Wimme Gierran Hedningarna
Karelia Visa
(NorthSide)
The star of the show is Sami Wimme Saari, a native of Finland who combines an indigenous vocal style called yoik with electronic instrumentation and rock instincts. The result suggests Peter Gabriel gone Nordic: fresh, strange and enchanting. Another NorthSide release with Finnish roots -- Hedningarna's Karelia Visa -- is a more traditional but still compelling look at the music of this region, and is also highly recommended. -- Roberts
Corey Harris
Greens From the Garden
Barry Admanson
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World Saxophone Quartet
M'Bizo
(Justin Time)
On M'Bizo, the U.S.-based World Saxaphone Quartet meets South African vocalists and percussionists to honor the late South African bassist Johnny "M'Bizo" Dyani via a musical suite and two other pieces. The lead piece, "Snanapo," sets up a percussive base over which the quartet engages in brief solos and lots of polyphonic group blowing. The end piece features chanting by the Americans and allows each of them to solo on their horns as well. But the real treasure is the suite itself -- a slow, gospel-tinged number with chanting, clapping, and declamatory statements by the horns. A thing of beauty surpassing most records this year. -- P. Brown
IF WE HAD TO PICK JUST ONE The Flaming Lips
The Soft Bulletin
(Warner Bros.)
Pucker up for the Lips' most essential kiss to date, an astounding, meticulously crafted masterpiece that just might give you hope for the human race. From a fourteen-year marriage yielding more than a dozen wonderfully weird kids, the prolific acid-minstrels of Oklahoma have sired their most gifted prodigy to date: a career-defining love child that not only splits the technical bull's-eye of musical ingenuity, but ushers in a much-needed jolt of optimism, however flamboyant, in this culture of sleepwalking cynicism.
Led by singer/songwriter Wayne Coyne, these lush, ethereal, soothing and beautiful tracks combine multilayered soundscapes with a cinematic sweep that can both astonish and restore what's left of the human spirit. Utilizing harps, gongs, synthesized gadgetry, choir-like vocal harmonizing, and plenty of loud drumming, Bulletin finds the Lips playing with the notion of limitless musical possibilities. "Race for the Prize," a tweaked but upbeat soul concoction, pits two scientists in heated battle "for the good of all mankind," even if it kills them; the lilting arrangements beg a velvety narrator on the scale of Barry White, but Coyne's withered voice, nearly worn to a shadow, conjures the tone of Neil Young instead, melancholic while keeping his chin up.
Gone are the squalling chunk and stun guitars of projects past, the psychotic barrage of 1989's Telepathic Surgery, the pop chicanery of 1993's Transmissions From the Satellite Heart; this time the prog-Romeos (Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins round out the brilliant trio) are preoccupied with love, so much love -- right down to love's very molecular components. Before bleeding into a mood that floats blissfully away on a cloud, "What Is the Light?" suggests (through an untested hypothesis) that the chemical produced in our brains that enables us to experience the sensation of being in love is the same chemical that caused the Big Bang, the birth of the accelerating universe. "Buggin'," the work's most radio-friendly track, reels ripe and bursts with a delirious joyfulness that again confirms the summertime buzz -- you guessed it -- love. And most endearingly, "The Spiderbite Song" declares "Love is the greatest thing a heart can know" with such lump-throated lunacy, you'll want to throw yourself open-armed into the nearest black widow's nest.
With ever-increasing millennial jitters, primal fuses growing shorter and enough bad vibes and weaponry to glut hell, a night on the roof contemplating Superman, the cosmos and our very own hearts might do all of us some good. -- La Briola
