trivial melody of Waitin On A Sunny Day , and its loud rhythm and blues pace, or the party rave-up of Mary s Place , or the heavy guitar sound and pounding rhythm of Countin on a Miracle and Further On hardly belong to a mournful time. Let s Be Friends is totally gospel, The Fuse is almost trip-hop The production is not only too intrusive, but also very old-fashioned, dejavu, involuntarily self-mocking. Too much sound ruins even the best reportages: the rousing blues of Into the Fire and the solemn prayer of My City of Ruins. In his attempt to reach out to other cultures, Springsteen is no Peter Gabriel.The winners are on the opposite front: the desolate lament of Nothing Man, the apocalyptic vision of Empty Sky, the romantic farewell of the dying in Paradise.The lyrics read like a summary of tv news, talk shows and interviews with survivors of the World Trade Center.The simple, relaxed late-night ballads of Devils Dust , third of the acoustic trilogy with Nebraska and The Ghost Of Tom Joad, marked a significant change in tone. At times, he speaks as a spiritual person tormented by the thoughts of redemption and salvation, making the most of the historically incorrect Jesus Was an Only Son . The new phase is still a strange limbo of brooding emotions where history and heart still have to find a common ground.The first three albums recorded by Roxy Music revolutionized progressive-rock and prepared the way to the new wave and to synth-pop. The sounds of Pink Floyd , Soft Machine , Traffic , Cream , Led Zeppelin , King Crimson and the avantgarde merged in the inventive bacchanals of their debut album, Roxy Music , which includes the futuristic anthem Virginia Plain and several avant-rock pieces fueled by Brian Eno s electronics. Bryan Ferry s emphatic crooning soared unrestrained on For Your Pleasure , that contains the hypnotic synth-dance Bogus Man; and attained a kitschy quality on Stranded , whose ballads Mother Of Pearl and A Song For Europe wed the themes of European decadentism and existentialism with luxuriant arrangements and sleek production.Brian Eno, ex-keyboardist for Roxy Music, changed the course of rock music at least three times. The experiment of fusing pop and electronics on Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy changed the very notion of what a pop song is. The result was similar to the novelty numbers and the bubblegum music of the early 1960s, but it had the charisma of sheer post-modernist genius. The melodies could be renaissance madrigals, and the rhythm could be used by disco-music, but the whole did not sound like renaissance music or dance music at all: it sounded like the end of civilization. A learned practitioner of musique concrete, Cage s aleatory music, LaMonte Young s minimalism, Karlheinz Stockhausen s electronic music, Eno had an ambitious program of music for non-musicians that was the equivalent of Schoenberg s Theory of Harmony . If Schoenberg had argued in favor of a new way of composing , Eno basically proposed to abolish composition altogether, focusing instead on sound . Eno had begun to implement his program on Discreet Music , which was hardly music, and it was hardly his music: the composer only set it in motion. Music For Airports presented the result: ambient music , a music made of static drones and languid notes, a music that hardly changes at all, that hardly betrays any feeling at all, music that is meant not to be listened to, the avantgarde equivalent of supermarket muzak. On the way to becoming one of the most influential composers of the century, Eno had also become one of the most influential producers in rock music.After his numerous exploits of the 1970s and early 1980s, Eno never quite regained his stature as an oracle and a genius. He pioneered electronic music for the audience of rock music, but somehow was never fully in command of what happened later .When they formed in the mid 1980s, Boards Of Canada were originally a commune of Scottish artists and musicians, but they quickly thinned down to a trio and then eventually to the duo of electronic musicians Michael Sanderson and Marcus Eoin. Acid Memories is even less imposing, as are the 17 short pieces of Closes Volume 1 , but Play By Numbers , with the 9-minute Infinite Lines Of Colourful Sevens, showcased a more creative approach. The EP Hooper Bay , whose extended compositions are Seward Leaf, Noatak and Point Hope, heralded their mature phase, which yielded the 20 ambient tracks of the album Boc Maxima , particularly the melancholy Everything You Do Is A Balloon and their early masterpiece Turquoise Hexagon Sun. After the EP Twoism , the best tracks of the early years were reprised on Hi Scores and revealed the duo to a broader audience.The problem with their first full-length album, Music Has The Right To Children , is that it is too obviously inspired by their mentors Autechre. Theirs is mainly a science of cyclical drones and syncopated beats , that tends to get trapped in its own premises. The musicians successfully push the boundaries of that paradigm with the extra-galactic lounge music of Turquoise Hexagon Sun, the and the eight-minute Broadway-tinged fantasia Happy Cycling. Pete Standing Alone tries in vain to re-enact the magic of Telephasic Workshop. The album is virtually an anthology of their early days, as half of the material had been previously released. The EP In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country , that contains two gems, In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country and Kid For Today, introduced a gentler pace that was retained for the 23 tracks of Geogaddi . Rather than breaking new ground, this disc consolidates and refines the ideas of the debut: a sound that straddles the border between ambient, new age, psychedelia, glitch, hip-hop, and that concocts soothing, mellow, sugary atmospheres, albeit with a neurotic twist.The best results are probably achieved in the tracks that employ a stronger rhythm and a more varied dynamics: the melancholy middle-eastern prayer-like wail of Music is Math , the syncopated cacophonous carillon of Julie and Candy, the six-minute strained, elongated and warped ambience of Sunshine Recorder, the fluttering cubist lullaby 1969, and the almost tribal The Beach at Redpoint.The main tracks are separated by brief interludes of sonic debris . On the downside, the musicians tend to employ a technique of undulating mechanical patterns and voice collages that, after a while, gets predictable. The seven-minute fantasia Alpha and Omega harks back to the electronic pop novelties of the 1980s, despite a more intricate rhythmic pattern. This time the breadth and depth of the project left no doubt that Boards Of Canada were among the most adventurous electronic musicians of their generation. The Campfire Headphase is a much simpler work, a throwback to Boards of Canada s early music. The average tone of the songs is gently poignant: 84 Pontiac Dream, Tears From the Compound, Oscar See Through Red Eye, Peacock Tail unfold like deeply-felt sensations that are reluctant to materialize. Only the eerie six-minute Slow This Bird Down and the psychedelic nirvana of Dayvan Cowboy push the album to another dimension, and probably a more interesting dimension, but just not one that the duo can attain frequently.With the album Leisure Blur tried unashamedly to speculate on rock s tradition.The languid, mellow, flowery, affected psychedelia of She s So High and Bad Day is actually not completely epigonic , but it is also terribly tedious. The band can be more entertaining with the slightly more aggressive blues and soul shuffles of There s No Other Way and I Know, but too often they stumble on half-baked rock and roll numbers that would make reference to the Who . Blur were yet another Brit-pop band that has nothing to say but they said it in a sophisticated manner. The single Popscene led to the second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish , a decisive shift towards the more robust sound of the Who and the Kinks .Blur became rock musicians, and not mere Brit-pop icons, with their fifth album . Gone are the 3-minute witty and quirky pop ditties, replaced by extended compositions that take their time to develop a theme. No doubt this album would rank with the boldest efforts from the alternative scene, but there is nothing that countless bands haven t done before.Surprisingly, Blur s guitarist Graham Coxon is a much better songwriter, as displayed on his first solo, The Sky Is Too High , in a low-key, spare vein that recalls the suicidal agonies of Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen rather than the bombast of Brit-pop . The fact that the two best songs are the exceptions lends the songwriter even more credibility: the man is not just another whining, alienated, introverted singer songwriter. Unfortunately, The Golden D is the record of a completely different artist. The album sounds like a tribute to the sounds of his teenage years: punk-rock , dark metal , new wave, hip hop, etc.Coxon s third solo album, Crow Sit On Blood Tree , is a half-baked collection of subdued folk-rock ballads that could have easily summarized on a single or EP, as only one song stands out. His fourth solo album, The Kiss of Morning , improves quite a bit by setting Coxon s noisy folk-blues singalongs at the crossroad between Nick Drake and Syd Barrett . After the success of the bubblegum hit Freakin Out, Coxon delivered yet another hodge-podge of folk , hard-rock , country-rock , power-pop styles, Happiness in Magazines . Love Travels At Illegal Speeds was no less entertaining , and finally a bit raunchy too, despite being as unoriginal as Brit-pop can bet. Gorillaz is a collaboration between Damon Albarn and Dan The Automator Nakamura. The EP Tomorrow Comes Today features a number of high-caliber guests and is devoted to pop music played according to a cartoon aesthetic. Gorillaz , also known as Tomorrow Comes Today , contains an eccentric and cartoonish mixture of funk, dub, hip-hop, folk and rock . Gorillaz s Demon Days was de facto an Albarn solo album but no less inventive, just serious instead of comic, offering the same whirlwind of party music , hip-hop , rock , pop, electronica, etc. Blur s Think Tank , following Coxon s departure, is a confused hodgepodge of styles that simply proves how little inspired Blur have always been.Damon Albarn s Democrazy collects demos.Far from being predictable and dull, Blink 182 s punk-rock packs life stories and teen energy in catchy refrains and then stretches them over ever mutating structures. The commercial potential of Dumpweed s refrain does not deter from the pace, which peaks in the galloping singalong of Don t Leave Me and in the frantic Wendy Clear. The music is still mainly an echo of singer Mark Hoppus tirades, as epic while self-indulgent numbers like Going Away To College amply demonstrate. His attitude threatens to get out of control in the melancholy and subdued ballad Adam s Song, which soars with a pompous chorus. Sometimes too slow and too intelligent for its own sake, the album is redeemed by the senseless hoedown and the unstoppable bubblegum of All The Small Things.Take Off Your Pants And Jacket offers more fun music with the same high-school pranksters attitude. The existential and military uncertainty of the post-September 11 world seems to haunt even Blink 182 s jovial punk-pop on Blink-182 .Blink 182 s vocalist Tom DeLonge formed Angels and Airwaves with guitarist David Kennedy, bassist Ryan Sinn and Offspring s drummer Atom Willard.The most influential female singer-songwriter of the 1990s was neither American nor British: Sugarcubes s singer Bjork Gudmundsdottir came out of Iceland, of all places. Debut employed massive doses of electronic keyboards and synthetic rhythms to sculpt dance-pop tunes that combined the savage, vital spirit of rhythm n blues with the psychic devastation of the post-industrial age. Her eccentric vocal style, which was the musical equivalent of cinematic acting, dominated Post , an album that focused more openly on the groove and that the producers turned into a hodgepodge of fashionable sounds. Her traumas sounded more sincere on Homogenic , which was also her most cohesive album; while Selmasongs and Vespertine merely admitted her fundamental travesty of kitsch, easy listening and orchestral pop of the past. Sometimes, Bjork can t help proving that she is one the most over-rated songwriters of the 1990s, and she manages the task wonderfully on Selmasongs . Cvalda and I ve Seen It All are probably the least pretentious tracks here, and it is no surprise that they rank also among the most sincere. Elsewhere, orchestral arrangements and synthetic rhythms reduce her voice to a mere marketing device for what is, ultimately, passionate easy listening set to dance beats, show tunes in the most conservative Broadway tradition. The first impression with Bjork s music is always of something terribly trivial, obnoxious and, ultimately, boring. Bjork is a plastic fantastic vocalist, who can turn pretty much any sequence of notes into a song and add a magical, oneiric feeling to whatever plays around her, but Hidden Place is merely easy listening with echoes of 1960s film music in the ethereal choir. The bubbling, sparkling, delicate tapestry of It s Not up To You eventually releases a string-driven aria that belongs to Broadway shows.The subdued, disjointed, timidly noisy electronics perfectly complement Bjork s wandering and overdubbed vocals in Undo, ranking as the second most important trick of the album, soon joined by the ever more cosmic choir. By the fifth track you are beginning to sense that there is very little of substance, just those two tricks and Bjork s voice.Too mellow to display any significant emotion, the album lives of romantic and surreal soundscapes, broadly reminiscent of film and show tunes. She is not a genius of composition, but her paradisiac, fairy-queen crooning has indeed created something new the way Hendrix s guitar invented something new. She doesn t own the arrangements, and often seems indifferent to them , but the album s complexity is the ideal setting for her art, whatever her art is. Just like the Beatles before her, Bjork has made trivial pop music enhanced with studio wizardry.Family Tree is a six-CD box-set that collects rare and previously unreleased material.If an unknown musician makes a wildly experimental album, few will notice. But if a pop star makes a mildly experimental album, critics will go beserk writing how daring and adventurous she is. Medulla is ostensibly a vocal album with electronic and digital production work, but no traditional instruments at all; and ostensibly inspired by the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York . The album is an exhibition of her knowledge of the state of the art in recording technology and her good taste in picking collaborators . Beyond this, the album contains the radio-friendly Who Is It and Oceania, the hip-hop of Triumph of the Heart, the mildly entertaining Pleasure Is All Mine and Submarine, the pulsing production tour de force of Where is the Line and the laid-back, almost angelic, Desired Constellation.This is not to say that the album is a bore. There are career highlights: the harrowing a-cappella kammerspiels of Show Me Forgiveness and Vokuro and the chilling Freudian soundscapes of Oll Birtan and Ancestors. This is an album of vocal atmospherics , and that would be enough to make it an interesting piece of work, although a far cry from the truly experimental atmospheric vocalists of our time . Just do not exaggerate her merits. In a veiled case of blackxploitation , Bjork has adopted that idea and bent it to the intellectual aesthetic ideals of the European culture. Like all pop stars, she pretends to straddle the line between experimentation and commercial sell-out, when in fact she is simply advertising her product over and over again, the ultimate commercial trick. It is an insult to all the experimental musicians in the world to claim that there is even a bit of experimentation in this album. The change in mood is, all in all, even more interesting than the music: gone is the naive and or erotic tone of her former self, and Bjork is suddenly a scared human being adrift in the wild river of history. Army Of Me collects remixes and covers of the namesake song.Bjork debuted as a composer of soundtracks in Matthew Barney s film Drawing Restraint 9 . Her eleven vignettes, inspired by Japan s noh theater, were performed by an international cast of musicians including Zeena Parkins, Will Oldham, Akira Rabelais, Mayumi Miyata, She is definitely a better vocalist than musician.Seattle became a gold mine with Nirvana, formed by vocalist guitarist Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Chris Novoselic. They, too, played hard-rock, but they also injected abnormal doses of emotion into it and had a melodic flair that the others lacked. Nevermind , featuring new drummer Dave Grohl , increased the melodic factor, and found an even more unlikely balance between pathos and disgust, tenderness and rage, melancholy and rebellion.Nirvana s origins are rooted in the Melvins entourage: Kurt Cobain , and Chris Novoselic , two Aberdeen fans of the masters of doom, adopted the punk mystique and started playing in private. A few months later, Cobain wrote a bunch of songs with Croven, which were collected in a cassette-only release, titled FECAL MATTER.Nirvana s first release was the single Love Buzz Big Cheese , of which only 1,000 copies were printed. In the year of ULTRAMEGA OK s, Nirvana came forth as a natural follow up to the Soundgarden s revolution, rehashing hard rock s deepest roots in a less oleographic, more calligraphic style - placing more emphasis on melody and instrumental skills.Leveraging on the success of these two songs, the album BLEACH, released in the following June , created quite a sensation. Floyd The Barber and Scoff are loud outbursts of painful noise, burping fiery riffs and syncopated beats, resonating of the Stooges, the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith, yet sustaining the commotion with a ghastly tender melody and vehement refrains, closer to revolutionary slogans than rock music. Cobain tops such a sequence of desperate acts by indulging in the hopelessly negative sarcasm that stills from the shouted rigmarole of Negative Creep and Mr.The influence of the hard rock classics, mostly Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, is evident in Blew and School, ignited as they are by unrelenting shocks of blues. Still, their masterpiece is the album most atypical song: About A Girl, a piece flung back into the 60 s by garage rock accents and sweet folk rock sound. If doubts persist about the music s originality, Cobain s anguish was no doubts sincere; he ranks as the first composer since Jim Morrison who succeedeed in the risky task of expressing sorrow through catchy tunes. NEVERMIND, their next album, recorded by Cobain, Novoselic and a new drummer , was released in October 1991 and was to become one of the greatest hits of the year. Smells Like Teen Spirit, an epic, angry cry in the style of the Replacements, is the album s opening song which quickly rose to cult status, symbolizing the apathetic and caustic spirit of a generation. Treading in its wake, songs like Breed build a wall of noise according to a musical lexicon which has been reduced to minimum terms and maximum means in order to wed juvenile frustration and metaphysical yearning. However, in this caldron of burning lava, some intense and weary ballads shine too - In Bloom, Lithium and On A Plain which are the album s true heart. It is only in the stormy raptures of Territorial Pissing and in the wild ferociousness of Stay Away that Nirvana recall their origins; Cobain is at his top as a singer, he can even transform the acoustic moaning of Polly or the moribund whisper of Something In The Way into magical and ominous atmospheres. Elements of the Sixties proudly surface in Lounge Act, revealing that, after all, this is the same good old bubblegum, now performed with the grace of a bulldozer, its main ancestor being the Los Angeles powerpop of the 70 s. The obvious commercial potential of the album did not cut off Cobain s hard-core fans from him: he still shined as a mythical, fiendish character and kept on asserting his belief in the punk creed. The album was followed by several discographical speculations , until their third real album, IN UTERO , appeared in 1993. It had been announced as a brutal and harsh work - yet another Seattle-style marketing scoop - as if Nirvana should refuse their modern pop star status. Their idea of rock music can not be delivered in more than a couple of ways, so they are forced to repeat in Rape Me the substance of Teen Spirit and in Radio Friendly Unit Shifter the essence of Negative Creep. In Pennyroyal Tea, Heart-Shaped Box and Serve The Servants an endless sequence of grunge surgery is performed upon the Beatles somatic features. If NEVERMIND had been greeted as a generation s manifesto, IN UTERO is nothing else but Cobain s personal odyssey ; he needs to face his own post-teenage disorders but he has neither the mental skills nor the moral maturity to do it. The result is the same as in the previous album: a dark and aimless feeling of impotence, forbereance, fatalism, that well summarizes the navel-quality of Cobain s music. Gifted as they were with a superior melodic talent, Nirvana managed to become the undisputed rulers of the scene in a very short time, but their artistic skills may not deserve the ovations they received and they certainly owe quite a bit to the pioneers of grunge . Cobain committed suicide in April 1994.But his persona was too weak and confused to turn that idea into a real life.Trent Reznor s Nine Inch Nails changed dramatically the fate of industrial music. The thundering polyrhytms, the chaotic and cacophonous orgies, the grotesque danse macabres , the chamber blues pieces, the harsh counterpoints, the mournful melodies were carefully assembled to deliver the sense of a man without a past or a present or a future, a man who was a pure abstraction in search of meaning, pure form in search of content. Reznor showed that he was not interested in angst for the sake of angst, and cared more for meditation on his own angst; that he was not indulging in insanity but merely puzzled by it. After a long period of silence, Reznor was expected to save rock and roll from the dozens of Nine Inch Nails pale imitations that roamed the airwaves, was expected to deliver some definitive statement about art and life. Reznor shows that he is not interested in angst for the sake of angst and cares more for meditation on his own angst; that he is not indulging in insanity but merely puzzled by it. The album is, in fact, largely autobiographic, the title being a dedication to himself, the industrial ripper who has realized his inherent fragility, his deep need to fill the void he had created around himself. While the melodic, disturbing bombast of We re In This Together, Somewhat Damaged s machine-gun rhythm-box and bass loop, and the driving progression and singalong refrain of Please are the clear attention-grabbers, it is the emotional black holes that betray flashes of Reznor s soul as it is burning, such as the virulent riff of The Wretched, attacked by alien frequencies over haunting piano notes; or the evil deflagration of Starfuckers Inc over a swamp of syncopated polyrhythms; or the eerie lament in the killing fields of Underneath it all. All the instrumentals fall in the latter category: the terrifying chaotic cacophonous orgy of Just Like You Imagined, that sounds like a peek into another world, the grotesque danse macabre of Pilgrimage; the ambient chamber music of La Mer, rising and ebbing; the futuristic blues of The Mark Has Been Made; the closing, subdued, cryptic sonata Ripe. Two discs may be two much for what Reznor has to say at this point in his career life. Occasionally too emphatic , occasionally too friendly to the new fads , occasionally even pathetic , Reznor is more than ever a titanic hero, but not an infallible one. Things Fall Apart are remixes from Fragile. And All That Could Have Been is a live concert. Having lost the rage, Reznor decided to focus on the sound of his machines for With Teeth . All the Love in the World, Only, the closing ballad Right Where It Belongs and the dance-rock novelty The Hand That Feeds are hardly what one expects from the master of paranoia. Maybe You Know What You Are and The Line Begins to Blur were meant as the psychopathic punches of the album, but they sound harmless like a deadly missile exhibited at a museum of old military technology. His voice sits uncomfortably in the front of the mix, and his lyrics In an age in which even Brian Wilson is hailed as a genius, Reznor probably felt that he had no choice but to submit to the dumbness of his contemporaries.Before he died in 1974, Nick Drake managed to record only three albums, but that meagre repertory is enough to rank him among the most influential singer-songwriters of all times. If rock music had emphasized the emotional aspect of music in ever more creative ways, Drake did the opposite: his music seems to cancel out the emotional factor, his voice sounds neutral, anemic and indifferent, the arrangements are spectral and almost silent . Drake s lost, tenuous, taciturn manner scoured the terminal states of melancholy, angst and despair for a reason to live this life. Drake fumbled blindfolded on the edge of the abyss, and his songs were the thoughts that accompanied him while waiting for the fall. The lyrical, elegiac and naive Five Leaves Left was already representative of the drama that developed via Bryter Layter , mildly revitalized by soul and rhythm n blues spices, and that reached its climax with Pink Moon , Drake s masterpiece and one of the most depressing albums of all times. Neurosis added keyboards and samples to their background of speed-metal and hardcore to craft the terrible visions of Souls At Zero , that scoured infernal depths and treaded a fine line between improvisation and composition. Through Silver In Blood , possibly their masterpiece, was a work of spasmodic tension that constantly teeters on the edge of the psychic abyss. Neurosis music was one of psychological subtlety, based on the cynical orchestration of eerie dissonances, heavy riffs, frantic drumming, instrumental distortions, screams, whispers and echoes, a blend that mostly sounded like the nightmare of a deranged mind. Static Migration , an extreme experiment of electronic and guitar-based sound-painting, was mainly a collaboration between Steve Von Till and Pain Teens Scott Ayers . Souls heavy, gothic and futuristic style became a classic with Enemy Of The Sun .Lost is an agonizing piece, that lays down Black Sabbath s agonizing, emphatic delivery and slow, rumbling rhythms over a wind of found voices. A renaissance hymn is brutally raped and smashed in the epileptic fits of rock and roll that shake Raze The Stray, a track that hosts some of the visceral riffs in Neurosis career. The title-track is emblematic of the psychological subtlety of this music, no matter how degraded and devoluted it appears to be: after a lengthy introduction of eerie dissonances, whispers and echoes, that sound like the nightmare of a deranged mind, Black Sabbath-ian riffs lead to a drama in which human screams and instrumental distortions play a sort of call and response soon matched by savage, frantic drumming that functions as a third voice.The majestic, hyper-glooomy The Time Of The Beasts stands as both the anthem and the requiem for these enemies of the sun . The intensity is so harrowing that the shorter tracks are not songs: they are veritable infernos, their instruments the musical equivalent of burning embers. As the singer screams exoteric formulas, Lexicon is devastated by apocalyptic drumming, chaotic guitar riffs, machine-gun bass lines, and abominable noises. The tribal, bass-heavy Cold Ascending builds an ideal bridge between Neurosis post-industrial music, the sub-gothic moods of Swans and the criminal accelerations of Black Flag.Tribes Of Neurot is a side-project by the Neurosis members, who use this moniker to release more experimental music. Tribes Of Neurot debuted with the double 7 Rebegin and first proved to be more than a distraction with Silver Blood Transmission , an epic-length instrumental album containing live improvisations of an unnerving kind. Another track, The Accidental Process, seems to describe the way in which that sonic sludge turns into melody and rhythm and harmony. In common with Neurosis, Tribes Of Neurot has the passion for extreme sounds, and that seems to be the main thematic key of the work.Fires Of Purification returns to a more typical format, a tribal orgy a la Crash Worship, enhanced with power-drills, jackhammers and assorted noises. Achtwan is a gigantic, and unabashedly ambitious, avantgarde piece, 24 minutes of discrete noise and long pauses, deliberately discordant and unpleasant, the ultimate metal machine music . Tribes Of Neurot is classical music for punks. The album was followed by the mini-CD Locust Star and the 10 God Of The Center .Continuing Neurosis evolution, Through Silver In Blood outperforms Enemy Of The Sun in terms of musical construction and sheer emotional power. The 12-minute title-track is a concentrate of everything that makes Neurosis such an extreme experience: tribal drums, terrifying riffs, death-metal vocals. The music teeters on the edge of the psychic abyss, like King Crimson s 21st Century Schizoid Man played by 21st century schizoid men, and then relents into an agonizing declamation set in a desolate soundscape. Another 12-minute nightmare, Purify, exhales a loudly stoned, Hendrix-ian blues before erupting with evil riffs and manic screams; until the sound fades in a surreal sonata for clangs, bagpipes and tribal beat.Aeon has a different feel, because the spasmodic tension is released in Pink Floyd-ian calm and then in utter cosmic panic. Enclosure In Flame is the lengthy ceremony that closes the album, the musical equivalent of piercing an eye with a blazing blade. With As The Crow Flies Steve Von Till, Neurosis main composer, has written his first truly shocking album, not because it expands on the band s apocalyptic industrial-metal, but precisely because it does the opposite: Von Till finds shelter in acoustic chamber pieces for piano, guitar and strings. Like the later Swans, Von Till has trascended his inner ghosts and achieved a personal nirvana, no less disquieting than the stormy neurosis that preceded it. A transition for Neurosis began with their album Times of Grace . Despite the apocalyptic emphasis of End of the Harvest and the lugubrious, 10-minute hymn of Away, tracks like Prayer and Belief are actually regular songs. Suspended In Light The Road To Sovereign threnodies The band is also maturing as a whole, as drummer Jason Roeder and keyboardist Noah Landis contribute to the overall sound as much as leaders Scott Kelly and Steven Von Till. Tribes Of Neurot s Grace is the companion album, one that focuses on textures and atmospherics rather than on brains and emotions, not a remix but a complement. Sixty Degrees compiles Tribes of Neurot singles and rarities. Neurosis Sovereign is an EP that collects four lengthy tracks that were excluded from Times Of Grace . A simpler, thinner and less noisy production lends A Sun That Never Sets a mellow, gloomy feeling akin to late Swans and Nick Cave. The symphonic poem The Title is the perfect introduction to the mature style of Neurosis: an acoustic theme opens the tale in the fashion of apocalyptic folk, borrowing Nick Cave s prophetic tone; then a majestic viola-driven waltz takes over, almost a concession to neo-classical ambitions; and finally the song erupts in a Black Sabbath-ian panzer-riff, that makes Type O Negative s suites sound gentle. Von Till does not waste time in From The Hill to vent his angst in his best death-metal register over funereal beats, with an accompaniment that at one point even sounds like pipes and that keep rising in emphasis. A Sun That Never Sets is a sort of appendix, music for burying souls that are still alive, an ultra-gothic march through dark catacombs. especially The Tide feature the best enunciations The gripping intensity of these pieces is, unfortunately, diluted by the lengthy Falling Unknown, that features a cosmic electronic intermezzo and some tedious repetition of past stereotypes. The demonic pow-wow dance of From Where Its Roots Run reopens the gates of hell, that are finally burned by Watchfire, a symphonic threnody of devastating power. The epic ten-minute raga of Stones From the Sky, that ends the album with a tribal orgy of biblical proportions and with the guitar s tremolo evoking another dimension, highlights the band s cohesive playing. Despite a pervasive, Pink Floyd-ian repetition of the melodic theme over and over again, until it drills holes in the subconscious, this album represents the classical stage of Neurosis.Tribes of Neurot s Adaptation and Survival - The Insect Project is a two-disc project, whose music is the electronic digital manipulation of field recordings of insects.Von Till continued the passion begun with As The Crow Flies on another desolate collection, If I Should Fall To The Field . This time around, the selection is less harrowing, but the delivery is still glacial and macabre, very similar to Michael Gira s. Neurosis guitarist Scott Kelly debuted solo with the acoustic sub-folk music of Spirit Bound Flesh . Scott Kelly also started the project Blood Time with Neurosis keyboardist Noah Landis: the sound of At The Foot Of the Garden is post-rock grafted on folk-rock, diluting Neurosis apocalypse in a more human melancholy. The collaboration between Neurosis Jarboe is largely a wasted chance.The Eye Of Every Storm is another slab of apocalyptic industrial folk. Not only anything can happen during a song, but everything must happen, in order to maximize the devastating effect on an audience that becomes more and more dependent on sheer instability, addicted on being taken constantly on and beyond the edge. Harvestman s Lashing The Rye was Steve Von Till s venture into psychedelic folk. Tribes of Neurot returned after a four-year hiatus with Meridian , the least accomplished album of the series, ten pieces that test different aspects of sound manipulation art but fail to achieve any memorable result.One of the greatest and most distinctive musical geniuses of the 20th century, Tom Waits was apparently a barbarian but in reality an erudite post-modern artist.His first major artistic achievement was the trilogy of Small Change , Foreign Affairs and Blue Valentine . The bittersweet vignettes of these albums formed the musical equivalent of Balzac s comedie humaine transposed to the lowlives of urban America. Waits wed a very personal idiom, made up of free associations in the style of beat poetry, with an eclectic idea of what a song is, one that draws from diverse traditions of white and black popular music . What kept the whole together is Waits voice, which was also the most unlikely element of cohesion, being the musical equivalent of the stench of a skunk. Especially when coupled with the pretty arrangements of established genres, that voice became the perfect tool to depict the inner, anarchic ugliness of the individual within the organized beauty of society. The unitary and coherent qualities of his songs emanated out of a psychic landscape that was lugubrious and arcane, and in which the singer played the archetypical role of the visionary misfit. The process of identification by the pop star with the masses of nomads, derelicts, bums and tramps reached a new stage with Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs , his two masterpieces. Here Waits turned to theatre, thus enhancing the narrative content, while at the same time the acquisition of ever more refined arrangement techniques transformed his degenerate bacchanal into baroque elegance. In one of the most surprising mutations in the history of genetics, the most barbaric of songwriters turned out to be the most neo-traditional of composers. Waits syncretic art continued to flourish on Franks Wild Years and Bone Machine , bordering on stylistic self-indulgence.Waits did not belong to any of the schools and movements of his age.Small Change was the album that clarified the misunderstanding: the musichall was a tragedy. His voice was not poking fun at pop singers: it was a lyrical and desparate voice, wailing on behalf of humankind. The bulk of the album contains the drunk, melancholy vignettes of Jitterbug Boy, The Piano Has Been Drinking, Invitation To The Blues, I Can t Wait To Get Off Work, that echo pop ballads, blues dirges and jazz standards while mocking them all. The tragicomedy peaks with the touching orchestral laments of Tom Traubert s Blues and I Wish I Was In New Orleans, the former a superb example of chamber pop, the latter a jazzy bluesy lullaby. Waits toys with his own semantics when he apes Louis Armstrong in the dixieland jazz of Step Right Up and other amusing novelties.Waits took a long creative break, during which the main output was music for cinema: Big Time , which recycles old songs for a documentary, and the soundtracks for One from the Heart and Night on Earth .The Black Rider is yet another theatrical work, premiered in 1990 in Hamburg by Robert Wilson, this time around with William Burroughs on spoken-word . The program is a little predictable, given Waits catalogue, but nonetheless offers a glorious ride through the artifacts of American popular folklore. None of the pieces is meant to be a masterwork, but the whole is meant to evoke a place and a time . That voice turns into a circus entertainer in The Black Rider, that harks back to the 1920s, the beginning of a long journey through the musical psyche of the USA , passing by the Broadway showtune of I ll Shoot the Moon and the funereal New Orleans fanfare of Lucky Day. But, for example, the African polyrhythmic percussions of Oily Night are wasted in a crescendo that doesn t seem to know why it is a crescendo.Alice , also dating from 1993 and also a theatrical soundtrack, is one of his most idyllic and ethereal works ; in fact, an absolute oddity within his repertoire. The delicate lounge jazz of Alice, caressed by vibraphone and alto sax, opens the album, but there are relatively few nods to his blues jazz roots . There are still strong numbers of his nostalgic and demented musichall: Kommienezuepadt , Everything You Can Think Of Is True, a waltzing tune that turns into an expressionist nightmare, and Reeperbahn. He returns, as he always does, growl or no growl, to the grand pop ballad for violin and piano , and ever more often pens neoclassical arias . The top, as it is often the case with his mature albums, is reached with an elegy that is both funereal and rousing, Fish Bird, the ideal fusion of New Orleans marching band, classical orchestra and jazz combo. Bone Machine , the first album of original and non-soundtrack material in seven years, features cameos by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, Primus bassist Les Claypool, Los Lobos David Hidalgo, and the usual Ralph Carney. On the one hand there are songs performed in a casual, amateurish or downright demented manner and sung in a psychotic register. The culmination of this ritual of primitive deconstruction is the voodoo novelty with reverbed guitar twang of Goin Out West, like the Cramps jamming with Free. On the lyrical front, Waits indulges in the usual mood of drunk melancholy with the dirge Dirt In The Ground, the country-ish lullaby A Little Rain, and the epic, romantic Whistle Down The Wind, the album s zenith of pathos. He even takes a stab at atmospheric music with Black Wings, whose guitar phrasing apes Ennio Morricone s celestial melodies, and the childish nursery-rhyme I Don t Wanna Grow Up seems to wash it all away with a smile. Alternating yin with yang, Waits experiments a call and response style that percolates from one song into the next one.Whistle Down The Wind and Goin Out West alone are worth the price of the CD. Beautiful Maladies is an anthology of the early years. Mule Variations , the first solo studio effort in seven years, celebrates Tom Waits sudden popularity around the world. As his genius gets the recognitions that it had long deserved, Waits must have thought it wise to make an album that is a tribute to his own style and his own biography.But the relaxed mood ends up draining Waits inspiration. There are some of his trademark vignettes: the dissonant James Brown-ian stomping rhythm n blues of Big In Japan, the Captain Beefheart-ian voodoo dance of Filipino Box Spring Hog, the hysterical spiritual-like shout Eyeball Kid . On a much more serious tone than ever, he unveils the ballad Hold On , the solemn piano hymn Picture in a Frame, the moving piano and accordion elegy Georgia Lee, the whispered piano ballad Take It With Me the country yarn House Where Nobody Lives. Then he tops them all with the magniloquent gospel Come On Up To the House that signals his acquired peace of mind.Blood Money , another co-production with his wife Kathleen Brennan and another set of songs inspired by a Robert Wilson opera, is an impeccable work, whose only problem is to be too Waits-ian . Waits recycles old tricks, and some are, indeed, very impressive, such as Misery Is the River of the World , and Starving In The Belly Of A Whale , and best would have been the dissonant chamber music for small ensemble of Knife Chase and Calliope, had he chosen to developed them beyond the sketchy two minutes that they are. But many songs are mere repetitions of old ideas, and sometimes in a childish manner , and the only new idea is underdeveloped at best. A melancholy acid blues number such as Everything Goes to Hell is almost dejavu, although the study in contrast is sophisticated . Thus All The World Is Green and A Good Man Is Hard To Find evoke Armstrong at, respectively, his saddest and his most joyful. Whether professional or ironic, Waits keeps finding new ways to elude his ghosts while impersonating them one more time. Real Gone is a spartan album that leaves to be desired. Metropolitan Glide, Trampled Rose and the 10-minute blues dirge Sins Of The Father form the core of the collection: the accompaniment is adequate, but the piano is sorely missed.If post-rock was the key to understanding the 1990s, pre-rock was the key to understanding the early 2000s.White Stripes , recorded in their basement, was a modest endeavour that rekindled visions of Jon Spencer covering Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin . Leveraging atonal guitars, sloppy vocals and trash rhythms, the White Stripes achieved a sense of poignancy and urgency that is truly the soul of the blues. The more professional De Stijl offered a wealth of sonic extracts of blues music without actually playing blues music. You re Pretty Good Looking is classic power-pop, with a refrain and a riff that have been heard countless times since the early Kinks singles.On the other hand, Hello Operator boasts the aggressive vocals of Chicago s rhythm n blues and the guitar of hyper-syncopated blues-rock a la Free. Best is perhaps I m Bound to Pack It Up, a quintessential Delta blues imitation sung the way the British bands used to in the early 1960s.Animals, but the comparison only shows how inferior the White Stripes are.Jack White s guitar is not innovative, inventive or acrobatic.White Blood Cells is a mixed bag. On the other hand, the power ballad The Same Boy You ve Always Known, the catchy and martial country-rock Hotel Yorba and the poppy folk-rock Fell in Love with a Girl signal a new, more conventional direction.Surprisingly, the band did not turn radio-friendly in response to the hype. Elephant continues their fusion of Led Zeppelin and John Spencer Blues Explosion with Seven Nation Army, Black Math, The Hardest Button To Button, Girl You Have No Faith in Medicine, In The Cold Cold Night, but it displays the real soul of the leader with the seven-minute rhythm n blues number, Ball and Biscuit, that sounds like a tribute to Chicago circa 1950.The White Stripes entered their adult stage with Get Behind Me Satan , that, unlike its predecessor, does not repeat White Stripes cliches but rather expands them into many directions. It feels, overall, more more melancholy and content than the previous ones, as if juvenile anger were slowly being replaced by middle-age s resignation. The energetic Blue Orchid, the convoluted bluesy Red Rain, the majestic Forever For Her, the exuberant alt-bluegrass Little Ghost, and the bizarre disco-punk of My Doorbell and The Denial Twist use the same building blocks to create a new kind of architecture.The Raconteurs are a side project by Jack White and singer songwriter Brendan Benson plus bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler.Xiu Xiu is an experimental San Diego-based rock band led by vocalist Jamie Stewart and framed by Cory McCulloch s bass and Yvonne Chen s and Lauren Andrews cheesy keyboards that debuted with the five-song EP Chapel Of The Chimes . Knife Play is a highly eccentric and creative album that ideally bridges the generation of Pere Ubu and the generation of Radiohead . Witness how the unbecoming threnody of Don Diasco careens through cacophonous miasma and erratic percussions; how waves of agonizing vocals tame the techno pulse of Over Over; how the dissonances scour the sparse landscape Anne Dong for meaning; how Suha attains a lyrical splendor, despite the organ, the guitar, the accordion and the saxophone take turns at ridiculing the voice; how the neurotic elegy of Luber, drained by a horn fanfare, manages to sound grotesquely insane but also humanely touching. I Broke Up embraces an odd tempo and wildly distorted noises to accompany a simply melody. Poe Poe charges with the impetus of Pere Ubu s best modern dances , although sabotaged by a disco-fied voodoobilly beat and by quasi-orchestral keyboards.The impression is one of an unfinished masterpiece, a design that was carefully planned but was only partially implemented. Given the bold premises and the caleidoscopic imagination of the musicians, the album unleashed only half of the power that it could have. Jamie Stewart has created one of the few truly innovative styles of singing of the decade, hardly singing at all. The use of silence and of non-melodic singing was even more prominent and effective on A Promise , that continued their exploration of the border between music and non-music. Gothic in spirit, but too rarified to be anything at all, Xiu Xiu s music left behind any melodic pretense, focusing almost exclusively on the atmosphere. Stewart s schizoid persona dominates the proceedings, from the declamation of Sad Pony Guerilla Girl, against sparse, acoustic, ukulele-style guitar strumming, and suddenly devastated by electronic noise, to the agonizing screaming of Apistat Commander, with casual beats and electronic noises and sudden explosions of hysterical jackhammer electronic rhythm, to Brooklyn Dodgers, in which Stewart s wavering prayer-like vocals reach a develish intensity.There is more silence than music in Sad Redux-O-Grapher, barely caressed by a mournful violin and digital bits, otherwise surrendered to the tortured vocals. 20,000 Deaths for Eidelyn Gonzales 20,000 Deaths for Jamie Peterson is emblematic of the difference between this new wave and the new wave of 1977: compared with Suicide, the electronic melody sounds sardonic, the electronic rhythm is irregular, the vocals hum instead of biting. The only pieces that can compare with the terrible neurosis of Nine Inch Nail are Pink City, that boasts the loudest rhythm and distortion, but the vocals are merely a whisper and the nightmare is over in just two minutes, and Blacks, scarred by sudden bursts of atrocious guitar riffs. Stewart s dramatic skills have further improved. Not only is each instrument limited to a few seconds of sound, and not only are those sounds mostly atonal, but there is virtually no counterpoint, harmony, polyphony.Xiu Xiu went synth-pop on Fabulous Muscles , but not really. The more intense use of electronics enhanced the emotional appeal of Stewart s suicidal kammerspiels , and did not detract from the vibrant, hysterical edge that underlies the band s most memorable moments . Despite the more commercial melodies and the far less impressive vocal range, Jamie Stewart s persona resembles the young David Thomas: a rambling neurotic who indulges in provocative, cathartic, theatrical, unsettling performances that come through as both bizarre and lyrical, vicious and shy, evil and sweet. Repenting from the trivial tunesmithship of the previous album, the band returns to more adventurous structures: Saturn, the decadent and danceable Pox, the quasi-industrial Muppet Face, the medieval and gothic Rose of Sharon.Ciautistico!Life And Live is a live album.The Zombies were perhaps the most refined and extravagant songwriters of the Merseybeat era. She s Not There , by way of Colin Blunstone s orgasmic panting and hollow falsetto, and author Rod Argent s celestial solo at the electric piano, made it clear that this band set itself apart from the Merseybeat and from the rhythm and blues, as demonstrated by the album Begins Here . From Tell Her No to Time Of Season , guitarist Chris White and Rod Argent co-wrote eccentric songs, often imbued with soul and jazz. Their masterpiece Odyssey Oracle released after the band s breakup, one of the first albums to employ the mellotron, remains, together with the Beach Boys Pet Sounds, at the apex of baroque pop.The quadruple record Zombie Heaven contains everything the band recorded. Afterwards White and Argent formed Argent, a progressive rock band with Russ Ballard.What Walter Carlos had done for electronic pop music, Jean-Michel Jarre did for electronic dance music. Oxygene and Equinoxe merely overlapped and contrasted a catchy melody, a steady beat and a synthesizer, while the electronic poems of Le Chant Magnetique explored melodic electronica at a more abstract level.The two albums cut by Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures and Closer , before vocalist Ian Curtis committed suicide and the band evolved into New Order, coined a new kind of gothic, decadent, futuristic and psychedelic rock, and offered an unlikely mixture of Doors, Kraftwerk and Black Sabbath.Among the pioneers of the new wave of heavy metal, Judas Priest rediscovered the evil iconography and gothic overtones of Blue Oyster Cult and Black Sabbath on their second album, Sad Wings Of Destiny . They became stars in the 1980s, when they embraced a futuristic and sadomaso look, and began crafting melodic and magniloquent power-ballads. The new-wave band that was going to have the greatest impact worldwide was the most unlikely one: the Ramones, who simply played inept rock n roll at supersonic speed. Their frenzy was not exactly intellectual, and certainly had no artistic ambition, but was exactly what legions of frustrated kids had been waiting for. Iinspired by New York Dolls and Dictators, Ramones , a rapid-fire collection of brief songs that were intentionally demented and clownish, invented the most significant genre of the last quarter century of the 20th century. Rocket To Russia , their masterpiece, was the ultimate item of junk art : a ridiculous catalog of rockabilly, surf music, Mersey-beat and bubblegum music, but charged with the violence of the slums. A few more classics followed, although Do You Remember Rock And Roll Radio and Bop Til You Drop flirted with heavy-metal and missed the exuberant recklessness of their early days. Their lifestyle was rude and barbaric, their philosophy was a simple I Don t Care and their slogan was gabba-gabba-hey : this was the revolution that changed the face of western civilization.