10

,-d20070411,-r20070320
,11019625-01-07
,album11019625-track-01-07

Make'em NV

Artist: Jay Dee aka J Dilla

Album: Ruff Draft

Label: Stones Throw

Genre: Hip-Hop/R&B

Styles: Hip-Hop

Album Review

Stones Throw continues its J Dilla memorial project by releasing this, a previously little-known vinyl-only album that Dilla put out in 2003 on his own label. On it, you can begin to hear the blossoming of the sound that would make up both Champion Sound (his collaboration with Jaylib) and 2006's Donuts: a ruffer, more grab-bag approach to production. Before, Dilla had catered to rappers that flowed over his work (including hip-hop luminaries such as A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul); Ruff Draft is Dilla finally making something for himself. As such, we get a variety of treasures, including (but not limited to) subaquatic hair metal ("Nothing Like This"), Dr. Who keyboards ("Interlude") and incidental music for'70s cop shows ("Take Notice").

10

,-d20070409,-r20070410
,11025413-01-02
,album11025413-track-01-02

No Pussy Blues

Artist: Grinderman

Album: Grinderman

Label: Anti Records

Genre: Alternative/Punk

Styles: Garage Rock

Album Review

Nick Cave sows some of his Bad Seeds for his newest project.
In recent years, Nick Cave has grappled with the writer's block that sobering up wrought upon him, and ultimately triumphed, enforcing a "let's go to work" regime in his new home, Brighton, complete with an office visited at regular business hours. The gambit worked: With 2004's Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus double-whammy, there was a real sense of his digging deep to create a new world, both in music and words.

With the inaccessible Seeds decamped back to Australia, etc., he has kept himself moving by reconvening the so-called Micro-Seeds (Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn Casey), but this time the quartet has become something else — Grinderman — a release, an intentionally runtish offshoot of the main band.

On this debut record, Cave is liberated from his "besuited pianist" persona. Instead, he plays electric guitar, at which he is, to be frank, a novice. The sound is accordingly loose, often primordially brutal — the words, too. "We are sick and tired of all the self-serving grieving," he sings on "Go Tell the Women." "All we wanted is a little consensual rape in the afternoon, and maybe a bit more in the evening." "No Pussy Blues," meanwhile, unleashes all the pent-up sexual energy one might worriedly anticipate from its title, and then some.

Grinderman, then, proves this: at close on 50, some inexplicable and exhilarating fire still burns in Nick Cave. Bizarrely, for such a typecast doom merchant, he gives hope to us all!

08

,-d20070408,-r20070320_pic
,11020528-01-07
,album11020528-track-01-07

Winterreise

Artist: London Philharmonic Orchestra

Album: SEREBRIER: Symphony No. 2, "Partita" / Fantasia / Violin Sonata / Winterreise

Label: Naxos

Genre: Classical

Styles: Orchestral

Album Review

The eight-time Grammy nominated José Serebrier may be best known as one of the most recorded conductors of his generation, but his compositions are equally well-renowned by anyone who has the pleasure to hear them.

Serebrier's Second Symphony ("Partita") was written at the young age of 19 and premiered by the venerable National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. Lauded as "[the] sort of musical Armageddon you're not likely to forget" by CD Now, the piece opens as an inviting and buoyant showcase for the Latin influences of the Uruguayan composer. Soon, though, the apocalypse comes as the joyous sounds give way to a "Poema elegiaco" and a harried fugue finale.

Bundled up with the symphony are a few other Serbrier penned works. "Winterreise," a recent piece, is perhaps the most interesting: it takes Haydn, Tchaikovsky and his own "Violin Sonata" (which also appears here) as jumping-off points, but true to its title ("Winter Trip"), it grows distinctly cold and grim by its end.