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ELEPHANT MAN
Good 2 Go
(Atlantic)
Elephant Man is dancehall's court jester, horny toad, and cheez puff. He's the softcore inside the hardcore. Good 2 Go, his third album, suffers from the usual symptoms of dancehall's attempted crossover moves. There's the awkward collaboration with U.S. hip-hop stars ("Jook Gal," featuring Bone Crusher and Lil Jon); there's the misguided stab at U.S. notions of "pop" ("So Fine"); and then, scattered throughout, there are the bangers for the headstrong. Which is a shame, because whether you're a regular worshipper at dancehall's temple of boom or not, it's the bangers you're buying this for. "Pon De River, Pon De Bank" is one of the few "pure" dancehall tracks to ever chart in America, but "Fuck U Sign," which could only chart on Mars (or Jamaica), was dancehall at its most punk rock in 2003. Produced by Ward 21, a squeal stabs your temples (or tells you that tea is done), Animal from the Muppets smacks some tablas, and Ele shouts the title chorus as if he had founded Pussy Galore—albeit a Pussy Galore that actually grooved and/or rocked. Hearing it, cranked up, you wonder why America's youth are still pissing around with Good Charlotte. (Ele probably buys his Chee-tos-colored hair dye at Hot Topic, too.) He looks like Dennis Rodman. He sounds like a cartoon car alarm. He quotes "Eye of the Tiger" and C + C Music Factory. He doesn't need to hook up with Busta Rhymes or get produced by the Neptunes to become dancehall's biggest crossover star. He just needs to stop giving a fuck what we think. JESS HARVELL
Elephant Man plays Larry's Nightclub at 9:30 p.m. Wed., Feb. 18. $25.
THE CASUAL DOTS
The Casual Dots
(Kill Rock Stars)
"Seems to me you've made your mind up anyway," sings Christina Billotte with a cascading thickness, each syllable unfolding like an old letter or a map, like something long ago creased. Behind her, a slow drum march is resolute but gentle, while two simple, repetitive guitar lines interlace, lock, and let go. "She's the Real Thing," though relatively simplistic, is sour and just awkward enough to nudge it toward the left. The song, like most of this debut, sounds both old—like the Raincoats or an outré Shirelles outtake—and new, like a one-off from the Sleater-Kinney camp. This makes sense: Guitarist/frontwoman Billotte is a veteran of Autoclave (with Mary Timony), Slant 6 (D.C.'s nü-waved grrrl-group answer to Fugazi), and, most recently, Quix*o*tic (a laid-back garage outfit). Kathi Wilcox, who also plays guitar, was in Bikini Kill and, after that, Frumpies; drummer Steve Dore played in Deep Lust with Bratmobile's Allison Wolfe. To their credit, however, the band's résumé is just that. The tracks are wonderfully varied and rarely sound self-referential. Dore's beats are often hypnotically tribal, recalling Krautrock's heyday rather than K Records', and while Billotte and Wilcox expertly blend their diagonal, dueling guitar melodies like they're playing their own private hopscotch game, there's always a bottom end heavy enough to back Dore's dark, driving beats. The result is arty, curvaceously rectilinear, and girly without (praise Shiva) too much Olympia. LAURA CASSIDY
THE CHROMATICS
Plaster Hounds
(Gold Standard Laboratories)
The Chromatics' second album struts past similar acts on sheer audacity—neither predecessors nor contemporaries create so much raunch and basement-level fervor with such aural economy. Although they manage more melody than peers like Erase Errata or no-wave pioneers Suicide, Adam Miller, the only original member, and new recruit Nat Sahlstrom do so with a surprisingly minimalist ethic. On the best tracks, simple, plodding bass lines are chopped up by borrowed percussionist Ron Avila's scattershot drumming—indeed, much of the album's instrumentation comprises little more than raw rhythm-section grooves with only sparse guitar fragments echoing out over the barren landscape. Miller hisses, screams, and yowls like Iggy locked in solitary confinement for the duration of a bad acid trip. The collective result could be the soundtrack to either a fever-induced nightmare or a punk's basement dance party. Three-quarters of the original Chromatics are absent on Hounds, and the reduced membership is evident, especially on "Jesus" and "Monarch," which feature only strange electronic buzzing and Miller's fractured missives kept on life support by rickety, anemic drum-machine thump-and-clack. But when Avila drives the rhythm, ass shaking is nearly irresistible. GRANT BRISSEY
DAVID BANNER
MTA2: Baptized in Dirty Water
(Universal)
David Banner is inhuman. It's not just the rapper's work rate (two albums in 12 months, dozens of guest spots), it's the very sound of him. When he's not wheezing like broken-down machinery slouching toward Babylon, he's roaring like something that's been rudely disinterred from the primordial depths. On "Fuck 'Em," from the first Mississippi: The Album, he sounds for all the world like his (unintended?) namesake, the Incredible Hulk. David Banner is very human. Every second of his work seethes with barely restrained anger over the situation and station of his people: "New schools/But the black kids still ain't learnin' 'bout shit!" To combat this, he's stuffed five golden tickets into his new MTA2: Baptized in Dirty Water worth $10,000 in tuition for the higher-educational institution of the recipient's choice. Sure, it's still philanthropy-via-game-show culture, a Band-Aid applied to a gaping wound, but it beats the crappy shoes and jewelry you might get from Jay-Z or G Unit. The basic writ of Dirty Water is the crunk norm: a black lagoon of bass slime and thugged-out kick drums overlaid with skipping, triple-time snares, blurts of keyboard gunk, and, oh yeah, guys yelling stuff about boobs and alcohol. Banner is smarter than your average, but for the most part, crunk is another in a long line of you-should-really-know-better thrills in pop, from gabba techno to oi! to thrash metal. Then again, Howlin' Wolf sang a lot more about being a backdoor man than being an upstanding citizen, and no one faults him for it, right? J.H.
