Fog

Andrew Broder, aka Fog, started off turntabling in the vein of DJ Shadow before taking the Anticon cue and rippling out from hip-hop into musical free-for-all. But experimentalism shouldn't be synonymous with using pretension as an excuse for not trying. Here, Fog is less Spiritualized and Wilco by way of Pete Rock, more like John Zorn pistol-whipping the Microphones. Broder used to shepherd his compositions into loosely netted melodies, songs that toyed with entropic crumble yet managed to stay both epic and chaotic without falling apart in a jacked-off mess of tangents. But on 10th Avenue Freakout, he plays a straight flush of deficits -- few actual songs, vocals that sound like Jonathan Richman phoning from his deathbed, and glaring intrusions of gouging noise -- like a deaf orchestra with an armless conductor.