Del Amitri have fared better than many in this pop-rock genre, as the Scottish band has managed to produce and tour behind four albums since 1989. Still, the new best-of collection dubbed “Hatful of Rain” can’t help but prompt the question “What hits?” (In fact, Del Amitri had one bona fide top 10 hit with the brisk pop-rock of 1995′s “Roll to Me.”) Perhaps Del Amitri’s biggest problem was timing — a decade dominated by rap and grunge was not made for a band that specializes in melodic songs sung in a personable style by Justin Currie and featuring a folk-rock mix of electric and acoustic instruments.

The 17 tracks of “Hatful of Rain” reflect both the band’s soft and harder-rocking styles, while also managing to hang together as a tuneful meditation on troubled romance. Del Amitri commits the occasional gaffe, such as the over-ripe string arrangement on “Don’t Come Home Too Soon,” and the ill-conceived imagery captured in the title “Spit in the Rain.” But the flaws are few, and there’s fun to be found in the soulful swagger of “Kiss This Thing Goodbye” and the blissful Mersey beat of “Not Where It’s At.” And when acoustic strings swaddle Currie on the bittersweet ballad “Be My Downfall,” it’s easy to conclude that the singer’s heart is more apt to be broken by a woman than the ever fickle state of rock ‘n’ roll.

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Lyle Lovett
STEP INSIDE THIS HOUSE | MCA RECORDS
HEAR IT |–> BUY IT –>

–>BY SAM HURWITT | Lyle Lovett, as has been noted, is a long, tall Texan, and the two-CD album “Step Inside This House” constitutes a sort of musical homecoming, paying tribute to the great songwriters of the Lone Star State whom Lovett cites as influences. The influence isn’t hard to hear in songs like Steven Fromholz’s delightful “Bears,” which opens the album. There’s that same wistful quirkiness, the same tender chiding, that makes Lovett such a compelling lyricist.

On the surface it might seem a surprise that an all-covers album would be one of Lovett’s best, but these 21 songs play to his strengths, and he approaches them with a songsmith’s loving care, from the Guy Clark title track to Michael Martin Murphey and Boomer Castleman’s sweet hitchhiking yarn “West Texas Highway.” “I’ve had enough lonesome/In my education,” Lyle sings in Walter Hyatt’s playful gem “Teach Me About Love,” punctuated by Matt Rolling’s jaunty ragtime piano and Paul Franklin’s pedal steel.

The arrangements throughout the album use steel, fiddle, cello, mandolin and electric guitar sparingly, relying on the lyrics and Lyle’s soothing voice for atmosphere rather than oppressive layers of instrumentation. Viktor Krauss’ stand-up bass twangs through Willis Alan Ramsey’s smoky, jazzy “Sleepwalking,” and Alison Krauss joins in with some Carter Family-style harmony vocals on the traditional number “More Pretty Girls Than One” and Fromholz’s “Texas Trilogy: Bosque County Romance” as well as murmuring along with Townes Van Zandt’s heart-rending “If I Needed You” (answered immediately by Hyatt’s lovely, redemptive “I’ll Come Knockin’”).

As he sings in the traditional “Texas River Song,” which caps off the album, “There’s many a river/That waters the land,” and Lovett bathes us in each one.

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Q-Burns Abstract Message
FENG SHUI | ASTRALWERKS
HEAR IT |–> BUY IT –>

BY MARK ATHITAKIS | Since Orlando’s Michael Donaldson — aka Q-Burns Abstract Message — works far away from dance and trip-hop centers like Bristol and Detroit, he’s free to open up the genre’s rules, structuring his peculiar dance pop in ways that his blockheaded contemporaries in the Chemical Brothers wouldn’t dare to think of. What he winds up with instead is a unique form of armchair hip-hop; melodies too lovely to compare to the gritty skulk of Tricky, with beats so relaxed and ethereal they approach Brian Eno’s ’70s ambience. Vocals, when they exist, are often whispered, as on the title track, or crooned lightly on “Kinda Picky,” the album’s piano-laced centerpiece.

Part of the difference between Donaldson and his peers is that his musical starting point isn’t so much hip-hop as Krautrock — there’s a gorgeous, rippling cover of Faust’s “Jennifer” — and he has a taste for Euro-pop at its most reserved, soliciting members of Iceland’s Gus Gus to lend a hand in the studio. It’s cold stuff indeed, especially when some tracks push the 10-minute point. But never static, and like the album title suggests, it’s organized and functional; its chill-room ambience works just as well in cars and living rooms as it does in those trip-hop power centers Donaldson so happily ignores.

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Throwing Muses
IN THE DOGHOUSE | RYKODISC
HEAR IT |–> BUY IT –>

BY JOE GROSS | Legions of Throwing Muses fans were absolutely sure that 17(!)-year-old Kristen Hersh, like many an object of obscure desire before and after her, was not only expelling her own personal demons, but theirs as well. Others just wanted her to stop screeching already. Such is the stuff from which rock legends are made. Few debuts — heck, few records, period — have ever drawn a line in the sand quite like the self-titled 1986 debut from the Throwing Muses. Just try to put the thing on the stereo at some hipster party and watch the sparks fly. Whether you thought “Throwing Muses” was home to the worst large sweater and black eyeliner-chick lyrics ever written, or you were one of thousands, male and female, who thought Hersh and Tanya Donnelly were speaking directly to you, it’s tough to deny that this was one of the most jarring records of the 1980s. With “In the Doghouse,” the defunct Throwing Muses finally fulfill an old promise to reissue their extraordinary debut — the first record by an American act released on the until-then Anglophilic 4AD label in the United Kingdom — in the United States.

“In the Doghouse” takes its name from the Muses’ legendary 1985 “Doghouse” demo tape, issued in its entirety on Disc 2. With their martial drumming, abrupt rhythm changes and ornate dual guitars, the songs on “Throwing Muses” could have been recorded yesterday, especially the still startling “Call Me” and “Vicky’s Box.” Only Gil Norton’s “Joy Division lite” production has aged poorly. The immediate follow-up EP, “Chains Chained,” is also here; its slightly more linear songs are a welcome penumbra around the molten core of “Throwing Muses.” The demos will probably be of interest only to fanatics and collectors — but hey, fanatics and collectors were what “Throwing Muses” was all about.

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Aterciopelados
CARIBE ATOMICO | BMG US LATIN
HEAR IT |–> BUY IT –>
Bloque
BLOQUE | LUAKA BOP
HEAR IT |–> BUY IT –>

BY JOSH KUN | No matter how deeply you understand that Colombia is a country of crossings — coasts (Caribbean and Pacific), cultures (African, Indian, European), musical traditions (cumbia, salsa, vallenato) — these new albums by Bogota’s Aterciopelados (their fourth) and Bloque (their first) still make you check your ears. Because instead of simply reflecting on that legacy, they treat it as a mandate for further outness: Aterciopelados sprinkling mutant cumbias, batucada attacks and big band porro stomps with looped breakbeats and trip-hopped moodiness; Bloque throwing recycled Afro-pop into feedback-thick tropical storms of acid rock descargas.

Led by reigning Latina alterna-girl Andrea Echeverri, Aterciopelados have long been Colombia’s most reliable and stylish ambassadors of post-New World hipness. So it was only a matter of minutes before they added their voice to the growing electrsnica scene with “Caribe Atomico,” where their patented neo-folkloric takes on pop, punk and alt-rock mingle with flickering ambient soundfields, back-stepping beats and mumbling vocal samples. Nothing too dramatic, though, just piped in old-school choruses and acoustic son nods over “El Estuche’s” down-tempo strut and the techno-dancehall punctuation of “Humo y Alquitran’s” urban eco-apocalypse.

Bloque’s take on culture-clashing may need fewer wires, but the sound they come up with is as aesthetically ferocious and stylistically dizzying as anything that’s trickled stateside out of the South American pipeline in years. Made up of former members of ex-telenovela darling Carlos Vives’ band, Bloque strip off the polish and smiling shine of Vives’ pop vallenato updates and dive headfirst into an edgy polyrhythmic bliss that’s equal parts salsa and Zappa, Fela and Zeppelin, angry funk and dissonant cumbia. Ivan Benavides is plenty powerful as a melodic growler and manic word-sprayer, but Bloque’s secret weapon is stuffed-up singer Mayte Montero, who, besides blowing skyward on her gaita flute, leads the band in two of its most gripping Afro-Colombian performances on “La Pluma” and “Majana.” On both, Bloque show tradition enough respect to explode it, build it anew and, from straight outta Bogota, help the future decide what it will sound like.

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Archers of Loaf
WHITE TRASH HEROES | ALIAS RECORDS
HEAR IT |–> BUY IT –>

BY GAVIN McNETT | When indie-rock acts fall into decay, it’s seldom through the canonical process of selling out, watering down and pandering that brought rock bands to ruin in previous times. Diminishing indie bands just get more precocious.

That might be because the indie-rock underground has been, for quite a while now, a difficult, contrarian sort of place where saying little, obliquely, can be a better policy than saying anything complex and specific. Ellipticism in itself can be a sort of pandering — and a sort of formalism.

For now, it’s a bit painful to find that “White Trash Heroes” is about 20 percent strummy Fender guitar blear of the common sort; about 40 percent eclecticist prog-rock jumble with odd noises ladled over the top (also pretty much in the “easy-call” category); and 30 percent bad ’70s rock with “Oh, YAY-uh!” vocals. “Slick Tricks and Bright Lights” manages to be all three at once — which is, it’s undeniable, a certain fiendish achievement. And there’s nothing wrong, really, with any of it, except there’s little here that justifies the Archers’ status as the preeminent band of their type.

The remaining 10 percent of the album is “Fashion Bleeds,” a scorcher that suggests the band could damn well have made a great album if it had wanted to — or at least another “All the Nation’s Airports,” which was great in a spotty, almost-there sort of way. It’s disheartening how so many of these collegiate-slacker-type bands will get right up to the edge of brilliance — and then back off, chuckling nervously.

And then there was Compay Segundo, an active musician and prolific songwriter since the 1920s and a living incarnation of the folkish style of music known as “son.” Segundo, who is 91, helped to shape the sound of son by inventing a seven-stringed instrument called the “armnico,” which doubled the guitar’s “D” string to produce a cross between the Spanish guitar and the Cuban tres. At Carnegie Hall, he spun out the kind of sweetly lyrical solos that can come only from caressing steel and wood for the better part of a century.

The concert ended with a bolero titled “Silencio,” and the duet partners, Ferrer and Omara Portuondo, spent the instrumental portion dancing in slow romantic circles. The moment was calculated, corny and, like most of the evening, altogether irresistible. It was the kind of cerebral fish-out-of-water scene that you might imagine in a Wim Wenders film — he was there, in fact, with cameras running.

“The Buena Vista Social Club,” which has already sold nearly a million copies around the world, is the hip hit of the season among the older demographic that I think of as the “midrock” crowd, and which guitarist Ry Cooder, who produced and played on the album, has been known to call the “Jeep Cherokee set.” These are often affluent, well-educated music buyers in their 30s and 40s who don’t often relate to the rap, rock and pop that dominates the youth-driven pop charts. This is an audience more likely to take its cues from NPR than MTV, and whose interests are often piqued by a sense of the exotic. And these days, Afro-Cuban music has become as sweetly seductive as the smoke of a contraband cigar.

Still, the success of “Buena Vista Social Club” is far beyond that of most world music releases. Language is often the toughest barrier to widespread acceptance of international artists. Part of the reason that Bob Marley became not just the biggest star in reggae but the most widely heard world-music artist is that he sang in English. “Buena Vista Social Club” includes a lavish booklet with informative liner notes and translated lyrics, but for those like me who are linguistically challenged, the vocals are destined to be heard more as musical sounds than literal language.

The mostly son-based music of “Buena Vista Social Club” manages to sound both foreign and familiar, with arrangements that are thick with a folkish bed of guitars and related stringed instruments. The collection’s sweet, almost pastoral vibe is established by its first track, a haunting, minor-key tune by Segundo called “Chan Chan.” Cooder’s no novice at such hands-across-the-water collaborations. He’s already won Grammy Awards for recent collaborations with Rajastanian guitarist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt (“Meeting by the River”) and Mali’s Ali Farka Tour* (“Talking Timbuktu”). And he’s long enjoyed a reputation as a highly tasteful musicmaker, with his early albums introducing many to the music of such gifted artists as Blind Blake, Joseph Spence, Flaco Jimenez and Sleepy John Estes.

The challenge for the midrock (or Jeep Cherokee) listener is where to go after “Buena Vista Social Club.” A logical next step is “A Toda Cuba le Gusta” by the Afro-Cuban All Stars, which includes many of the same players as “Buena Vista Social Club” but focuses on Afro-Cuban jazz, with bold horn lines and quicker tempos imbuing the music with Latin swing. Gonz}lez, who helped develop the mambo and brought jazz harmonies to Cuban music, is featured on both albums as well as on a solo effort, “Introducing … Rub*n Gonz}lez.” Though his playing is consistently inventive, this collection of Cuban tunes in the “descarga” (jam session) is less distinctive than the other two discs.

Expanding my Latin horizons beyond the traditionalist world of these albums proved to be a bit bewildering. What I was looking for was propulsive percussion and inspired instrumentalists. Browsing through the various-artist compilations in a number of large, well-stocked record stores, I was confronted by hundreds of discs on unfamiliar labels that were filled with artists beyond my limited knowledge. Consequently, I gravitated to collections on labels known for authoritative reissues.

Rhino, whose extensive reissue catalogue has long managed to mix the monumental with the marginal, has lately moved into the Latin market with a variety of compilations. “El Rey Del Timbal!” is a splendid disc dedicated to Tito Puente, the veteran band leader and timbale player best known to old rock fans as the composer of an early Santana standard, “Oye Como Va.” Tracks stretching over nearly 40 years reveal Puente to be a master of creating dynamic interplay between syncopated horn lines and percolating percussion. Finding that one disc was just not enough. I also picked up a compilation on Concord of tracks from the ’80s and ’90s, “Oye Como Va! The Dance Collection.” Frankly, now I’ve got enough Tito, but then, that’s the way a midrocker dabbles.

If you’re looking to imagine yourself dancing the night away with mobsters in a Havana nightclub before the arrival of Fidel Castro, then you might enjoy “Mambo Mania!” The collection is filled with swinging moments, but there’s also a campy element to these vintage dance tunes that is driven home by the inclusion of a tune by Desi Arnaz, who became the best-known of all Cuban musicians by becoming the sitcom straight man for his wife, Lucille Ball.

“The Original Mambo Kings” (Verve) predates “Mambo Mania!” and focuses on the New York jazz world of the late-1940s. The disc is dominated by the work of a pair of seminal Havana-born musicians, trumpeter Mario Bauza and a vocalist known as Machito. Besides tracks by Machito and his Afro-Cuban Orchestra, the collection also includes an “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite” with Charlie Parker on alto sax, and one of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s epic excursions into Latin jazz, “The Manteca Suite.”

As my Latin collection grew, it became clear that I preferred music that tended toward Afro-Cuban jazz than more pop-oriented tunes that took clear aim at the dance floor. This distinction was sharpened by another pair of Rhino compilations, “Salsa Fresca! Dance Hits of the ’90s” and “Sabroso! The Afro-Latin Groove.” The former is a good introduction to the slick and rhythmic sounds of contemporary salsa, but it also suggests that in these global days, the highly polished sounds and techniques of commercial dance music crosses the boundaries of different musical genres. Consequently, much of “Salsa Fresca!” strikes me as no deeper nor more memorable than a collection of yesterday’s English-language dance tracks.

By contrast, “Sabroso!” breathes the kind of Latin fire that’ll appeal to rockers raised on the sounds of Santana. The majority of the tracks are from the 1960s, and while the instrumental improvisations are clearly inspired by the sounds of jazz, the rhythmic grooves also show the influence of rhythm & blues and funk. It’s not the title of tunes like Willie Bobo’s “Fried Neck Bones and Some Home Fries” and Mongo Santamaria’s “Sweet ‘Tater Pie” that makes “Sabroso!” a most delicious musical meal. It’s the deep rhythmic grooves that left me searching for the ultimate albums by artists like Joe Cuba and Mongo Santamaria.

Another explanation for preferring “Sabroso!” over “Salsa Fresca!” could be that while my introduction to Latin music has included familiarizing myself with these and a few dozen other discs, it’s yet to include a night of dancing. That is where the hips will finally meet the beat, an image that puts fear into the heart of somebody who came of age during the days of free-form hippie dancing. Maybe that’s why I was so charmed by those dancers shuffling slowly around the stage of Carnegie Hall. Looking at those swinging senior citizens, it was almost possible to believe that a midrocker still had time to learn how to really dance.

Lowe’s only slightly tongue-in-cheek assessment of the concert experience is familiar to those in their “midrock” years — which is to say, among music fans old enough to have bought Beatles’ albums when they were first released on vinyl. And it goes partway toward explaining Lowe’s transformation from a composer of bright but lightweight pop tunes to a much more serious and substantial songwriter. Lowe’s most recent albums, 1994′s “The Impossible Bird” and the new “Dig My Mood,” are subtle, low-key affairs filled with songs that live where country meets blues and jazz meets rock ‘n’ roll.

“I’m not as much a fan of my ironic, smartass material as other people are,” says Lowe, pouring himself a cup of coffee at his New York hotel the day after he and his trio concluded a brief tour of the U.S. “And I suppose I was waiting until I was old enough to have some sort of experience to sing about. When you’re young, it’s hard to sing the blues. Nobody believes you.”

“These days,” he continues, “rock ‘n’ roll is much more about rock than about roll. I don’t do rock. But I’m interested in that roll part, because that’s the funny little bit that makes it hip. And it’s the roll part of the equation that lets somebody like me have a career — as long as my body holds out, I’ll be grooving when I’m 70, and not some sort of horrible spectacle.”

Lowe has the kind of je ne sais quoi it takes to use words like “grooving,” and to say that your elderly parents are “a very swinging pair.” Lowe dedicated “Dig My Mood” to his mom and dad, who didn’t always dig his music, but who were always supportive. “The only other profession I even thought about was being a fighter pilot like my dad,” he says, “but I was too dim to do that. Be a military flier or be in a band; those were the two hippest things I could imagine.”

Lowe was plenty bright enough for the music biz. He was a member of the British pub-rock band Brinsley Schwarz in the early ’70s, a prominent punk-era record producer (he recorded Elvis Costello’s first five albums and the Pretenders’ first single, “Stop Your Sobbing”) and a quirky solo act with a handful of minor hits like “Cruel to Be Kind” and “(I Love the Sound of ) Breaking Glass.” He also performed with Dave Edmunds in Rockpile, and later joined John Hiatt, Ry Cooder and Jim Keltner in a brief alliance dubbed Little Village.

Each experience taught him something new about the business of show. He learned the danger of hype when a planeload of British journalists were flown to New York to witness the Fillmore East debut of Brinsley Schwarz. Travel delays left the journalists drunk and surly by the time they reached the concert, and the band became lunch meat. The Fillmore show taught Lowe another lesson. He remembers watching headliner Van Morrison lead his “Moondance”-era band through an astonishing set that made him realize how much he still had to learn.

Then came punk. “When punk rock came along,” he says, “the one thing you were not supposed to be was musical. All those years that we’d spent learning these chops, and all those gigs in Germany where you’d play all night, and on the weekends, where you’d play all day and all night. Along comes punk rock and it has nothing to do with that. And a lot of people went out of business.”

Lowe found a new gig producing records, the first of which was the wonderful “Howlin’ Wind” by Graham Parker and the Rumour, and helping to form a seminal punk label, Stiff Records. Naturally, he was a star of the label’s “Little Stiffs” tour. Then came Elvis Costello.

“Elvis had a brand new bag,” says Lowe. “He was a musician and wanted to be good, but he knew all about the attitude part of it, and knew that the world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn’t cross the road to see them. It’s people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones. They’ve got the roll thing.”

Lowe is not one to confuse record production with brain surgery. “When somebody like Elvis Costello comes along,” he says, “anybody can make a good record with him.” Costello’s catalogue proves otherwise. His last production was two tracks by the Mavericks that appeared on a Buddy Holly tribute album and the “Apollo 13″ soundtrack. “They tell me I produced those songs,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, I just stood in the back, wore a good suit and said, ‘Yeah, that’s happening.’” Lowe adds that maybe he should get back into production.

Working with the Mavericks was not Lowe’s first exposure to country music. In 1979, he married country-rock singer Carlene Carter, a union that brought him into contact with another “swinging pair” of parents, Johnny Cash and June Carter-Cash.

“Going to Nashville to meet the in-laws,” he recalls, “was the first time when I’d been in America and not been seen as some sort of eccentric character with a cute accent. It was the first time I’d been somewhere where I was a goddamn foreigner. Not by the Cash’s, of course, but considering that everybody’s nervous around their in-laws, having it be Johnny Cash and June Carter gave it an extra twist.”

The marriage didn’t last, but that didn’t stop Lowe from writing “The Beast in Me” for Johnny Cashes 1994 record, “Cash.” Lowe dealt with the beast in him in the ’80s, when drugs, alcohol and career anxiety put him into a severe depression. After three-plus years of utter sobriety, Lowe toasted his success and returned to being a social drinker. Later, after meeting at a party for a mutual friend, former abuser Eric Clapton sent him a personal note and a 12-steps pamphlet. Says Lowe, who admits to being both touched and perturbed: “I thought, ‘Well, you cheeky bastard!’”

Lowe’s creative lethargy was broken by John Hiatt’s invitation to help him record a 1987 album with guitarist Ry Cooder and drummer Jim Keltner. “Bring the Family,” recorded in just four days, is both Hiatt’s best album and a superb example of ensemble playing. The experience made Lowe a great believer of recording live in the studio, with the instruments playing right alongside the vocals. Lowe says that when the same players were given an unlimited budget to record a 1992 album as Little Village, the magic disappeared under big-time expectations and unruly egos.

The ’90s Lowe has adjusted his expectations — “Anybody my age who worries about appealing to kids is not only out of their mind, but in for a brutal disappointment,” he says — even though he recently reaped an unexpected windfall for a song he wrote while a member of Brinsley Schwarz, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.” He’d already earned some royalties when the tune was recorded by Elvis Costello for 1979′s “Armed Forces,” and it had even been included in a number of movies. But all that was chump change compared to the $1-million-plus he earned when Curtis Stigers sang it on the multiplatinum soundtrack to “The Bodyguard.”

“The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal, and I’m playing to the sort of people who like those same records,” Lowe admits. Which is to say, he’s playing to a pretty small pool. And most of them work in the music business and get their records for free.

Maybe that’s why Lowe has come to look upon his records as demo tapes designed to lure superstar voices to his songs. (Both Rod Stewart and Diana Ross have covered tunes off his recent albums.) But that shortchanges the soulfully undercooked manner in which Lowe has rendered his most recent songs. There’s a melancholy intimacy to “Dig My Mood” that goes far beyond the clever schtick of Lowe’s earlier music. Pop artists typically peak early, but Lowe’s just now hitting his groove.

“Largo” is the second movement of “From the New World,” and the theme is interpreted both by the Chieftains, who give it a lovely lilt, and by Garth Hudson of the Band, who has great fun pulling it apart. The new songs work better as episodic vignettes than as parts of an ongoing narrative, with standout tunes performed by Osborne (“An Uncommon Love”), Lauper (“White Man’s Melody”), Taj Mahal (“Freedom Ride” and “Needed Time”) and Willie Nile (“Medallion”). But the real star of the show is David Forman, who helped write many of the tunes, and who sings lead on five of them, including a terrific duet with Levon Helm on “Gimme a Stone,” a song that sounds like a forgotten gem by The Band. Forman attracted critical attention in 1976 for a sweetly soulful LP on Arista. Twenty-two years later, it’s nice to see him taking a second bow.

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Tricky
ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES | ISLAND

BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG | Like Tricky’s last record,
“Pre-Millennium Tension,” “Angels With Dirty Faces” is a
jumbled, gorgeous hiss of despair. This dark and difficult album
will do little to bring back fans of the relatively accessible
“Maxinquaye,” who were alienated by “Pre-Millennium
Tension’s” relentless bleakness. On the new album, the
beauty-and-the-beast tension that Tricky has with Martina, his
angel-voiced collaborator, is particularly potent. “Talk to Me,”
for example, has Tricky’s paranoid growl creeping under
Martina’s sweet, heartsick warble, while layers of ominous sound
and irregular beats gurgle menacingly in the background. On
“Carriage for Two,” Tricky’s voice percolates through layers of
plaintive guitars. His barely-there whisper, “Black girls are
beautiful,” sounds predatory and terrifying, while above him
Martina sings, “God bless the child.” “Broken Homes,” which
opens with a gospel choir, has the subtle incantatory power of
“Makes Me Wanna Die,” the best song on “Pre-Millennium
Tension.”

Of course, angst is currently little more than a highly marketable
commodity, but Tricky’s wild-eyed misery and Martina’s soulful
blues are like nothing else in pop music. His music is explicitly
political — on “Money Greedy,” he repeats over and over,
“Waiting on government lines, I’ll take what’s mine, you trample
on my soul.” But unlike most rappers, Tricky shows us a soul
that’s internalized the degradation of the ghetto. His persona is
never that of a “gangsta” or an activist; he’s more like the broken
man mumbling profundities under his breath on the subway.

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Fugazi
END HITS | DISCHORD

BY MARK ATHITAKIS | Looking for a band name that wasn’t
going out of style any time soon, Ian MacKaye’s post-Minor
Threat outfit agreed on Fugazi, a Vietnam-era military term for
“fucked-up situation.” In the 10 years that followed, the
indomitably independent Washington, D.C., quartet has focused
on showing precisely where those situations are: in the financial
centers, in the government, in relationships, in music. In
yourself, too, should you care to look hard enough. But while it’s
the no-quarter theorizing that’s gained them massive respect, it’s
the music itself that makes the message hit its targets: Tight as
clenched fists, loud as car wrecks, predictable as the Asian stock
market, “End Hits” is Fugazi at its fiercest yet most
approachable.

Their patented quiet-loud dynamics are more controlled than
ever and rooted in a surprising amount of hook-happy
songwriting; if the band had any interest in such things, “Place
Position,” “No Surprise” and “Caustic Acrostic” could do some
chart action. But the hooks and lockgrooves are just places for
the band to hang its outrage. MacKaye barks at global
conglomerates on “Five Corporations” with a fervor that marks
the best hard-core punk (which he defined way back when). And
as for Guy Picciotto, Fugazi’s Sensitive Guy, he’s staring death in
the face and spitting back: “Yawn! Yawn! Yawn! I can’t stifle my
boredom!” he yelps defiantly, giving those fucked-up situations
all the disrespect they deserve.

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Various Artists
GODZILLA: THE ALBUM | SONY

BY GEOFF EDGERS | Most movie soundtracks fall into one of two
camps: There’s the Motown/CCR dose of instant nostalgia ` la
“Forrest Gump,” or the lumping of a dozen seemingly unrelated
new songs — as on “Godzilla: The Album” — whose only mission
is to stick somewhere to the charts. Trouble is, these days the hit
list changes faster than a James Cameron budget. How is Sony
supposed to know Ben Folds has been cold since he teetered in his
chair on “Saturday Night Live”? Or that Green Day is so, well,
1995?

Several of the 13 songs here — not counting the two tracks from
the “score” — are pleasant enough. The Wallflowers do a loyal
version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” (picture the look on Bowie’s
face when he realizes that almost every 13-year-old boy in the
free world thinks Jakob Dylan wrote it), and there are new songs
from Rage Against the Machine and the Foo Fighters. Green
Day’s offering, a very slightly remixed “Brain Stew,” reminds
me that I still think the chords were stolen from Chicago’s “25 or
6 to 4.” The best song on the album, Michael Penn’s “Macy Day
Parade,” is a grinding pop tune with a tinge of gospel, buried
between songs by bands named Fuel and Days of the New.

Incidentally, two other “Godzilla” discs are out on
GNP/Crescendo, music Akira Ifukube recorded for the
charmingly low-budget Japanese monster flicks starting in 1954.
But if the marketing push on the movie is any indication, this is
the one you’re going to hear about.

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Natalie Merchant
OPHELIA | ELEKTRA

BY CYNTHIA JOYCE | Long before bands like the Sundays or the
Cranberries made it fashionable to affect speech impediments
when singing, Natalie Merchant had the diction thing down.
Chopping off the ends (and sometimes the beginnings) of her
words like some French class flunky (remember “Peace Tain”?),
Merchant’s trademark combination of big ideas and baby talk
suggested that these were the thoughts of a wise and sometimes
weary old woman being processed through an innocent child’s
mind.

It’s too bad we can barely hear those big ideas on “Ophelia,”
Merchant’s second solo album. A collection of songs written
from the various imagined perspectives of a woman with
multiple personality disorder (and thus a rich fantasy life),
“Ophelia” is an even more contemplative affair than her previous
work. Long on concept, it’s unfortunately short on the buoyant
rhythms that could carry you through even the most melancholy
of songs from “Tigerlily.” The album (and accompanying video)
appears to be an opportunity for Merchant to indulge her
thespian tendencies, but the music itself amounts to little more
than pleasant background music, a soundtrack for her wild
imagination. The inclusion of unconventional instruments, such
as the Renaissance tenor recorder on the “Ophelia” reprise and
the Wurlitzer on “Frozen Charlotte” and “Effigy,” adds drama,
but the heavy arrangements make Merchant’s lilting voice sound
as if she were drowning in a sea of session musicians.

There are a few tracks, however, that feature the same spare
piano accompaniment and tight turns of phrase of Merchant’s
best work. One of those, the upbeat “Kind and Generous,” opens
with a series of “oooh oooh whoas” that bear a disturbing
resemblance to Olivia Newton-John’s “Have You Never Been
Mellow.” Certainly Merchant has been, but never more so than
on this record.