THE CURE

The Cure

(Geffen)

How Buckaroo Bob Smith—the foremost Western swing innovator of the ’80s and ’90s—got suckered into this big-buck Nashville mishap is anybody’s guess. Most likely, God is punishing Smith and his backing band, the Cure, for fudging on their third and most recent breakup promise, made shortly before the release of 2000’s Bloodflowers. “Three strikes and you’re out!” Jesus thunders like Chuck Heston, thrusting a furry forepaw toward Music City. Why else would they have ended up in the tentacles of Ross Robinson, the mainstream-country assembly-line Rasputin whose previous disciples include the meat-and-taters trinity of franchise two-stepdom: Korn, Sepultura, and Slipknot? Country music is devil music, totally inimical to the sunny ambience of England’s sharpest- dressed cowpokes, the Cure, best known for a succession of noontime chuck-wagon recordings dating back to 1979’s Three Imaginary Boys. Robinson employed a variety of brainwashing techniques in the studio, even forcing the quartet to record in a circle on some tracks, meaning everyone else in the band had to play and look at Bob’s hair at the same time. His trick worked: The band’s self-titled 25th album, The Cure, seems positively darned from the moment Buckaroo groans “I can’t find myself” over ominous stud-muffin guitar at the onset of album opener “Lost.” Mostly, The Cure sounds like a suppler version of 1982’s Pornography with slightly dumber lyrics. But “Anniversary” makes good on its prurient predecessor’s promise of idyllic country/swing fusion—at last: Antigravity guitar and synth currents ripple magnetically over a molten sea of dubwise drums and profoundly distorted bass while Smith draws a smoldering torch out of his ass and keeps it aloft without once sounding as though he’s about to sneeze. ROD SMITH

ANTIBALAS

Who Is This America?

(Ropeadope)

Antibalas are triple-thirdhand: an embrace of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat and thus, by proxy, James Brown’s finely tuned soul power, with a post–Manu Dibango rare groove 45-fetishist chaser. Throw in a tendency to utilize spacious-yet-muffled production, and they’re essentially the audio equivalent of a Super 8 film—grainy and shaky and blurry and tinged with an otherworldly coloration. But hindsighted revivalism doesn’t necessarily preclude modern thrills. Who Is This America? Good question—albeit one only half-answered by the dozen-minute pseudo-title track “Who Is This America Dem Speak of Today?” The show-not-tell answer lies more in the pan-African Masekela-meets-Maceo horn assault and its bloody-palmed conga drive than its Sociology 101 lyrics—which, from the booming voice of Duke Amayo, at least sound like a Very Worthwhile Lesson. “Speak of Today?” as well as the last two cuts—mineshaft pachyderm pimp strut “Elephant” (14:03) and Nubian-feminist slow jam “Sister” (19:14)—are good for three-quarters of an hour worth of slow-building, densely layered, cavernous jams. Those marathon tracks owe a noticeable debt to Kuti’s Africa 70, but the lateral expansions of that sound keep this album above mere aspirations toward Brooklyn 00. The electric piano whir and space-martial horns of “Pay Back Africa” hint at the Euro-mod psych orchestrations of German sci-fi/horror film composer Peter Thomas, and the carnival-barker courtroom drama of the Bush administration showroom trial “Indictment” is Talking Book–inflected half-speed juju with dub echo for miles and miles and miles. NATE PATRIN

BLACK DICE

Creature Comforts

(DFA)

Thus far, New York’s Black Dice have shuffled and stomped all over the noise rock corridor, pausing to squeal incongruently, chirp like airmen, and chime like Neu! Age hippies while beats designed to correspond with a junkie finally kicking dope attempted to unscrew your cranium. Where 2001’s Beaches and Canyons, with its standout feel-good track “Endless Happiness,” favored windsocks over throbbing gristle and made art punk sound downright pastoral, their earlier, self-titled debut was, more or less, a picture postcard depicting melted-down bananas. Here the band tethers the two aesthetics, packaging tweets, twitters, and deep, heavy pedal tectonics as if they are feathers of the same bird. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the concrete city they live in, but the most consistent thing about Black Dice might be their references to nature—regardless of how digital their delay pedals are. Having lost drummer Hisham Bharoocha, rhythms are now provided by Ping-Pong matches and computer-generated rain dances. In the final movement of “Skeleton,” a 15-minute opus that shadows the aforementioned touchy-feely track from Beaches, Black Dice approximate the act of stepping off an elevator into a color-saturated sanctuary brimming with exotic flowers and gentle beasts. As much as I would like to insist that with Comforts, Black Dice finally got it right, that would only be because I personally see myself in this record to a degree that I didn’t with early releases. Black Dice, I’m sure, feel confident they’ve been getting it right all along. LAURA CASSIDY

Black Dice play Neumo’s with Animal Collective and Climax Golden Twins at 7 p.m. Sun., Aug. 22. $12 adv.

THE COURT AND SPARK

Witch Season

(Absolutely Kosher)

Plenty of alt-country acts have taken Gram Parsons’ fabled description of a “cosmic American music” as an impetus to inject the dusty twang of vintage California country-rock with the lysergic swirl of late-’60s psychedelia. L.A.’s supremely druggy Beachwood Sparks have demonstrated the virtue of getting lost inside that Naugahyde cook-up, but on their third album, San Francisco’s Court and Spark illuminate the alternate advantages of keeping your head about you. No matter how trippy some of the textures on Witch Season get— liberally flanged electric guitar strum in “Out on the Water,” post-dub mixing-desk echo in “Suffolk Down Upon the Night,” underwater headphone kick-drum boom in “Steeplechasing”—there’s a clear-eyed lucidity to frontman M.C. Taylor’s songwriting that cuts through the pungent studio fog. This allows Taylor to indulge a narrative jones that runs satisfyingly deeper than y’alternative’s typical terrain (missing loose women, drinking cheap liquor, driving down curiously long highways); in the dreamy, organ-led closer “Titov Sang the Blues,” he pours one out for Gherman Titov, the Russian that cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin beat to become the first human in space. And when Taylor does miss a lady with “hair like the straight sea grass,” or stares out the window at the passing scenery, his band usually gives him a lovely melody to keep the rest of us amused, as in “Sundowner, You,” which Wes Anderson should be required to include in any future Royal Tenenbaums sequel set in California. MIKAEL WOOD

The Court and Spark play Sunset Tavern with Dolorean and Call and Response at 9 p.m. Fri., Aug. 20. $7.

THE RED KRAYOLA

Singles

(Drag City)

The 1967 debut of Texas psych/folk/free-rock experimenters Red Krayola provided a barely corralled mess of noise, kazoo symphonies, and drug-taking epics disguised as antiwar songs. No one, including principal member Mayo Thompson, was necessarily adept at his instrument. Not really a recipe for permanency, then—and yet the band has, in various forms, continued to put out records for nearly 40 years. The 21 singles collected here were made between 1970 and 2002 and run the gambit of the band’s dalliances, from Can-esque soundtrack abstracts and jammy space-outs to skewed speakeasy torch songs and post-punk mathematical equations. 1970’s “Old Time Clark” could follow Tom Waits on a mixtape; 1999’s “Come on Down” experiments with the laptop electro-funk, seemingly for the hell of it; “Micro-Chips & Fish” is a metallic and modern (circa 1979) comment on rampant consumerism that fuses Devo with ESG. Thompson has a mind for concepts and statements, but he’s also mindful of the times and an eager collaborator. The Raincoats’ Gina Birch, Swell Maps’ Epic Soundtracks, and Jim O’Rourke have all pitched in over the years, slanting Thompson’s sound toward their own. Occasional stinkers are inevitable with this collaborative, conceptual formula—the wankery and perhaps purposefully terrible “The Red Krayola on Forty-Five,” from 1993, seems offered as proof. Singles is loaded with variations and trials, and the load may prove to be too heavy. It isn’t every fan that wants absurdist political post-punk with funk beats, but those who do may not get enough. LAURA CASSIDY

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

Sung Tongs

(Fatcat)

Though it does indeed make the New York band’s 2003 album Here Comes the Indian sound like something Glenn Branca would’ve saved for a box set, the Animal Collective’s new Sung Tongs is only the pop breakthrough it’s been called in some quarters if you’re willing to accept microwaved field recordings and 12-minute track lengths alongside gorgeous Beach Boys harmonies and zestfully strummed acoustic guitars. Which, sure, we all should be, since pop is only as small a universe as we elect to make it, a pointless closing-down whose beneficiaries are limited to the multinational corporations attempting to sell us sports cars and sugar water with as few interruptions as possible. But these open-eared home-recording experimentalists remain fascinated with texture over tune, a conscious prioritization that will deprive them of Carson Daly’s imprimatur until Timbaland truly loses his shit. “The Softest Voice” starts out with spindly campfire atmospherics, then just wallows in them; “Winters Love” is filled with memorable vocal hooks, but they’re arranged in the overlapping strands noise bands deploy, not in the neat contrapuntal matrices the Matrix prefer. Still, there’s an almost manic vivacity to the more straightforward material here that feels worlds away from the studied manipulation that flourishes within the Animal Collective’s cohort; in “Who Could Win a Rabbit,” band members Avey Tare and Panda Bear sing together with the enthusiasm of those who want to be heard. MIKAEL WOOD

Animal Collective play Neumo’s with Black Dice and Climax Golden Twins at 7 p.m. Sun., Aug. 22. $12 adv.