Devo, Confrontational Punks; Grandaddy Returns; Shivaree, Ruined by Beck

New York" SIZE=5> That Beck. He's ruined everything.     A couple of years ago, Shivaree would have been a fairly pleasant outfit in the style of a Sally Timms-fronted Mekons. But ever since the advent of Beck and his bleedin' postmodern hybrid music, every last country hopeful is wearing the baggy strides and making faces at the four-on-the-floor contingent. Shivaree's exotically named Ambrosia Parsley has a delightful hiccup in her vocals, a sweet way of rolling one syllable into the next that would endear her to men with far hardier hearts than mine. She knows when to yodel. More importantly, she knows when to stop. She sings from the back of her throat like Cerys Matthews, if it's possible to sound like Matthews without sounding Welsh. So why, then, does half of I Oughtta sound like it wants to get into bed with the Bloodhound Gang? That bleedin' Beck and his bleedin' drum machines. There ought to be a law against it.

It's not like Shivaree don't have their moments. The high-spirited "Darling Lousy Guy" and nursery rhyme segment "Cannibal King" both rollick like dark angels on LSD. "Arlington Girl," too, starts off by clip-clopping and breathing heavily like a sex line populated by equines. After three of four numbers seamlessly rounded off and given a coating of beats, the production starts to grate, however. "Lunch" should have the phrase "Out to" inserted in the title. "I Don't Care"?sadly not a cover of the Ramones' minimalist classic?is too damn cool for its own good. Could well be more massive than Massive.

Everett True

Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology Devo (Rhino)

Some 20 years ago, Devo played a show in Chicago. They were approaching the height of their popularity at the time, and drew a crowd of thousands. Given the nature of things then, the crowd consisted mostly of punks.

That's why it seemed such a shockingly bad decision to have a Christian band open the show.

They called themselves Dove, and made it through about three soft, gentle numbers about God's love and the power of Christ's forgiveness before the barrage of garbage and beer bottles, hoots and catcalls finally forced them off the stage.

Nobody in the audience that night, it seemed, bothered to notice that if you rearranged the letters D-O-V-E, you ended up with the name of the headliner.

I wasn't a huge Devo fan at the time, but that move?opening for themselves as a Christian band?really, really impressed me. It was a very hardcore stunt for a new-wave act to pull.

It wasn't like I went out and bought a lot of Devo records after that. I heard enough of them as it was on the radio. Still, though it's something I could never admit, I secretly really liked them.

Formed in Ohio in 1972 by Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, Devo, it goes pretty much without saying, defined what we think of when we think of 80s-style new wave: the cold, repetitive electronic sound and jerky, mechanical presentation, the futurist attitude, the goofy fashion and the video style of the time. Of course they were making a point with it all about the dehumanizing effects of contemporary culture, but whatever.

Only problem with Devo was, after defining "new wave," and being copied by a couple hundred Casio-wielding bands, they never got much beyond that point. In their later albums, their dance remixes and their soundtrack work for films like Doctor Detroit and Revenge of the Nerds II, it often sounded as if they had become lazy, shiftless followers instead of the pioneers they once were.

And that's what makes this new two-disc, 50-song set from Rhino so iffy. On the one hand, unlike most such boxes, it doesn't seem to be missing anything fundamental (though I'm sure some of the more obsessive fans would disagree). "Whip It" is there, of course, as is "Jocko Homo," "Mongoloid," "Uncontrollable Urge," together with their covers of "Satisfaction," "Secret Agent Man," "Working in a Coal Mine" and "Are You Experienced?" All the basics from those first few albums are crammed onto the first disc, and in the forms that you remember them.

On the second disc, however?aimed at the collectors?you get the dance remixes, the obscure songs from obscure soundtracks, live tracks, later bits off albums no one much cared about. And it's on that second disc that things start sounding an awful lot alike?and more and more like some generic New Order ripoff band. It's almost as if Devo had finally, in the end, actually become everything they had been parodying all those years.

Thing is, if you're just looking for your Devo basics in a cheaper package, there are already at least eight "Best of" discs available. If you're a complete Devo geek, chances are you'll already have most everything here (except for the last track?a newly recorded version of "The Words Get Stuck in My Throat"). And if you're somewhere in between, then maybe this is just the convenient package you're looking for, complete with a 3-D flickerbox cover and a thick booklet jam-packed with delightful archival band photos.

In a way, Pioneers Who Got Scalped (which becomes a very appropriate title) is not only a snapshot of what made a certain generational subculture so great?but also a snapshot of how it went very wrong.

Jim Knipfel

The Sophtware Slump Grandaddy (V2)

Here's something strange. A couple of years ago, I was unfortunate enough to catch Grandaddy live at London's Rock Garden. Dismal. The absolute nadir of pretentious lo-fi, so I thought. Americans who pretend to be Lou Barlow's kid brother and bring along tape recordings of all their false starts and lo-fi mistakes just so they can appear soulful. Not only that, but they had pretensions toward that New Country horsecrap. I spat in the general direction of the stage. All right, I'm not denying I was drunk.

The weird part is I absolutely adored their album at the time, played it to the back of infinity and beyond. After that show, I expunged it completely from my mind. That is why, even now, after 223 plays, I cannot tell you the title.

So now Grandaddy's back. With another record that I find myself unable to resist. All nine minutes of the opening track, "He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot," is not long enough?even though it starts recalling Pink Floyd at their most soulful toward the finale. I've always been a sucker for a vocoder, a minor key change exquisitely drawn out, a Mercury Rev-style falsetto vocal. Psychedelia when applied to the music that I love means imagination, melody, songs of nonsense sung with such world-weary resignation that they take on hidden nuances of meaning. There's no denying that on numbers like "Jed the Humanoid" and the upbeat "Chartsengrafs" they owe the debt to all the familiar faces?Pavement, Sebadoh, the Rev. It doesn't matter. A year ago, I had a favorite album of Americana in the shape of Mercury Rev's magical, mystical Deserter's Songs. It's been replaced. By the mighty Devo retrospective. But The Sophtware Slump isn't half bad.

Everett True

In the Flesh Johnny Thunders (Amsterdamned)

Johnny Thunders' audience never gave up hope that the great renegade junkie would one day surprise them with another dose of life-affirming rock 'n' roll. They suspended disbelief and watched the debacle that his "career" had become, late into the 80s, even though the guy hadn't written a good original song in five years. This kind of blind devotion isn't uncommon when it comes to the family members of junkies as well. Thunders' audience was the Al-Anon of rock 'n' roll. More aptly, they were like the noonday lunch crowd who spot the guy about ready to make a swandive off the 34th floor and yell, "Jump!" Thunders & Co. put up a flier back in the primacy of the Heartbreakers that said "Catch 'em before they die," and the fans enjoyed this element of danger, that every show might be his last. Johnny Thunders ranks only slightly ahead of GG Allin as an argument for mortality over immortality.

As usual with junkies, the love was not reciprocal. Thunders viewed his sympathizers as easy marks who could be hit up for a few more bucks to keep the junk flowing into his veins. His whole career was like a weird prop-up of this legend-that-never-was. He was legendary all right?a legendary junkie. His first two albums, LAMF and So Alone, weren't even released in the U.S. Then it got worse. By the 80s no record company in America would sign him. He was perceived as a liability.

All these things would be romantic if he'd jeopardized only his commercial potential with his love of junk. Instead he damaged what was a pretty decent musical talent as well. The guy penned some of the greatest songs in rock?"Chatterbox," "One Track Mind," "Ask Me No Questions," "You Can't Put Your Arm Around a Memory," "Just Another Girl"?before becoming merely a parody of himself. Like any good hustler, Thunders realized the end must justify the means, and the end was junk and the means was a sackful of old songs he'd been hauling around since he was a teenage superstar with the New York Dolls.

Almost a decade after his inevitable death, why are people still bearing testimonial to it? That's what In the Flesh constitutes: saying because this is Johnny Thunders, and there isn't going to be another Johnny Thunders, why not add this to the albums that already exist, with the exact same songs on it? Recorded in Hollywood in 1987, the performances here are about what one would expect from Thunders at that juncture. Undeniably sloppy, Thunders' guitar playing is an exercise in going-through-the-motions. Thunders only had about three or four variations on the same guitar solo anyway, but here he's abandoned any hope of coherence. When the band begins "Green Onions" with the intro to "Pirate Love" one wonders if even they knew which song was next. He melds Bo Diddley's "Pills" and "Too Much Junkie Business" and it actually makes sense, helping to draw together the drug-soaked aura of Thunders' entire musical trajectory. He blows lyrics in mid-verse but the fans still cheer. They're just waiting for him to fall off the stage. The big deal about this album could have been that it reunited three-fifths of the Dolls, with Arthur Kane on bass and perennial drummer/sidekick Jerry Nolan. But, at this point, they weren't much better off than Thunders.

The other thing this album demonstrates is how badly the man's voice was shot. His original trademark yowl wasn't exactly poetry in motion, but it was distinct. Here he alternates between that and this weird new voice he picked up sometime in the mid-80s, perhaps to compensate for his lack of range. It's a weird parody of Louis Armstrong and Thunders uses it in all the wrong places. What's really bizarre is the way he uses both voices in the same song, sliding from this guttural delivery to his typical whine. The guy was delusional. Only point of this album is as a spectacle and/or human sacrifice.

Joe S. Harrington

2000 Years: The Millennium Concert Billy Joel (Columbia)

Fortunately I figured out a long time ago that getting drunk means never having to say you're sorry. Unfortunately, most of my friends haven't. After mentally separating those who agree with me from those who don't into two distinct camps, and having only myself and a guy from high school with two first names in the former, I began entertaining that most self-destructive of notions?the second guess. That was until I heard the following:

"Friday night I crashed your party/Saturday I said I'm sorry/Sunday came and trashed me out again..." Now this is the part I want to have made into a t-shirt: "I was only having fun/Wasn't hurting anyone/And we all enjoyed the weekend for a change."

And with that I found the good in a Billy Joel album, which is kind of like finding the bright side of a tiger cage in Quang Ngai, or being at Jonestown and thinking, "Well, at least it's grape-flavored, because I can't stand cherry!"

The first time I really listened to "You May Be Right" was on this live record, The Millennium Concert. And that, for me, justifies the album's existence. Barely. However, I'm not going to try to validate Billy's existence, as the few good moments he probably ever gave himself or anyone else for that matter add up to fewer than 20 minutes total (most of which are on this CD). Besides "You May Be Right" there's "Big Shot" (written back when he tagged and bagged Brinkley for back-waxing, Jersey white trash everywhere) and "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me," which, much like Seger's "Rock and Roll Never Forgets" or the Stones' "It's Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It)," may not be a great song, but a sentiment worthy of a facial tattoo none the less.

There's just one absentee here (my personal favorite and the comment on a religious education), "Only the Good Die Young":

Come out Virginia, don't let me wait

You Catholic girls start much too late

But sooner or later it comes down to fate

I might as well be the one

You might have heard I run with a dangerous crowd

We ain't too pretty we ain't too proud

We might be laughing a bit too loud

But that never hurt no one...

Billboard.com recently featured Joel and this latest release. Below his picture was the caption: "Billy Joel's swan song performance?" News flash?that happened more than 15 years ago. Now he's just hanging around to prove there's a reason his initials are B.J. As far as the record goes, you're better off with an old greatest hits.

Tanya Richardson

Blues Come Home to Roost Super Chikan

Grand Slam Magic Slim & the Teardrops

Midnight Delight Lonnie Shields

Rooster Blues 1980-2000 Various Artists (all Rooster Blues)

The blues is dead. Any night at a place like, say, Cambridge, MA's famous House of Blues (famous on the same level as the Rock Hall of Fame) is filled with more geeks than an X-Files convention. Seriously, I'm surprised these guys don't still have the pocket organizers literally sticking out of their shirtfronts . Blues? Last ones to do anything interesting with the genre (not counting urban punk-wail like Patti Smith's "Piss Factory") were the Allman Bums and their generation of Southern boogie bands. Other than that, it's the same old-men-with-guitars going through the motions. And this caskload of cretins from the kind folks at Rooster Blues is no exception.

The Rooster people have been putting their red cock emblem on fine blooz for more years than you can remember and they've done it with "authentic" bluesmen like Super Chikan. Chikan's real name is James Johnson, and he's been a local legend in the Mississippi Delta ever since the preacher's daughter had waders on. Or so he'd like you to think: the inner sleeve of Blues Come Home to Roost is ripe with pictures of shotgun shacks, not to mention such mythmaking hype as "Super Chikan played a one-string guitar made out of baling wire when he was 13..." etc. With a buildup like that you know the Chikan ain't no clucker. He's got a smooth delivery, and he rarely busts up the chicken coop. This is domesticated blues?the Chikan is happy on the homefront with the missus, although he sometimes squawks: "You don't know nothin' 'bout me, woman," as he sings on the aptly named "Captain Love Juice" while a funky organ wriggles throughout. And it's hard not to crack a smile over a song named "Camel Toe" (although Jenny Mae's song of the same name is way better).

Then there's Magic Slim. Not to be confused with Magic Sam, Memphis Slim, Slim Harpo, Guitar Slim or Memphis Minnie. Slim smokes the chicken-man on guitar and, for that matter, as a vocalist. It's a guttural growl akin to the Beeb at his most impassioned. He cuts the Stones on "Walkin' the Dog," but not Aerosmith or the Flamin' Groovies. And when it comes to women, I'd like to see how his "Rough Dried Woman" stacks up against Chikan's crack ho. Maybe they should trade sometime, like they apparently once did with guitars.

Unlike the rough bumpkin Super Chikan and the grizzled veteran Magic Slim, Lonnie Shields is a class act. Once again, B.B. seems to be the catalyst. I guess he occupies the same niche in blues now as Wynton Marsalis in jazz. The nurturing father figure who proved that crossover success was the quickest route out of the trenches. So Lonnie Shields plays it real slick, but he's still "authentic" (having been born in the Delta, like Super Chikan). One thing about the blues: it ain't changed much in 100 years, and that's one of its shortcomings. So when Shields slicks it up a little with some syrupy organ on "Woman, I Want to Talk to You," it's a welcome relief from blues-as-usual. Horny horns, as well as more organ, invade the song toward the end and it's a rejoicing moment, believe me.

Actually, the cut Shields contributes to the Rooster compilation 1980-2000 is better than anything on Midnight Delight. With sinewy ripples of guitar, percolating percussives and a more "urban" atmosphere, "Fistful of Dollars" is almost as good as the movie. Rest of the comp ain't bad either. After all, Rooster is probably the preeminent blues label in the country (fuck the oppressive swine at Rounder), so why shouldn't it be great? Willie Cobb contributes some funky juke-joint jive on "Eatin' Dry Onions." Larry Davis' "Worried Dream" is a strangulated beat-off just this side of ZZ's immortal "Blue Jean Blues." Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes gives us his Howlin' Wolf parody on "Rocking Daddy," although the subsequent "Elvira" by Lonnie Pitchford is more reminiscent of Lightnin' Hopkins. Carey and Lurrie Bell's "Rollin' and Tumblin'," which is pretty raw and amateurish, is a nice variation on an old formula. Valerie Wellington's "Bad Avenue" cops Koko Taylor. And Eddie Shaw's "Dunkin' Donut Woman" even sticks up for fatties: "We thought she was hot/Because she had a lot." Johnny Rawls and L.C. Luckett, meanwhile, go for more of a Clarence Carter/soul vibe on "Can't Sleep at Night." And only Super Chikan emerges a turkey.

Joe S. Harrington

Flatheads and Spoonies Drums & Tuba (My Pal God)

"Funky Tuba" sounds like a joke, like one of those painfully trying-to-be-hip tunes the high school band director would slip into the repertoire in between "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" and an arrangement of "Danny Boy." It's no joke though?this band, composed of drums and tuba plus guitar, knows its way around a groove. Originally from Austin, they've been playing regularly (for free) in the Knitting Factory's Tap Bar and are better than a lot of the bands that you have to pay to hear. The first sound on the first track of Flatheads and Spoonies ("The Mummy") is Brian Wolff's tuba sliding down into an infectious groove. Then he's joined by Neal McKeeby on guitar and finally Anthony Nozero on drums. Everybody's riffing at once, not in unison but overlapping and intertwining around each other. There are some weird avant-garde elements to it, some hints of dark jangly indie-rock, but this is not a pretentious band.

McKeeby uses a lot of pedals and effects so you don't miss the other elements you might hear in a funk band. I've got to wonder how he feels about being the only one not in the band's name. His style reminds me at times of Andy Hawkins from Blind Idiot God. But where they were heavy, dense and overpowering (in the best possible way), Drums & Tuba create a wide-open, spacey sort of sound. Wolff is so agile that the band isn't heavy at all.

In general, the tracks on the CD feel a little more mellow and dreamy than their live sets. This may be a conscious decision about what to play in a bar, or because the album was recorded a year ago and their sound has evolved. "11 o'clock," for example, has a dark, abandoned Halloween-type feel with a lot of guitar effects. "The Chicken" is another mid-tempo track with a melancholy indie-rock sound, kind of like a Pavement instrumental, but begins with what sounds like an old-fashioned manual typewriter and, of course, a rooster cawing in the distance. The title track, improbably enough, starts out with a variation on "Hot Cross Buns" and gets funky with great press rolls and rim shots from Nozero.

The only complaint I have about this CD is the object itself. It comes in a brown cardboard case with photos of the band printed on it in green. The transfer quality is so bad you can't even tell what the guys look like. The album title is in French on the cover and you have to flip it or look at the spine to see the English?okay, I take it back, they are a little pretentious. The first and second tracks tended to skip as well. But the disc is worth it precisely because it is different from the live show. Which is not to be missed.

Eva Neuberg

Filth/ Body to Body, Job to Job Swans (Young God)

"Don't be a whore now," Swans leader Michael Gira bellowed back in 1984. "You could be screwing yourself." Standing by his words, Gira has refused to sell himself out to the will of marketeers. He remains a master of grand paradoxes and an uncompromising creative force. His music, especially his early material, is scabrously ugly yet brutally poetic, crudely anti-intellectual yet strategically conceptual, structurally primitive yet wholly novel?but always unyielding.

Gira was the first 80s noise-rocker to realize and overcome the self-imposed limitations of no-wave cacophony, though ultimately he wound up as one of the genre's truest ideological adherents. Throughout their 15-year existence, Swans underwent numerous stylistic shakeups and changes in personnel, but whether they were finessing a proto-industrial crush or sounding like Leonard Cohen for the art-school set, they never lost sight of their vision and their original intentions. Save 1989's slick, faux-pastoral, major-label embarrassment, The Burning World, Gira has never made a dull or commercial album. Even now, three years after retiring the Swans name, his methodical, repetitive work continues to pulse with an oppressive, superhuman intensity. While he saves his gentler, more symphonic offerings for his elegant, tuneful ensemble, the Angels of Light, he still rattles skulls with his hellish, anti-ambient projects, the Body Lovers and the Body Haters.

Gira threw his first real punch on Filth, which originally appeared in 1983 on Glenn Branca's Neutral Records. A caveman-like bluster and an expressionistic fervor inhabit the depth-charge drums, churning tape manipulations, grainy feedback smears and cathartic snarls of this landmark in unsurpassed aggression. Initially released in 1991 on Gira's own Young God label, the similarly potent Body to Body, Job to Job rounds up odds and ends recorded between 1982 and 1985. Paired as the fourth and final title in the lavish, double-CD reissue series of the group's canon, these LPs chronicle the birth of Swans' fighting technique while encapsulating the rage, thrill and decay of downtown Manhattan during the Koch administration.

To execute the remarkable Filth, Gira assembled a cast consisting of himself on bass, tapes and vocals, Norman Westberg on guitar, Harry Crosby on second bass, Jonathan Kane on drums and percussion and Roli Mosimann on more drums, tapes and percussion. The extraordinary double rhythm section packs a total wallop, locking together in unison but also pushing and pulling against itself to amass tension, head-spinning rolls and fills and general car-crash-like clatter. Gira erects his plodding, rudimentary compositions around the numbing pound of dueling, panning bass chords, which sluggishly march in step while scrap-metal avalanches tumble around the beat, like bullets ricocheting against the sides of a steel box. The lumbering sludge moves like nobody's business on "Big Strong Boss," "Power for Power" and "Right Wrong," while it remains solemnly static on "Weakling" and "Gang." Westberg's slab-like chord washes turn empty space into wet cement, while Gira commandingly and obsessively roars about control, submission, sex and cruelty. His chants (e.g., "You're gonna murder somebody weak," "Use your body to get satisfaction," "Hammer the nail") are just another blunt object with which to bludgeon you. By Filth's conclusion, you'll feel like gnawing on a bone and lifting something heavy.

Circa '81 or '82, prior to conceiving Filth, Gira and Kane ditched their icky, Euro-wave-influenced quintet, Circus Mort, to devote themselves to the nascent Swans lineup that spat out an edgy but developmental, self-titled 12-inch EP. Pressed by Labor Records and featuring low-mixed but unfortunate sax parts, that four-song curio was tacked onto the now-deleted 1990 Filth CD, but it's nowhere to be found on the new edition. Seamlessly inlaid with cassette experiments ("Loop 1," "Loop 33," etc.), Body to Body, Job to Job documents the same era by including gutsier live goods from an '82 show at CBGB, when Swans employed auxiliary bassist Thurston Moore, whose main endeavor, Sonic Youth, served as the droning Beatles to Gira's junkyard Stones. Body to Body also contains sterling concert renditions of standards from Cop and the Raping a Slave EP, the 1984 tours de force on which Swans became even louder, slower and harder. Without the technical savvy of the departed Kane, the players effectively strip down and approximate a sadistic machine on the endurance-testing "Thug" and the blast-furnace "Your Game," in which Gira recites a narrative (also found in his 1994 book, The Consumer) to the Black Flag/Black Sabbath redux of Cop's "Your Property." He enunciates his words in an increasingly hearty basso-growl, with projection and control that could make Rollins or Danzig dress in drag. The period's studio leftovers are another step forward; the subdued "I'll Cry for You" is a perfect intro to the less monochromatic themes of Swans' mid-80s discs.

Longtime devotees will appreciate Filth/Body to Body's lavish packaging and archival bonus tracks. Uninitiated tough guys who think they can cope with a 135-minute beating should also seek out this defining collection of dirges. Swans' dualistic cocktail of painful pleasure is designed to blow small subwoofers and small minds alike.

Jordan N. Mamone

Your Favorite Music Clem Snide (LONDON-Sire)

The only reason I heard You Were a Diamond, Clem Snide's first album, was that my friend produced it. It was one of the best things I'd ever heard. Eef Barzelay had some great stories to tell about driving tests, gardening, broken noses, and anything else that came to his mind. Over cello, guitar or banjo, whatever: he sang like his skin was being ripped off, and that was on the ballads. I don't think too many people heard it, but it must have made an impression on the lucky few?I saw Clem Snide at the Knitting Factory during the worst downpour of 1999, and there was a large, drenched crowd happy to be there.

One person who took a liking to the band was Seymour Stein, and now they're on Sire Records, part of that friendly AOL/Time Warner family picnic. What was the last record you bought on Sire?Talking Heads, The Ramones? It's been a while since a great unknown band woke up in the bed of a Fortune 500 company, and here we have some evidence of the union: a little polish, louder drums. Other strings-happy country bands (Lambchop, Lullabye for the Working Class) have ruined themselves with gussying up, but even the loops and samples on Your Favorite Music blend right in as subtle textures without destroying the directness of the songs. I still don't have a clue how they're going to turn this into a radio or MTV success, but that's not my concern. I just want to listen to it, again and again.

There's a honeyslide-slow combustion on about half of these songs, tension between the cello and cymbals that finds angry plateaus like only the Tindersticks (with twice as many players) used to, before they became a noirish lounge act. When things are calmer, an electric piano brings fireplace warmth, and a pitch-bending synthesizer whistles its way in occasionally. Most of the music could stand alone, full of rich instrumental catharses in its own right. But finally these are just accouterments to the songs. "I love you with all that I can, and bleed from the palm of my hand," is a great lyric; that it's followed with, "I'll see you in heaven, if we both get in, 'cause I wouldn't die for your sins," should be proof enough of the level of writing.

Your Favorite Music is certainly an emotionally gentler work than You Were a Diamond, and Barzelay sounds even more laconic this time out. Taking in everything around him before he makes a move, he comes off like a shut-in with picture windows. "Come lay on the couch, we don't have to work on our tans," he sings in one song, but "Bread" takes his passivity even further. Beckoning a lover to join him in absolute stillness after dinner, he shrugs off the dirty dishes, the messy bathroom, the broken window. "The stove can be used to light cigarettes/let the tablecloth burn, it's pretty that way."

Domestic irresponsibility has never sounded so romantic. Barzelay's pairing of lazy drawl with half-assed puns can't hide the fact that he's a dreamer, a wide-eyed humanist despite his better judgment. And for all his talk of immobility and inaction, he's anything but idle?it's not even April, and he and his band have already released the best folk album of the year.

Sean Howe

The Best of the Rivieras: California Sun The Rivieras (Norton)

Black Is Black Los Bravos (Retroactive)

Bring a Little Lovin Los Bravos (Retroactive)

My Friend Jack The Smoke (Retroactive)

Wuzza time when mere Nuggets was enuff. Back in the day, in the early 70s, when rockcrit/collector types began exhuming every precious drop of 60s ephemera, one two-disc set basically took care of all those second-string bands from the heyday of the rock revolution. In the 60s there were the major bands, then there were all these insignificant underdog bands. And in the post-Nuggets years it apparently became necessary not just to unearth what was perhaps the one good song by, say, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, but reissue every goddamn note they ever did, most of which wasn't very good. In the retro age, there's no shortage of maggots to chaw the corpse of a dying culture.

Not that I'm complaining?why not have it all? As long as the kids realize that there was a difference between, say, the Byrds and bands like these. But sometimes I fear that's not the case; in these ultra-ironic days of post-everything consciousness, it sometimes seems the irony-kids don't really dig that the Beatles and their ilk really were the hip ones in the 60s, not goofballs like this. Sure, it's "punk" to champion the underdog, but as far as music goes, there was very little good of it among the garage bands.

Take the Rivieras: hailing from the Indiana, they joined the ranks of Minneapolis' Trashmen as that rare commodity, the Midwestern surf band. And like the Trashmen, Kingsmen, Raiders, Wailers and Sonics, they were in the unique class of bands that were playing something that resembled "rock" before the Brit invasion. You'd think from the band that waxed the almighty "California Sun" (covered by both the Ramones and Dictators) that there'd be some actual punk content, but such is not the case. On their version of "Whole Lotta Shakin'" they rock the henhouse, but their bastardization of Chuck Berry's "Rock and Roll Music" for "Little Donna" is shameless (at least the Beach Boys gave Chuck credit for "Surfin' USA"). Trapped somewhere between Joey Dee & the Starliters and the Beach Boys, the Rivieras just didn't get it (and I bet they literally didn't "get" it, if you know what I mean).

The rock revolution didn't just sweep America and England, it swept the whole world, as two recent reissues of Spain's Los Bravos proves. The only song anyone in this country has ever heard is "Black Is Black," which is probably heard several thousand times a day on oldies radio. That song's okay, with its bass intro stolen from the Four Tops' "I Can't Help Myself" and hypnotic organ riff (not as great as "96 Tears," however). They had one other hit, "Bring a Little Lovin," which percolates pretty nicely with a tough bassline and brass that rivals the Doors' "Touch Me." However, they were Grade-A dorks. The guy with the glasses looks like Noel Ventresco.

Doubt Los Bravos ever did acid. The Smoke did: they were Brits and they don't hint around about their drug indulgences, they come right out and say it! Well almost. Their big "hit" in England, "My Friend Jack," which starts with a reverberating fuzz-guitar intro, proclaims, "My friend Jack eats sugar lumps," hint hint! The guy on the cover even plays a sitar, so you know these boys were brimming with innovation, just like all those other wizened cats from the summer-o'-love. Rest of the output is kinda twinky in an almost American Breed way. On the inner sleeve they look like Oasis. On the back cover, the guy in the middle looks like Kris Thompson of Abunai. Personally, despite the guy in the bellbottoms, who looks like Ronnie Lane (or is that Ron Wood?), I think the dog was actually the coolest member of the group.

Joe S.Harrington

Rocket in the Pocket Console (Matador)

Meet Martin. Martin has several things going for him. First and most importantly, his surname is Gretschmann. This means that either he's a bad-ass racing car driver or a lonely nerd, growing up Germanic surrounded by Army jocks. Guess which category Martin falls under? Neither.

Second, he hails from the tiny village of Weilheim in Bavaria?and if that doesn't send 1000 cool images rushing through your brain, then clearly you didn't read a single decent mystery book when young. What else does Martin have going for him, aside from accidents of fate? The music he makes is space-age retro. It harks back to postwar Western Europe in the late 50s, when people still believed the future to be shiny and bright and that by the year 2000 everyone would be walking around in silver jumpsuits, listening to Joe Meek-style toy symphonies on their pocket slide rules.

Shame. Doesn't mean Martin can't try to approximate the feel with his fun-filled, electronic pop. Martin sounds like he grew up liking Kraftwerk, Buggles and ELO in equal proportions...with perhaps the emphasis on the early-80s "Video Killed the Radio Star" bespectacled popsters. This is, unremittingly, another plus for Martin?not least because it means "14 Zero Zero" (the single with the video animation created by the guy who created the English phenomenon Flat Eric) has an indelible sense of mischief hidden among all the melancholy, minor-key magic and words that lead nowhere at all. Oh, and the funky four-on-the-floor dance beats.

Martin is a good sort. That's another plus. He's one of a breed of dance demons like Daft Punk, Air, DJ Shadow, who are infusing the coldness of mechanical sound with a very human, very fallible air. Listen to the ridiculous, squelchtastic salsa rhythms on "Pigeon Party" and tell me otherwise. The title track is like a tortoise strut, filled with synthdrum-style sounds as loved by disco nerds circa 1976. "Dolphin Dos" could be a PlayStation game, only PlayStation games are never this fun. (Believe me.) Imagine XTC's "Only Making Plans for Nigel," only instrumental.

Hah! Now you won't get that annoying tune out of your head for days. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Everett True

Bluebird Sarah White (Jagjaguwar)

Every now and then there'll be a record that sounds like it dropped out of the sky with no accompanying context, no obvious influences or antecedents, no preconceived notions of what scene it's supposed to fit into. That's the situation with Bluebird, the excellent new album by Virginia singer/songwriter Sarah White?the record sounds so disconnected, so isolated, that the presskit actually goes out of its way to note that White "isn't a hermit."

You'd be hard-pressed to find a record that sounds more austere than Bluebird. But austerity isn't always such a bad thing, and in this case it's just fine?the stark arrangements and deliberate pace highlight the songs' depth. The weird thing is that Bluebird isn't really as stripped-down as it initially sounds. Superficially speaking, it's a folk album, with White's acoustic guitar at its center, but other instruments show up to fill out the sound: a cello or viola here, an accordion or dulcimer there. But the arrangements are so spare that they almost sound naked?there's never a wasted note, much less a flourish, and the drums, when they appear, drag heavily on the beat. It's an incredibly reserved approach?think of it as sonic laconic?and it plays particularly well with White's vocal style, which is often a bit indirect, as if she's not quite looking you in the eyes. She's not so much emotionally detached as emotionally ambiguous, a tendency she exploits in her lyrics. When she tells an estranged lover, "I got you back," for example, it's not clear if she's means that she's reclaiming him or exacting a measure of tit-for-tat revenge, and she milks the tension between the two possibilities for maximum effect.

Like most acoustic singer/songwriters, White occasionally succumbs to lyrics that read like bad junior-high poetry ("If I had a fancy sash/My love would find me fair"?ugh), but for the most part she avoids this problem and does a good job of investing her songs with small details that stand out amidst the music's bare sound. The high point is "Bride," where she sketches the scene of a gorgeous country wedding and then, in the last verse, sings, "The weather, it came down"?this simple line is so devastating you can practically see the groom in his rain-drenched tux. Like almost everything else on Bluebird, it's a great example of White getting a lot out of a little. (1703 N. Maple St., Bloomington, IN 47404; www.jagjaguwar.com.)

Paul Lukas

Shanty Town Determination Trinity (Blood and Fire) Sometimes a second-string performer can illuminate the ethos of a music better than the star. If you wanted to learn something about the Jamaican music scene of the late 1970s, for example, you surely would do better to listen to this disc, most of which was originally released in 1977, than to, say, Bob Marley's Exodus. Marley isn't the appropriate comparison anyway, since Trinity is a deejay in the Jamaican sense, a toaster, basically a freestyling MC, rather than a singer. His major influences are Big Youth and Dillinger, the friend who got him into music.

Trinity has a powerful voice and rides the roots cuts here with assurance, delivering a lot of straight-up Rasta content that that flirts with the line between conventional and cliched. He sometimes lets loose with endearing, not to say alarming. gasps and moans and falsettos ("Oh my God, my God") and on some tracks he plays with the rhythms in a most impressive manner. At other times he seems to be fumbling a bit, disjointed, lyrically and musically, and the production follows suit. There are terrifically dark and reverb-heavy horn tracks recycled from earlier hits. Then there's "Quarter Pound of Ishens," in which Trinity complains about coke making him soft. The tracks not on the original LP generally feature a slightly more melodic delivery and lusher production. A couple are others' songs followed by the Trinity version, or Trinity and a dub.

Blood and Fire is a UK label dedicated to rereleasing lesser-known Jamaican artists, like Cornell Campbell and Children of Jah, who had one or two hits and are probably known in the U.S. only to hardcore fans of the genre. Shanty Town Determination isn't the product of a master, but producer Vivian Jackson knew enough to recycle the best of the time and place, and Trinity knew enough to model himself on them. Its very lack of originality makes it great fodder 20 years on. Better than being forgotten, I hear them say.

Eva Neuberg

The Death of Quickspace Quickspace (Matador) My memory plays tricks. Was Tom Cullinan in the ferocious, unfocused Silverfish in the early 90s? No. He was part of the same gang, the same enthusiasts who used to drink from the same lager bottle and dance in the same good-natured, manic way. He was good-looking, friendly, disarmingly charming. Had a real grin. Silverfish were too psychobilly-influenced, too grungy (pre-grunge)?great attitude, great band to crush a few heads to stage-diving from the ceiling, not so hot in the tune department. Cullinan was in the first band I ever reviewed, the forgotten X-Men, who came along cherishing ace Scottish garage/trash band the Rezillos and with obvious comic influences. Creation Records signed them early on, hoping to cash in on some revival or other.

When Cullinan surfaced next, he was fronting the brilliant Faith Healers, one of London's most underrated bands at a time when most folk were looking to the tired Bowie mannerisms of Suede and Blur for their cheap thrills. Faith Healers was an odd band. I could never work out if they ever had any structures (that was probably the experimental Sun Ra jazz influence coming to the fore), or indeed songs. Yet they were so great. Whatever. I had the chance to pick up a single of theirs for $5 (NZ) in Auckland recently, and failed the acid test.

Quickspace, who were formerly Quickspace Supersport, have been around for several years. Hardly new, unless you want to take the description as a reflection of their sound: Quickspace have never stopped sounding totally in love with music and totally like they're having fun, even as they fuck with conventional time signatures and catharsis. For example: how good is the theremin sound on the second track here, "They Shoot Horse Don't They"? Please note the singular. It's like minor key melodic magic had never disappeared.

Don't read anything into the album title. It's perhaps a reference to the way the mysterious North London quintet often sound simultaneously astonishing, ravishing and most becoming on this, their third album, fusing heartache and Space Age moog synthesizers, engorged female/male vocal interplay and old-fashioned guitar dissonance, usually within one song. Death takes on its old-fashioned meaning as "minor orgasm." (As in.: I died a thousand tiny deaths listening to the resigned, warped opus "Gloriana" on the new Quickspace album.)

Here's a quick checklist of bands you might want to compare and contrast Quickspace with: Supergrass, Stereolab, Faith Healers, Clara Bow, Van Morrison. Here's a quick checklist of tollbooth baskets you might want to deposit your head in afterwards, for being so simple: the one between Newark Airport and Manhattan will do. This is such a wonderful, spirited, heartening album...and I haven't even mentioned the finest track, the country-ish "Rose" yet. Now I have. And now you have no excuse.

Everett True

Complete Recordings, 1987-1989 The Donner Party (Innerstate) Back in the mid- and late-1980s there was a very bad New York indie label called Cryptovision, which released generally awful records by generally awful bands like Lyon in Winter and Mod Fun. Between the lousy music and the label's indifferent promotion and poor distribution, few people on the indie scene knew that Cryptovision existed, and those who did know didn't care. So it's not surprising that nobody really noticed when Cryptovision released the self-titled 1987 debut LP by an unknown band called the Donner Party. Like most Cryptovision LPs, it was poorly packaged and wasn't carried by many stores, and nobody raised an eyebrow when it went out of print about five minutes after it was released.

Which is a shame, because The Donner Party is a truly sensational album, full of dynamite guitar hooks and some fantastically warped songwriting that favors topics like decomposing bodies and Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. In fact, when you consider the record's consistently high quality and the abysmally small number of people who've heard it, it probably qualifies as the great lost indie album of the 1980s. The only reason I ever got to hear it myself is that I was publishing a music zine in 1987 and had landed on Cryptovision's mailing list. I knew how miserable the label's releases tended to be, but I was in one of those naive periods when I'd listen to anything at least once if it came in the mail for free, and I can still remember how surprised I was when I stuck my promo copy of The Donner Party onto the turntable and discovered how terrific it was.

The Donner Party, which broke up in 1989, was led by Sam Coomes, who later surfaced alongside Elliott Smith in the Portland band Heatmeiser and now fronts the deservedly lauded duo Quasi. The Donner Party is at least as good as anything he's done since, and now it's finally available again as part of this double-CD collection of the band's work. The anthology also includes the group's mediocre second album, which was released in 1988 on Camper Van Beethoven's Pitch-A-Tent label (and was also self-titled, which probably added to the obscurity of the Cryptovision release, since some people might have asked their record store for "the self-titled Donner Party album" and ended up with the wrong one), as well as a third album that was never released and a handful of live tracks.

Frankly, much of the material after the first album is uneven, but the 15 tracks that comprise the band's debut LP are worth the price of admission all by themselves. The songwriting?mostly cheerily absurdist rants with titles like "Godlike Porpoise Head of Blue-Eyed Mary"?bears no resemblance to the morose black-humor tunes that Coomes now writes for Quasi, but it works. The swirling, buzzing guitar sound owes a lot to other mid-80s indie bands like the Volcano Suns, and at times also feels a bit like the great New Zealand band the Clean, with some occasional banjo or fiddle tossed in to give the proceedings an appealing hootenanny feel. But comparisons do a disservice to a record as fully realized as this one?it's a tremendous album that's gone unheard for far too long. Get it before it falls out of print again.(PO Box 411241, San Francisco, CA 94141; www.innerstate.com.)

Paul Lukas