BEASTIE BOYS / DJ GREEN LANTERN
New York State of Mind
(djgreenlantern.com)
The Beastie Boys are not hip, though they were once supreme arbiters of that slipperiest of adjectives. The Beastie Boys are not street, nor have they ever been, even as undeniable rap pioneers. So imagine a record that briefly renders Ad Rock, MCA, and the Crypt Keeper not only hip again but street as well. After his frontline reporting from the Eminem/Benzino beef and squeezing the last drops of interest from 2Pac's corpse, DJ Green Lantern's writ for New York State of Mind has the whiff of EZ Cheez about it: Throw the history of the Beasties over hard-core rap instrumentals and poof! Instant snack food. But it's got far more replay value than you'd guess. How gully is the redo of "Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun" over the twitterpated soul and thousand-pound bass of Jay-Z's "U Don't Know"? How instantly party rocking is "Hey Ladies" over Biggie's "Hypnotize"? Think the new album sucks? Yeah, get in line. But Liquid Liquid's "Cavern"/Grandmaster & Melle Mel's "White Lines" bass line is immortal, and at least some of that pixie dust gets sprinkled on "Triple Trouble." I suspect if DJ Toejam from Topeka had mixed this that Busta Rhymes, Clipse, and M.O.P. wouldn't be on it. But Busta riding the original "Paul Revere" beat proves that in a post- Neptunes world, everything old skool is new again; and Clipse's Pusha T sounds good and chilly on the freeze-dried dorm room funk of "Pass the Mic," while M.O.P.'s ultra-aggro reading of "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn" amounts to icing on a jelly doughnut. Now Boys, please—just never make another album. JESS HARVELL
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THE HIDDEN CAMERAS
Mississauga, Goddam
(Rough Trade)
The new Hidden Cameras record sounds exactly like the old Hidden Cameras record. Good. Last year's The Smell of Our Own was a glorious indie-pop celebration of sex as religion, played by Belle and Sebastian's potty-mouthed, homosexual Canadian cousins. Head Camera Joel Gibb led his ramshackle orchestra through 10 lush hymns to Eros, singing the body electric in a shaky, precious moan, and fans of sun-kissed melodies and salacious irony wanted more. Hence Mississauga, Goddam: sprightly soft-rock walls of sound buoyed by swelling strings and heavenly choruses ("Doot Doot Plot," "Fear Is On"), tender, prayerlike pledges of devotion ("Builds the Bone," "Music Is My Boyfriend"), and, of course, lotsa references to gay sex. "So he seduced me in my dream/I kissed his ugly gangly greens/He swallowed my pee," Gibb sings on "Music Is My Boyfriend." Mmm-mmm good! This concept might begin to wear thin if stretched to a third record, but thankfully, this one ends with a step into territory the Cameras have previously hidden from their fans, a slow, mournful title track that contrasts with the anticipatory jitters for sexual or spiritual encounters of everything else here. "I'm wearing my disguise/Until I rid my life of Mississauga, goddam," sighs Gibb, dreaming Springsteen-like of escaping his dreary Toronto suburb. After all, there's more to life than rosy sing-alongs and golden showers. AMY PHILLIPS
RICARDO VILLALOBOS
Thé Au Harem D'archimède
(Perlon, Germany)
Music, for electronic producer Ricardo Villalobos, is like evolution—change comes slowly. On 2003's Alcachofa, he breathed the words to his first track, "Easy Lee," 25 times over 10 minutes, each aspiration a new take on this adverbial pun. These maddening mutations are the essence of his method, the absence of harmonic interference and the vast space between beats allow listeners to concentrate on the creeping melodic phrase. The changes are micro, the beats are house, but Villalobos' obsession with sound shaping is more akin to midcentury Columbia and Princeton boys than anything currently banging out of Germany. Fitting, then, that the title of Villalobos' newest is an homage to a French film about two doomed urban drifters whose days are filled with sad, gritty incidents. The opening track, "Hireklon," is nine of the year's most gorgeous and lonely minutes, its barren clicks and rattlesnake slithers eventually hosting an unsettling melody played on breeze-blown flamenco guitar. The album continues, but the tension doesn't leave: On the title track, a brushed snare beat and the pleasant bounce of ping-ponging metal are disconcertingly tape-spliced with shouting crowds and cross-rhythms, sounding like an intentional train wreck. Even on "Miami," where little swimmy sounds and polyrhythmic percussion get funky, clouds of grimy synth force the party indoors. Villalobos, then, is the scientist giving artificial intelligence to his works. Most begin innocent, behave badly, and get themselves straight. A few, following the album's namesake, just keep blundering on. DAPHNE CARR
WASTELAND
October
(Transparent)
Dirt-dance lifers DJ Scud (London) and I-Sound (N.Y.C.) have built modest but impeccable careers out of the moments when the club gets nasty. Their trans-Atlantic partnership as Wasteland is best summed up by the contents of their recent bootleg mixtape, Vulture Culture: cinematic New York rap, scattered Southern bounce snares, London grime, old-skool rave, and grungy dub techno. Their first album, 2002's Amen Fire, nimbly juggled the body-caressing imperatives of slow-jam R&B with extreme noise terror. The Spirit Shots EP from earlier this year was so loaded with bass, it felt like your lungs were filling with black sludge. And the new October is a perfect nine-song, 40-minute distillation of all of the above. Opener "Sandwood" is ambient grime, the place where battleship-sized bass-line drops are replaced with a ghostly maze of feedback trails. The Ativan-chilled dancehall of "Hourglass" is overlaid with what sounds suspiciously like the horrible grinding noise my car makes when I try to start it on a January morning. "Rain and Fine Weather" does much the same, except with little Mego Records–like mites of hiss and static weaving through bleeps from an old Q*Bert machine. "Much Is Certain" evokes Merzbow cutting up Neptunes tracks on rusty, tetanus-ridden wheels of steel. In a world where ice-cold tracks like Terror Squad's "Lean Back" and Lil Scrappy's "No Problem" are summer anthems, a cleaned-up Wasteland could be huge. But that's missing the point. The noise is the lead voice, carrying the weight of a rapper and/or singer. And if it's more impenetrable than slang about New Orleans projects or East London estates, it's not by much. JESS HARVELL
