Free to Do What? (Mint)
Various artists

A Tribute to the Soundtrack to Robert Altman's Nashville(Mint)

What with the immensely popular O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and Ryan Adams earning their fair share of Grammy nods and name-checks from Elton John, alt-country looks poised to possibly give today's dollar-driven Nashville a run for its money. Not that Shania and Faith need fret about new day jobs, of course, but it seems mainstream America may actually be interested in country music that's a little more, well, country. Whether that's good or bad depends on whether you'd rather an act like Neko Case become a household name or remain your "little secret," but considering Adams's newfound success, chances are that all the selfish indie-snobbery in Whiskeytown won't keep Case's next album of old-schooled country crooning off the charts and airwaves when it hits the street later this year.

Which must be a promising prospect for Cindy Wolfe, Case's old pal from Tacoma, Wash. On her Vancouver-based band's full-length debut the Tennessee Twin founder – and yes, actual Memphis-born twin of Bratmobile's Allison Wolfe – writes no-New Nashville numbers for yes-depressed listeners disenchanted with today's C&W world of gloss-pop superstars. Delightfully simple (but not simplistic), the dozen down-home slices of vintage country on Free to Do What? sound like a young Dolly Parton performing at the small-town hoedown in Waiting for Guffman's fictional musical. Sure, she's got a twang-tongued valley-girl drawl that'll deter as many ears as it wins over, but invest enough time in Wolfe's endearingly unpretentious and almost too-naive tales of bad-news boyfriends and cantankerous mailmen, and Tennessee Twin may win you over as one of alt-country's most charming new acts.

Wolfe and almost two dozen other country-nut Canucks and Americans appear on A Tribute to the Soundtrack to Robert Altman's Nashville, a perfect (and vastly superior, far more entertaining) successor to the O Brother soundtrack. "Directed" by Carolyn Mark – an underrated, understated solo artist from Victoria, B.C. – the 20-track tribute features Case, Kelly Hogan, the Corn Sisters, New Pornographer Carl Newman, and the Sadies' Dallas Good, among others, rerecording songs and dialogue snippets from the 1975 masterpiece about Music City biz and politics. It works brilliantly, too: the "cast members" embody their characters and inhabit their songs so impeccably – whether hamming them up or playing them down – that there's no need to brush up beforehand on the film's often confusing, crisscrossing story lines to fully enjoy the album.

Despite alt-country's increasing popularity outside of its overly insular "urban hick" cliques, however, it's a no-brainer that Free to Do What? and Nashville – both released by north-of-the-border indie Mint Records – won't come close to matching O Brother's and Adams's major-label successes. But then again, going tête-à-tête with U2 and Aerosmith at the Grammys isn't exactly the point. More important, acts like Tennessee Twin and those in Carolyn Mark's gaggle of wonderfully game tribute-contributors are content to keep the whiskey-drenched, steel-pedaled spirit of old country alive. And at least until the day when all those musicians who "slap a little electric fiddle on top of their pop and call it country" – as Wolfe recently put it – are handed their walking papers, there are few greater true country successes than that. (Jimmy Draper)

Matthew Shipp
Nu Bop (Thirsty Ear)

After Spring Heel Jack turned in a series of rather arrhythmic and abstract soundscapes to serve as electronically generated beds for a host of avant-garde jazz improvisers on last year's Masses, pianist Matthew Shipp wanted something more explicitly beat-driven for his third CD in the Blue Series he curates for Thirsty Ear. So he invited programmer Chris Flam, who has worked with DJ Spooky and A Guy Called Gerald, to provide samples that he, acoustic bassist William Parker, drummer Guillermo E. Brown, and to a lesser extent saxophonist-flutist Daniel Carter could work from in the studio.

The "Nu" in the title alludes to Shipp's dip into DJ culture, but the "Bop" is a bit misleading. Although he was deeply influenced by Thelonious Monk, Shipp makes no explicitly discernible trips back to that particular fountainhead. Funk is the more relevant touchstone, not only in the implicit homage to such jazz piano forebears as Ahmad Jamal (whom Shipp raptly watched on TV while growing up in Delaware), Ramsey Lewis, and Herbie Hancock but also in the simultaneously stomping and intuitively elastic interplay of Parker and Brown. In fact, while Flam's contributions were essential to Shipp's concept for the project and do provide interesting accents and textures (especially on the opening track, "Space Shipp," "D's Choice," and "Rocket Shipp"), they ultimately take a backseat to the ferocious drive of the acoustic rhythm section and Shipp's giant, blocky chords and fractured melodies.

Indeed, the biggest surprises on Nu Bop come less from the acoustic-electronica fusion than from the unified vision that emerges from such an eclectic set of pieces (including meditative piano solo, space music, and flute-and-bass interludes) and from the spontaneous emotional expression that survives postperformance overdubbing, editing, and mixing. At one point we hear one of the musicians say, "It took a minute for my brain to go dead, see? Once that happened, I was in it." But there is nothing flat-line or bloodless about Shipp's Nu Bop. (Derk Richardson)

New Flesh
Understanding (Big Dada)

Two years into this new millennium, the future has finally arrived. If Roots Manuva's Run Come Save Me legitimized U.K. MCs as leaders of a progressive hip-hop movement, his Big Dada labelmates New Flesh take the next-school agenda into a whole 'nother dimension on Understanding. The album begins with "Move Slow," whose title could be viewed as a metaphor for keeping it organic in a high-tech age. A lyrical invocation – "Stir me a little bit of riddle with the remedy" – guides New Flesh's journey through abstract philosophies, concrete junglist ideologies, and beyond over the course of the LP. Ragga cadences and soundclash aesthetics are put to good use on "Zero Gravity," "Stick and Move," and "More Fire," which identifies at least one source of inspiration: "smoking mad bombazi!!!"

There's no evidence of memory loss, however, when it comes to New Flesh's highly conceptual flows. "This is elastic language / Always coming back to the first word," they state on "Bound." "Real Child Soldier" is an emotionally affecting story similar to Curtis Mayfield's "Little Child Runnin' Wild" or Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Lil' Ghetto Boy."

Adding to the sense of up-to-date artistry are strategic alliances with equally forward-thinking lyricists such as Roots Manuva, Blackalicious's Gift of Gab, Anti-Pop Consortium's Beans, and old-school metaphysician Ramm:Ell:Zee. Gab's performance on "Communicate" is simply astounding, and Ramm:Ell:Zee sounds like a hip-hop Yoda, rocking the house and dissecting tricknology on "Mack Facts" and "His Story's Crockery."