Alamo Race Track Black Cat John Brown ITUNES MYSPACE Grey’s Anatomy pop rockers more wary than weighty Not a Nascar venue, but a polite Dutch rock band, Alamo Race Track bring a self-conscious detachment to their multicolored, carefully constructed, pop-leaning tunes. The foursome crib ideas from greats like Lou Reed (“My Heart”), the Replacements (“The Northern Territory”), and the Beatles (“On the Beach”), yet the songs remain stubbornly small-scale. Pale, shadowy voices sketch portraits of alienation—the lost soul resembling “a slightly wounded deer”

or the loner who grumbles, “Keep this girl away from me”—casting a glum spell that’s hard to shake. JON YOUNG

Alchemist Rapper’s Best Friend ITUNES MYSPACE Cali hip-hop producer can’t conjure the right mixture

Precise, brooding MCs like Dilated Peoples and Mobb Deep’s Prodigy thrive on Alchemist’s trademark production—’70s funk samples and dark sweeping strings. But on this instrumental collection, the absence of words is a thorny issue. “Still Feel Me” and “What a Real Mobb Do” are plain

unexciting; and with Prodigy’s measured threats removed, “Stop Fronting,” the Barry White–sampling track from the rapper’s stellar Return of the Mac, simply sounds like a weak remix of Black Moon’s “I Got Cha Opin” remix. THOMAS GOLIANOPOULOS

Nicole Atkins Neptune City ITUNES MYSPACE Seaside songbird gets buried under a Wall of Sound

When the Ronettes walked in the rain, they barely noticed the drops; Nicole Atkins, however, sounds ready to drown. On her debut, the New Jersey singer/

songwriter coolly distills the romanticism of ’60s girl groups into dark, baleful country pop. But the songs swell and crest in identical structure, leaving her gorgeous voice (equal parts Roy Orbison and Jenny Lewis) to battle the overproduction. Only the title track offers a respite, floating gently on sparse strings. Atkins should trust her voice; without the show-tune drama behind it, her vulnerability would be more convincing. STACEY ANDERSON

“Hey, our fashionable ennui
is just as valid as yours!”

Bad Religion New Maps of Hell ITUNES MYSPACE From Reagan to Bush, the punk-rock thesis continues

What happens when one of the best SoCal punk bands to protest the God-fearing, warmongering Reagan ’80s sticks around long enough to write about an even bigger mess? Bad Religion spend their 14th album dissecting just what got us here—from the death of rebellion (“Requiem for Dissent”) to the rise of religious dogma (“New Dark Ages,” in which PhD’d frontman Greg Graffin sings: “A pall on truth and reason / It feels like hunting season”). The songs are more frantic and noisy than the band’s recent work, with opening blast “ 52 Seconds” lasting just that. But the targets haven’t changed much, and Bad Religion still hit them hard. JASON BUHRMES TER

Brother Reade Rap Music ITUNES MYSPACE L.A. hip-hop duo flash promise on hit-and-miss second album This indie-white-rapper show throws in some cautionary thug tales among the usual braggadocio, and their subtle flair and smarts make up for the occasional tossed-off cliché. Rapper Jimmy Jamz and producer Bobby Evans do a little with a little, grafting sometimes solid, sometimes staid rhymes to sometimes workmanlike, sometimes imaginative beats. When Jamz acts more funny than hard (“I’m Lou Reed and I wanna be inside her velvet underground”) and Evans channels Company Flow, they click. That’s not often, but often enough not to send them backpacking. JOSH MODELL

Second Draft
Bummed-out Brit rockers turn the lights on brighter

The Cinematic Orchestra Ma Fleur ½ ITUNES MYSPACE Electronic auteur returns with a more melancholy tableau

Five years after their last full studio record, multi-instrumentalist Jason Swinscoe’s Cinematic Orchestra return with a stylish soundtrack to an (as yet) unmade film. Unlike the late-night jazz that defined the band’s earlier tracks, Ma Fleur’s atmospheric, moody songs and down-tempo arrangements are devoted more to Radiohead-worthy mopinesss than to snazzy chops. Phil France’s amazing double bass does anchor the groove, but even with such a deep current, the album doesn’t surge through you so much as slowly seep into your consciousness. ERIK DAVIS

Editors
An End Has a Start
½
ITUNES MYSPACE

haven’t really developed a more singular sensibility: Each of these ten craftily sculpted tunes could be mistaken for the work of a supergroup called Interplay for Cutie. But Editors have acquired a sense

The joke about this British gloom-rock quartet’s 2006 debut, The Back Room, was that it sounded like an edited version of Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights—with all of that band’s stylish post-punk signifiers, but none of the depth.

On An End Has a Start,
Editors’ superior sophomore
disc, booming baritone Tom
Smith and his bandmates
They’ve acquired a
sense of urgency and
emotion they lacked.

of urgency and emotion they lacked on The Back Room. Previously, Smith’s fixation on doom felt a little perfunctory, as though a quick skim of the collected works of Ian Curtis had convinced him that death and disease were what pasty

English guys were supposed
to sing about. Here, he comes
off like a real guy experiencing
real life.

In the powerful opener, he describes the sad sight of “Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors” as post-Edge guitars twinkle sympathetically behind him; and in “Bones,” he makes a patently New Age chorus—“All you can hope for is the love you felt to equal the pain you’ve gone through”— seem profound, rather than something you’d find painted on the side of a van at Burning Man. Interpol still do this stuff better, but not by as wide a margin as before. MIKAEL WOOD

Bowerbirds Hymns for a Dark Horse ½ ITUNES MYSPACE Energetic young folkies go off to brood in the boondocks

Though he insists that “there is hate all around” (“Human Hands”), it’s difficult to imagine lead Bowerbird Phil Moore getting miffed about it. Pessimistic declarations litter his hippie-folk trio’s debut album, but the music behind them bounces with Devendra Banhart–style whimsy, from the roughly hewn, chirpy harmonies to the vaguely nautical swoon of accordion and violin to the percussive fireworks of a can banged with a stick. Living, Walden-like, in an Airstream trailer in the North Carolina woods, Bowerbirds craft their twee beatnik fatalism with rustic gusto. STACEY ANDERSON

Circus Devils Sgt. Disco ½ ITUNES MYSPACE Another half-assed addition to Mr. Pollard’s opus

Still hoping Robert Pollard has another Bee Thousand in his dusty, song-filled attic? Well, Circus Devils, a trio he occupies with other Guided by Voices alums, never approaches GBV’s glory days with these 32 weird, unwieldy, and unsatisfying songs. Pollard’s ideas fly by furiously, but rarely amount to much more than raw sketches driven to madness by repetition. Sure, give the Devils their due for slight sonic experimentation, but it’d take a staunch Pollard apologist to excuse this mess. JOSH MODELL

JILL FURMANO WSK Y/COUR TES Y PLUS ONE