Drums, Guitars and Synthesisers. That’s what you get from Ratatat, two college buddies who have apparently made a little niche for themselves dropping instrumental albums on XL records, remixing everyone from the Knife to Young Buck (unofficially, in the case of the latter) and touring laptops in hand. The tracklist of this presumably unofficial remix release had me a little bit skeptical, dominated as it is by today’s Southern heavyweights and a sprinkling of the East Coast’s finest circa 1998. Not that I don’t like UGK, Slim Thug or Jeezy and certainly, Jay-Z & Biggie should make any cut…it was more that the prospect of hearing them remixed by what appeared to be two Brooklyn hipsters was not particularly enticing. A few weeks later and this disc still seems to find it’s way into my rotation, so there goes my book cover judging championship title. Let me be clear, 1/3 of the songs on this disc are skippers. Complete skippers. Not because the beats are bad (although The Mule & Over Here are definitely not good) and not because the rappers can’t spit (although who really wants to hear a Kanye remix from these cats)…the remixes fail when the combination is just off, or worse yet, the end result is mundane (i.e.We Gon Ride w/ Saigon & U.G.K.). That said, the album has more than enough incredible tracks to make it well worth the cop; Young Buck, T.I. & Ludacris devaste Stomp, Slim Thug, T.I. & Bun B do likewise on Three Kings. Beanie Siegel & Jay-Z’s disparate accapellas are perfect on Glock Nines, you would swear this was a real song not a clever cut and paste over relentless drums and an infectious melody. Biggie’s vocals get the royal treatment, which is probably why this is a good review. Please don’t remix Biggie for the 1, 000, 000th time unless you are going to bring it for real and Ratatat’s version of Party & Bullshit is that fire. With a nod to the underground Ratatat includes two original “freestyles” that both have great beats, unfortunately Despot can rhyme but I haven't felt shit Beans did in years. Even Memphis Bleek gets a banger, had me ice grillin old Spanish ladies in the grocery store with my headphones on "like better not bump my cart again"…yeah, I put Memphis Bleek and the word “banger” in the same sentence. Ratatat motherfucker.

Rodney Walters

Formed in 2006 at Syracuse University, Ra Ra Riot seem poised to become one of this year's big stories, despite the fact that they admit they have yet to figure out their sound.

Just weeks ago, as the EP was being spread to journalists and the band was preparing for summer shows, their drummer, John Pike, died suddenly in a freak accident—a crushing blow to a group of youngsters who were gaining momentum. After deliberation they decided the best way to remember their friend was to continue on.

True to their self-assessment, the record seems a sampling of things they could do and could be. Opening track "Each Year" has a bit of a Belle and Sebastian feel, and "Everest" spoke of the Police, an impression helped along by Wesley Miles' young-Sting-like vocals. Featuring a cellist and violinist, Ra Ra Riot could easily slip into the orchestral pop category, something they hint at on "Dying Is Fine", their longest and most ambitious track at over six minutes.

Regardless of points of reference, Ra Ra Riot will likely continue to grow and find something all their own. The band is currently talking with labels and looking for a deal, and will presumably have a full-length in the not-to-distant future.

It doesn’t seem so long ago when I first heard about Jennifer Gentle. I was at a bar talking to a friend. He’d just walked out on the opening act for a show a group of us were about to see at Mercury Lounge. The openers, he said, were really bad. “How bad?” I asked. He replied with three simple words: “There were kazoos.”

The opening act, of course, turned out to be Jennifer Gentle. I had the chance to watch them myself a few minutes later, and they confounded. I didn’t know what or whom I was watching. Much of the band appeared uncomfortable to be on stage, and the songs varied between annoying, and what sounded like fleeting brilliance. They didn’t propel me to buy their album or look up free mp3s online, but I did remember them.

After listening to The Midnight Room, Jennifer Gentle’s second LP for Sub Pop, I give more weight to my impressions of brilliance. But beware music consumer, because this fun, catchy, curious, exciting album is also quite weird and might annoy the hell out of you if you aren’t careful.

You’re tripping at an Eastern European circus. I really don’t need to say any more, but convention pushes me forward for a few more lines.

Jennifer Gentle is one person: an Italian named Marco Fasolo. He wrote, recorded, and produced The Midnight Room all by his lonesome in his house in northern Italy. Marco’s singular vision is audible throughout the album, an off-kilter mix of simple, bouncy guitar riffs, ramshackle percussion, and helium vocals. It could be too much in high doses, sure. But once this album comes in June, I see thousands of kids taking the time to collectively forget their lives, and enjoy hearing the world through Fasolo’s ears.

—Chris Ruen

A few years ago Beck released an album called Midnight Vultures. It was an interesting chapter for him because it was good, a lot of fun to listen to, but, as a friend of mine aptly put it, a little bit self-indulgent.
While that over-the-top, high-voltage effort was slightly off Beck's beaten path and certainly not representative of his most engaging work, "a little bit self-indulgent" is what Chow Nasty seems to do best. And if a party album is what you're after, "Super (Electrical) Recordings" is probably fairly hard to kill.

With production from Peanut Butter Wolf, whose hip hop influence is all over these beats, the San Fran trio seems to have no limit to the places they can take their vision for wild out rock; "if we can pull it off, it goes on the album" might have been the recording mantra. This sort of limitless creativity and sonic excess generally ends in disaster, the musicians unable to match anything-goes songwriting with the instrumental skill to make it work, but Chow Nasty are adroit. If I wasn't such a black-hearted pessimist, I might actually listen to this record a lot.

Although singer/songwriter Beau Jennings and Cheyenne moved from Oklahoma to Brooklyn in between releasing their 2005 LP I Am Alive and writing/recording The Land Rush EP, its hard to imagine living in Brooklyn has had much effect on their sound.

Jennings's slow, crackling vocals remind of a Tom Petty ballad. And while the music shares a certain classic, country-rock sensibility with Petty—on "This Is The Fashion" for instance—Cheyenne's aesthetic brings in more mellow, folk elements.
They seldom take the energy level above a slow rock, choosing instead to use adept instrumentation and melodies to engage listeners.

Cheyenne's is not a brand-new sound, but so long as you aren't among the music fans who would rather keep listening to old records than appreciating the talent of contemporary musicians, this EP would be a good introduction and appetizer for the LP expected later this year.

Sometimes the staff at COOL'EH gets buried under a pile of records and an important release date passes us by. But rather than cop pleas, we do our best to go back to records we missed that we shouldn't have. One such miss was Traineater, the April release from Book of Knots.

The second album in a triptych loosely inspired by, in order, growing up in an economically depressed fishing village, growing up in an economically depressed steel town, and I don't know what the third album will be loosely inspired by because the band hasn't announced that yet.

The Book of Knots are a studio collective comprised of Matthias Bossi, Joel Hamilton, Carla Kihlstedt and Tony Maimone. Largely concerned with stories issuing from the crumbling corners of America, where industry-based prosperity has long-since peaked and receded, the dark, grimy, orchestral music might easily become a soundtrack for a particularly awesome documentary film, so intense and various is the imagery created through the interplay of lyrics and instrumentation.

With guest artists Tom Waits, Mike Watt, David Thomas, Jon Langford and Carla Bozulich, The Book of Knots produced, with a vast number of instruments and ideas, an album that begs to be digested by music wonks whole. As cohesive an album as you are likely to hear this year. A perfect candidate for adaptation into a 50-minute music video.

The first LP for Seattle's Arthur & Yu is notable for a couple of reasons. Not only is it the band's debut, but the album is also the inaugural release for Hardly Art, the new label started by Sub Pop founder Jonathan Poneman. Arthur & Yu also represent one half of the acts currently signed to Hardly Art.

Grant Olsen and Sonya Wescott point to Velvet Underground as an influence, which can be heard off the bat in the lo-fi vocal production on opening track "Absurd Heroes Manifestos", a sound they employ throughout. But the album has a brighter aspect than VU, perhaps owing to the fact that A&YU seem to have skipped the heroin portion of the VU influence.

The exception is "Afterglow", with its heavy drum and acoustic guitar rhythm, and lyrical references to humanity's encroachment on the natural world—"Sun coming down/leaves on the ground/and a wolf got caught up in the barbed wire/and there's a bullet in the wood we used for fire."

Brighter sounds like the driving guitar and click of the snare rim on "The Ghost of Bull Lee", the ascending melody on "There Are Too Many Birds", the xylophone layer on "Half Years", or the subtle bongo rhythm on "Black Bear" create an overall sound for the record that may be best described as pastoral, maybe even a little bit folk.

Complaints here are few, but one significant tradeoff when employing that lo-fi vocal sound is how difficult the lyrics can be to hear at times, especially Wescott's. She's the only vocalist on "There Are Too Many Birds"—the rest of the tracks feature both Wescott and Olsen—and her lyrics are nearly unintelligible.

That aside, Olsen and Wescott prove themselves with their instrumental palette and vocal harmonies, delivering an album that should be right at home on a boozy summer afternoon somewhere well clear of the city.

Discerning listeners of hip hop music can no doubt detect the irony in the latest trend of Dipset/Lil Wayne/Clipse worship. There is some odd notion that these rappers have reinvented the metaphor, let loose from all form-based development and chosen to deliberately abandon concrete topics (aside from drugs) to go where none have gone before. They are not doing anything much different, in actuality, than what the entire nineties backpack scene did in terms of innovation. The backpacks therein implied a mental preparedness of sorts, not just a store of book smarts or a wise-man accessory. Emcees have adapted themselves as purveyors of culture more successfully than famed fiction authors. They must create a rhyme simple enough to be understood but that still brings in references to the outer world.

C Rayz Walz is a Bronx native whose referential tendencies skew more toward John Milton than Sportscenter, making his joints a conversational acid trip into his mind. On The Dropping: Colonic Progress, his seventh release in as many years, C Rayz scrolls through rhymes about New York City with seamless ideation. Where he once felt compelled to be clever by squeezing tons of punchlines into the subject matter, he now prefers to use his descriptive metaphors to describe his mental condition as it contends with urban sprawl. He says “I hate this town but I love this city” and that he is “optimistically cynical” on “Saigon,” which is essentially a thrust of battle-rap skill applied to internal conflict. On “I Am” he also shines with boastful resolve by illustrating his style through familiar mechanics (i.e. “I’m so nice I could…”; “My verse will…”) encapsulating what has made him popular over the years. However, C Rayz gets bogged down in identifying himself as the emergent/recognizable emcee (see: MTV’s Made appearance) stuck in the underground category, explaining himself as between “Ong Bak and Jam-rock” or between “GP Wu and Gangsta Boo.” Such is the plight of the intelligent rapper, wanting to make a living off of his complex thoughts but knowing it might ultimately alienate him from most. The result is a lyrically sound but thematically scattered thirteen songs. Not sure whether to Vast Aire it out or become an unchained analogy, C Rayz suffers from schizophrenia. Hopefully the next part of his Year of the Beast trilogy will proffer cohesion but that may be wishing for more than his abilities allow.

Andrew Ricketts

On another astonishing note Super Chron Flight Brothers, out of Brooklyn, has effectively combined futuristic electronic rock with dense lyrics of reproof against current hip hop. Billy Woods and Priviledge are not just meekly firing invective at those on the other side of the proverbial tracks. Rather than do that, they travel the contours of cannabis leaves and buds searching for the most accurate cultural commentary. Emergency Powers is their debut of zeitgeist-diving poetry strung over sometimes languorous, sometimes jumpy beats. The whole shit is dope and is in itself primer on literature, music, film and everything else that could possibly influence a studious artist. There is no shortage of references to those influences. For example you might hear “Days of Thunder with a Cuban full of skunk” or “the bluest eye [piercing] into a Heart of Darkness” or “push mics like Sisyphus up literary hills, literally” and be forced to harvest meaning from these tomes. That is the fun of it, though, because it’s all spoken through humble tongues dealing with gentrification, police brutality and high-school girlfriend trauma. Marijuana is a subtext here in the same way that it is in Nas’s music, inspiring random collections of images that figure into an overwhelming scene by song’s conclusion.

Simply put, nothing like this has ever been heard but it is remarkably familiar. “A Million Little Pieces” evokes both Ghostface and Shakespeare (“Great Expectations long since turned into Fear and Loathing”, “Fahrenheit 451, the Fire Next Time is a sermon”) showing how much of art must be derived from other art to be truly germane to us. The song’s chorus elucidates the method saying it seems like a ‘book or tv show or movie’ to delve into the memories of life. The album may require an overstuffed blunt and your entire personal library to sort through properly. Flight Brothers, for instance, would rather blaze ‘til they touch Mars and clutch jars filled with high-grade than race with these cars. There is empathy built in to their words and anecdotes whether they are decrying neighborhood invaders on “Rent Control” or repressing stories of childhood on “Love and War.” They delightfully straddle the line between esoteric brilliance and confusing channel-surfing. Where some underground New York work is belabored by nihilistic introversion, this oeuvre is external to the utmost. They choose perfect footnotes to glide through the soundscape.

Part of the reason I cannot stop listening to Emergency Powers is for fear of missing something infinitely better on another go-round. I think I found my new favorite dutch-rolling soundtrack.

Andrew Ricketts

Sometimes it really is all about the beats. I mean, you always want to have a dope backdrop but in a genre like Grime, I think it really is all about the beats. It’s not that Wiley can control the mic, his silver tongued flow flits between drums but always manages to enunciate, or at least clear enough for a decidedly English rude-bwoy patois to still be effective. He can rhyme but like all Grime albums it lives and dies on the beats, whether syncopated chaos or sparse melodies. The other key to a good Grime track is a great chorus, Dizzee’s seminal “Boy in the Corner” was full of them and Wiley manages more than a few here. If you don’t know about Roll Deep, or Wiley & Dizzee Rascal’s beef, or the scene at all, then it might be worth it to do some googling while you listen to this album. Like all Grime, it’s insular both musically and lyrically, but that insularity also lends a certain credence to the music, whether gangsta boasts or songs about his daughter, Wiley comes across as unflaggingly earnest. He also has some great production on here, unfortunately not all the way through, but with many of the tracks clocking in at under or around three minutes, if you don’t like something at least it’s over fast. 50/50, Bow E3, Slippin’, Gangsters, Stars, Johnny Was a Bad Boy all perfectly exemplify Grime as street-electronica, the Brixton verson of trap music with the bpms way up and the bass even lower. But Wiley fares just as well on the melodic ode to his daughter Baby Girl and the understated but revealing Letter 2 Dizzee, where he catches Dizzee up on what he’s doing while adding a not so subtle reminder “Nothing aint changed except I’m the best now/ It don’t matter, I’m still your big brother”. Instead of going for Dizzee’s neck, he reminisces while making his allegiances clear and setting out the terms of his peace with his onetime friend and later rival. He saves the more pointed barbs for the rest of his adversaries on Getalong Gang, a track where the lyrics outpace the production. There are some crap beats (No Qualms, Getalong Gang), some pure corny shit (Come Lay with Me), and some shit that’s just terrible (Flyboy) but you are still left with nine or ten really good tracks and a damn good album. I haven’t heard all of Dizzee’s new one but after marinating with “Playtime Is Over”, I think Wiley may not be far off in his assessment of who’s on top.

Rodney Walters

I have always been a sucker for a female vocalist. Neko Case, Sally Seltmann (New Buffalo), Jolie Holland, Jenny Lewis (Rilo Kiley), Joanna Newsome, Eleanor Freidberger (The Fiery Furnaces), Verity Susman (Electrelane), Leslie Feist...music fans are literally awash with beautiful voices.

Add Jesy Fortino aka Tiny Vipers to that list. The Seattle native delivers her first record this month via Sub Pop, a collection of both light and dark ballads, done mostly with acoustic guitar as the centerpiece, that showcase Fortino's rich vocals, patient, ambitious songwriting, and curiosity with electronics.

From the get, Tiny Vipers asks her listeners to be patient with sedate simplicity—opener "Campfire Resemblance" being four and a half minutes of four plucked guitar notes and vocals. Second track "On This Side" breezes in with a bit more pace in the chords, and Fortino's rich, soaring harmonies, with herself as backing vocalist, are like a seaside pub in the country.

Although hinted at with an almost indiscernible electronic effect on the first track, Forino's interest in pairing acoustic guitar with electronic effects is on full display in "Forests On Fire", where a minutes-long low-tone screech from an electric guitar and organ crescendo ask listeners to search for their own conclusions.

"Swastika", a ten-minute track that asks how "you" would react to a series of situations, bears both the positives and negatives of the album within it. Obviously weighty in its ambition, the song unfolds gradually and sparsely—Forino, as she is in the rest of her songs, clearly reaching for a composition that is artful rather than catchy, making no attempt to add layers for a false sense of complexity. But its minimalism also sets it back over the course of the lengthy track; at times it appears plodding, stuck under its own weight. Perhaps this is the point, but understanding that is asking a lot of today's listeners, and ultimately I am looking for more in a 10-minute track.

Still, hers is a beautiful voice, and she has created music around it that, although overly simple and drawn-out at times, also shows a delicate sensibility and underlying strength and confidence that makes me want to listen. Better to be challenging than easily dismissed for relying on tropes.