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Thursday, January 14, 1999
Copyright 1999 The New York Times
Pop Life: Treats for Off-the-Menu Tastes
NEW YORK -- When critics say it was a mediocre year for music, that's not the
whole story. What they mean to say is that it was a mediocre year for popular
music. With more than 25,000 albums released last year, the laws of probability
predict that at least a few dozen will fit each taste. The problem is finding
them. Record labels and radio stations often make their decisions based on trends,
genres and lifestyle instead of along purely musical lines. When the right music
is released at the wrong time, it can slip by unnoticed.
Below, the pop and jazz critics of The New York Times list some favorite albums
you may not have heard last year. Some are hard to find because they are on
small independent or specialty labels; others were released only abroad, and
a few were neglected by their own U.S. record companies.
Hunting for some of these records can be an adventure. Here are a few places
to start:
-- Other Music, an independent music record store at 15 E. Fourth St. in the
East Village. Its Web site is www.othermusic.com
-- Descarga Records, a Latin mail-order company, at (718) 693-2966 or (800)
377-2647 (www.descarga.com).
-- Gemm, a general Internet retailer (www.gemm.com). -- NEIL STRAUSS
JOHN PARELES
1. Waldemar Bastos: "Preta Luz" (Luaka Bop). An Angolan exile meshes a strong,
sweet voice and intertwined acoustic guitars for songs that blend sambas and
African pop to draw grace from anguish.
2. Saint Etienne: "Good Humor" (Sub Pop). Saint Etienne anatomizes heartbreak
with sleek, breezy pop songs that scramble styles from the 1950s to the '90s.
3. Rachid: "Prototype" (Universal). Skipping any rhythm-and-blues apprenticeship,
the ambitious Rachid heads directly for the tormented, self-revealing, musically
embracing sphere of idols like Prince and Marvin Gaye.
4. Amon Tobin: "Permutations" (Ninja Tune). Fiercely propulsive, hallucinatory
dance tracks from a disk jockey and producer who knows old jazz as well as new
software and who's not afraid to break away from 4/4 time.
5. Cheri Knight: "The Northeast Kingdom" (E-Squared). Country meets its Celtic
heritage in death-haunted songs of love and strife.
6. Deep Rumba: "This Night Becomes a Rumba" (Justin Time). Using little more
than drums and voices, Kip Hanrahan oversees explosively kinetic music that
sends Afro-Cuban rhythms hurtling into the future.
7. Casa da Mae Joana (Natasha, Brazilian import). Old-fashioned sambas with
an intimate, home-grown spirit from the musicians at a Rio de Janeiro club where
an earlier era lives on.
8. Dr. Israel: "Inna City Pressure" (Mutant Sound System). Fervent roots-reggae
melodies top vertiginous jungle tracks for an inevitable reunion of reggae's
dance-floor diaspora.
9. Califone: "Califone" (Flydaddy). In songs that clank and sputter and drone,
stray country and blues riffs turn into haunting riddles.
10. Asian Dub Foundation: "Rafi's Revenge" (Slash/London). The agitprop rants
are adequate, but the grooves are spectacular: dizzying, globe-hopping mixtures
of South Asian music, punk-rock, electronics and reggae.
PETER WATROUS
1. Bloque, "Bloque" (Luaka Bop). A mixture of Colombian rhythms and psychedelia
that oddly enough produces images of a workable musical future, somewhere between
rock and older traditions.
2. Celia Cruz, "Mi Vida Es Cantar" (RMM/Descarga). Her best record in years,
in part because the material suits her voice -- one of the great ones of the
20th century -- and also because the arrangements work so well.
3. Cuarteto Patria y Manu Dibango, "Cubafrica" (Celluloid/Descarga). A beautiful
record in the son style made different by the saxophone of the African musician
Manu Dibango. Against the traditional Cuban acoustic band, he places gorgeous
melodies.
4. Manolito y Su Trabuco, "Marcando la Distancia"(Eurotropical/Descarga). A
roaring, good-natured dance record from Havana, one of the few to come out of
the Cuban timba scene this year.
5. Eddie Palmieri, "Rumbero del Piano" (RMM/Descarga). His first dance record
in many years is an endlessly satisfying workout in the New York salsa mold,
intelligent and dance friendly.
6. Dede Saint Prix, "Afro-Caribbean Groove" (BMG/Declic). An extremely smart
theme album by one of the Caribbean's best groups. Saint Prix, from Martinique,
uses native rhythms, along with ideas from across the Caribbean; it's rich.
7. Union Sanluisera, "Charanga" (Playasound/Descarga). A basically unknown charanga
band from a small town in Cuba, the group from start to finish demolishes the
dance house. Violins riff away, the flute solos, the chorus sings, and all is
well in the world.
8. The Yoruba/Dahomean Collection, "Orishas Across the Ocean" (Ryko/Descarga).
Field recordings from Haiti, Brazil, Cuba and Trinidad, taken from the late
1930s through the late '50s, that document the Yoruba and Dahomean holdovers
that link the musics of the African diaspora.
9. Viento de Agua, "De Puerto Rico al Mundo" (Agogo/Descarga). A hard-working
local band's first record, and it's good. The band plays bombas and plenas,
music from Puerto Rico, and its exuberant and raucous.
10. Caetano Veloso, "Livro" (Polygram). Wildly intelligent and sensual, and
perfectly produced, moving from orchestral works to minimalist ballads and Brazilian
drum workouts. There's nothing like him in pop music, sophisticated and rhythmic.
NEIL STRAUSS
1. The Beta Band, "The Three Eps" (Royal). An eclectic compilation of bedroom
jam pop from a talented new Scottish group that inhabits its own world, where
there is no expressive difference between a drum machine and a jew's-harp.
2. "Beneath the Surface" (BTS, Box 10307, Marina del Ray, Calif. 90295). The
best alternative rap release since Dr. Octagon comes from the producer OD (Omid
Walizadeh), who spent two years gathering vocals from the Los Angeles underground
(2Mex, Darkleaf, Visionaries, Global Phlowtations) into a brilliant, bizarre
album of visionary sci-fi hip-hop.
3. Mark Hollis (Polydor U.K.). The first solo album from the former leader of
Talk Talk (the new-wave band that traded pop for high concept music in the late
'80s) further rarefies the emotional art songs of "The Spirit of Eden" with
slow, moody and intense acoustic meditations.
4. Various Artists, "Au Royanne de Tricatel" (Tricatel). Here are high points
in France's explosion of lounge music with Bernard Burgalat, Etienne Charry
and Valerie Lemercier contributing to a compilation for which songs aren't written,
they're arranged.
5. Dock Boggs, "Country Blues" (Revenant). His voice will raise goose bumps
on your back, his banjo-picking will make you dizzy and his fatalistic songs
will bring a tear to your eye -- and it was all recorded by a coal miner in
the Appalachian mountains 70 years ago. You can continue unearthing Boggs with
another new anthology of his music, "His Folkways Years, 1963-1968."
6. Fishmans, "Long Season" (Polydor Japan). This one-song album is actually
more than a year old, but it is a defining moment for this Japanese trio --
a timeless, entrancing exploratory rock epic. (A short version is on the band's
recent live album.)
7. Salako, "Reinventing Punctuation" (Jeepster). From the label that released
Belle and Sebastian comes an understated album of lilting personal pop songs
about telepathy and glass-bottom boats occasionally augmented by skewed electronic
dance beats.
8. Michel Chion, "L'Opera Concret" (MCE/INA-GRM). Bringing together street fair
and High Mass, the French composer and film critic excerpts 18 of his musique
concrete pieces for an experimental album that serves both as retrospective
and new composition.
9. D.J. Ed Rush and Optical, "Wormhole" (Virus). This British collaboration
breathes new life into drum and bass with a skitteringly cinematic dance record
that builds a dark futurist jazz out of scraps and throwaways. For an even darker,
more unfettered dance extreme, try "Twisted Designz" (Music Cartel) by Germany's
Panacea.
10. Shoutcast (www.shoutcast.com). Lately I've been listening to a lot of music,
not all of it available in stores, at this free online clearing house for specialty
Web radio stations, including a surprisingly interesting 24-hour-a-day video
game music channel, live concerts by bands famous and obscure, unreleased movie
soundtracks.
BEN RATLIFF
1. "Ethiopiques, Vols. 1 and 3: Golden Years of Modern Ethiopian Music 1969-1975"
(Buda). Transfixing soul and funk by state-sponsored bands: something like James
Brown with microtonal African wails and pentatonic scales.
2. Wessell (Warmdaddy) Anderson, "Live at the Village Vanguard" (Leaning House).
A good-natured jazz house party led by an alto and soprano saxophonist with
serious rhythmic bounce and a muscular, sharpshooting tone.
3. Reid Anderson Quartet, "Dirty Show Tunes" (Fresh Sound). A debut by a young
jazz bass player who writes witty, thoughtful, sweet-and-sour small-group music.
4. Johnny Society, "Wood" (Messenger). With a bar-band Beatle voice and an unpretentious,
utilitarian imagination, Kenny Siegal writes perfect little agonized rock songs.
5. Ravi Coltrane, "Moving Pictures" (RCA/BMG). As powerful as it is unassuming,
a saxophonist's debut jazz record explores short, simple themes; the drummer
Jeff Watts particularly shines.
6. Waldemar Bastos, "Pretaluz" (Luaka Bop). Heart-rending ballads and a few
upbeat dance-rhythms by an Angolan refugee living in Lisbon whose voice is a
bullhorn of loss.
7. Pluramon, "Render Bandits" (Mille Plateaux). A great rock-with-abstract-electronics
record, beautifully produced by Markus Schmickler, but the star is the remarkable
Jaki Liebezeit, former drummer of the German group Can.
8. Avishai Cohen, "Adama" (Stretch/Concord). A young jazz bassist with a natural
leader's commanding tone and a compositional idee fixe: Sephardic jazz.
9. Meshuggah, "Chaosphere" (Nuclear Blast America). Self-consciously tricky,
polyrhythmic heavy metal by a group of hard-as-nails Swedes -- the most musicianly
of metal bands.
10. Radian: "Radian" (Rhiz). Scratchy, staticky noises by an Austrian electronic
trio, accompanied by real bass and drums, which give it a delicious tension.
ANN POWERS
1. Dana and Karen Kletter, "Dear Enemy" (Hannibal). The voices of the Kletter
twins intertwine like strands of DNA as they excavate secrets from the heart
of family life, in pristine settings crafted by the legendary pop-folk producer
Joe Boyd.
2. Slapp Happy, "Ca Va" (V2). Art rock never sounded so elegant: the long-missed
trio of Dagmar Krause, Anthony Moore and Peter Blegvad return with an acerbic
and dreamy collection of rueful reminiscences and daring fancies.
3. Tom Freund, "North American Long Weekend" (Red Ant). This young singer-songwriter
joins the long line of artists giving voice to the disgruntled, romantic common
man, and his tunefulness and gruff heart help him cut to the front.
4. Iva Bittova (Nonesuch). A truly singular artist, this Czech violinist and
singer performs her magical story-songs solo; her astonishingly evocative voice
and style conjure a new world with its own gravitational pull.
5. Lhasa, "La Llorona" (Atlantic). Call her the Edith Piaf of Nafta, this American-born,
Spanish-speaking resident of Montreal is thoroughly modern in her syncretic
approach to pop, and classic in her florid, imperious singing.
6. Shudder to Think, "First Love, Last Rites: Music from the Motion Picture"
(Epic/Sony). An eccentrically ambitious underground rock band finds the ideal
form for its ideas with this soundtrack, which features guest vocalists like
Liz Phair and the late Jeff Buckley belting it out on hits from an imaginary
radio.
7. Mimi, "Soak" (Luaka Bop). Mimi Goese is an avant-garde diva with the reassuring
voice of a big sister; here, she pushes her wandering philosophies into new
shapes inspired by the electronic landscapes of her longtime collaborator, Hahn
Rowe.
8. Diane Izzo, "One" (Sugar Free) This Chicago-based rocker's influences --
mainly Patti Smith and P.J. Harvey -- still lead her, but this vivid debut suggests
that she may be rock's next prophetess.
9. The Henrys, "Desert Cure" (Trainrec/Canadian Arts Council). Don Rooke's work
on various slide guitars, from the kona to the lap steel to something called
a sonar zombie, recalls the erudite ramblings of Bill Frisell. This ensemble
(which sometimes includes the vocalist Mary Margaret O'Hara) surrounds his playing
with sunset tones.
10. Ozomatli, "Ozomatli" (Almo Sounds). The real sound of California is the
specialty of this multiracial crew as it blends cumbia with hip-hop in a joyous
free-for-all straight out of East Los Angeles.
Thursday, January 14, 1999
Copyright 1999 The New York Times