REVIEWS [ALBUMS]

to terms with the things he can’t control. (Dollars to donuts that the Serenity Prayer was hanging from the bathroom door of wherever he clocked his rehab.) On the eerie “Deeper Down,” a spidery guitar line, ride cymbal, and 16th-note harpsichord pulse skitter around the singer as he shakes hands with unknowing: “I adore the meaninglessness,” he declares, “of the ‘this’ we can’t express.” Later, Feist guests on the simply gorgeous “You and I,” which abides by a different kind of mystery. “However close we get sometimes,” she and Tweedy sing in close harmony, “it’s like we never met.” That could be a frightening realization, but the gently strummed acoustic guitar, warm keyboard chording, and lilting vocals suggest the awe that arrives by acknowledging your lover’s mystery as part of what makes them magical. Likewise, “You Never Know,” a standout among the album’s handful of crisp rockers, floats the phrase “I don’t care anymore” over zippy slide fills and Abbey Road “ooh oohs,” turning an admission of defeat into an existential victory.

The only missteps come when Wilco move away from Tweedy’s front-porch Zen homilies and the band’s otherwise tight arrangements. “Bull Black Nova” is a road noir that lunges from tense staccato guitar and one-note piano plinking into a noisy jam that confuses motion with progress. And hazy atmospherics undercut the apocalyptic lyrics of “Country Disappeared.” But when the biggest problems with an album are a couple of arguable form-function misfits, why fight it? Resistance for its own sake will only take you so far. As Wilco (the album) proves, sometimes submission is a beautiful thing.

Mulatu Astatke/ The Heliocentrics Inspiration Information

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AGAINST ME!

Against Me! The Original Cowboy

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Not quite PJ Harvey’s 4 Track Demos, but it’ll do At 11 tracks and 25 minutes, with unobtrusive overdubs as its most overt evidence of studio magic, Against Me!’s militantly thrilling 2003 second album, As the Eternal Cowboy, could hardly be accused of bloat. Main Me! Tom Gabel heard differently. Thus, this eight-track, 22-minute offering of preproduction demos. Drier vocals and guitars, plus drums that thud instead

of thwack, mean that the effect is more like being kicked in the gut by the steel part of the boot rather than the leather. Which begs the question: How real do you want it? DAVID MARCHESE

 

Amazing Baby Rewild

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Psychedelic seekers find delights and decadence On their debut album, Brooklyn singer-keyboard-ist Will Roan and guitarist Simon O’Connor long to get “lost in the garden of Eden,” and these showmen/

shamen, with a full band and 15-piece orchestra, almost get there. Channeling glam, metal, punk, power pop, and experimental noise, Rewild is like a tour through a psychedelic fantasyland, featuring visions, hallucinations, and glimpses of death. Roan coaxes with an almost deliriously euphoric art-rock swagger (see reggae jam “Roverfrenz” and infectious chant-along “Smoke Bros”), while O’Connor infuses every track with hedonistic energy. Amazing Baby are desperate to dazzle—and they often do. JULIA YEPES

Border-blurring jazz-funk feast for crate diggers Open ears might know the name of ’60s African jazz master Astatke from his music for Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers, but this collaboration with the U.K.-based Heliocentrics (who’ve backed DJ Shadow and been sampled by Madlib) exists beyond all borders or eras. Originally teaming for a live one-off, the two parties complement each other intuitively on this session. Astatke’s lyrical piano abuts levee-breaking beats and guitar crunge on “Masengo” and “Chik Chikka,” while snaking Ethiopian horn lines meet the alien electronics of “Cha Cha” and “Mulatu.”

 

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“Good evening, and welcome to the debut episode of Hip-Hop Apprentice.”

Is Clowntime Over?
Blustery MC tries to keep apocalyptic woo-hah in check

ONE MIGHT EXPECT Back on My B.S.—Busta Rhymes’ first batch of songs since 2006’s The Big Bang and the shooting of his friend and bodyguard Israel Ramirez—to be more sober and confessional. Recently, too, he’s railed against the “dehumanizing” aspects of technology.

Yet Busta has always mixed deep thoughtfulness with king-size clownish-
ness, and right from the intro (“Back on my bullshit” sung operatically to Beethoven’s
5th), he bounces between skittering beats and Dirty South synths, “throwin’ money
around the room to please myself,” and flashing breezily dexterous wordplay. On
“Respect My Conglomerate,” he’s a monolith rather than a mere entertainer, but
post-Diddy, Jay, and Kanye, such branding doesn’t retain much punch.
A ter presenting competing manifestos (“Shoot for the Moon” prizes
ambitious self-reliance, yet “Hustler’s Anthem 2009” is a Jeezy-style
exhortation to do whatever it takes to “pop bottles”), things get more
erratic, with dancehall whirlwind “Kill Dem” leading into the quizzical
boast track “Arab Money” (with its questionable quoting of the Koran
on the chorus). Finally, Akon collabo “Don’t Believe Them” and the
mournful “Decision,” with Mary J. Blige, Jamie Foxx, and Common,
address weightier issues. But two decades deep in the game, Busta is still
beholden to a style that ping-pongs between silly and steroidal, making
his stabs at honesty fall awkwardly flat. J. GABRIEL BO YLAN

BUSTA RHYMES Back on My B. S.

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