March 26, 2003

The first single off La Bella Mafia is "The Jump Off," but it's tempting to call it "The Fall Off," since this is Kim's first solo effort in years and all Timbaland can be bothered to serve her is a cut that sounds just like Clipse's "When the Last Time." The album's intro features a sample of Biggie saying, "Lil' Kim, she hungry, she writes," as if answering those persistent rumors that her mentor wrote for her. Well, nothing Kim spits here comes close to the B.I.G.-like wizardry of "Drugs" or "Queen Bitch," on Hardcore, so it might be good if she could place a phone call to other side.

Kim gets off to a terrible start: unfunny and phony radio call-in spoofs, a bratty schoolteacher skit, and wack tracks like the pukey-cutesy "Shake ya Bum Bum." The worst cut without a doubt is "This Is a Warning," on which she rewrites R. Kelly's "A Woman's Threat" and proves once and for all – let's hope – that she can't sing. Her Miss Ross-like attitude is the real turn-off; the friendliness seems fake, and the arrogance has turned sour. Kim may change clothes faster "than Walt Chamberlain switched up his hoes," but nothing here is as effortlessly campy as Foxy Brown describing Burberry as "necessary" on her recent single "Stylin'."

Luckily, La Bella Mafia makes a severe change for the better at the halfway point: the beats get harder, even if Kim never quite matches the relaxed elasticity of her Junior M.A.F.I.A. days. The highlight might be the Dre-like "Magic Stick," her duet with 50 Cent. A single version is planned with Eminem, which begs the question of who exactly will be screwing whom in that three-way scenario. I vote for Kim and 50 to take turns on the poor little rich boy. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Lightning Bolt
Wonderful Rainbow (Load)

Lightning Bolt have drilled into some mother lode vein way down deep in the human psyche, in the Jungian collective conscious thing that has to exist. It has to – Wonderful Rainbow is proof. I'm talking about when you hear music that sounds so right, so perfect, that it's as if it was always there. Because music is math, and so it's infinite – it's just hanging out in space, wherever algebra is, waiting to be decoded. Then somebody comes up with this nice, neat equation, with no remainders or anything, and what comes out is music that just flattens everything in its path. I always, always, always use "Jailbreak" by AC/DC as an example, or "Loose" by the Stooges. Here I'm just going to use "Mary Had a Little Lamb" because what Lightning Bolt do is so fucking basic it's practically an element.

They play repetitive chord changes, familiar ones, and they implement the formulaic rock 'n' roll trick of tension and release that's as old as the hills. The reason this ancient idea is different and new in the hands of the two Brians – Gibson plays bass and Chippendale plays drums – is that most bands use the tension-release thing the way Nirvana did, going from quiet to loud. But Lightning Bolt gather the tension at a high volume and intensity to begin with and then they up the ante from there. They start out at the top of the register, from a place that's already higher than even the most rockin' part of any quiet-loud rock tune, and then they rev it up even more.

Wonderful Rainbow is fucking beautiful. What they started with Ride the Skies, Lightning Bolt have pushed even further here. Without giving up any of the saturated noise and blown-out power that puts them on the fringes of the rock landscape, they play songs that remain accessible, anthemic almost to the degree of fascism – there is so little freedom in how your body reacts. What is truly amazing, though, is you don't have to be into noise rock to understand this record. I can't imagine anyone misunderstanding the energy put forth here. Wonderful Rainbow is the loudest, most incomprehensibly effective pop record ever recorded. (Mike McGuirk)

Owl and the Pussycat
Owl and the Pussycat (Kill Rock Stars)

Jack jumped over the candlestick, the fork ran away with the spoon, and the owl serenaded the pussycat in a boat on the sea, under a lunatic moon. Owl and the Pussycat's namesake Edward Lear children's poem is probably less familiar than the other omnipresent rhymes, but something about that sweet, simple story perfectly dovetails with this collaboration between longtime Northwest scenester, singer-songwriter, and writer Lois Maffeo and German translator and one half of Oakland's Moore Brothers, Greg Moore. Together, playing piano, acoustic guitar, strings, and flute, they dust off the emphatic melodies of backward-glancing Beatles fanatics such as Elliott Smith ("Curtains") and Matthew Sweet ("Time of Day"), at times recasting the tunes and wrapping them in soulful, femme wiles, as Maffeo does when she sings "I Hate the Sun." Some tracks on this self-titled full-length look at a less celebrated side of folk: the spacey production of "Blinds" recalls – ye gad – Seals and Crofts, whereas other songs, like "Give Me the Morning" and "Train My Eye," pay a fine, unflashy tribute to canonical figures such as Fairport Convention's Sandy Denny and Dave Swarbrick. Evoking the light-as-an-ocean-breeze minimalist mood of the Marine Girls, Owl and the Pussycat handle the music with such an open, easy lightness of touch that it seems to momentarily lift the weight of the world from your shoulders, even as bombs come raining down and an escape to the sea seems like just a fantasy. Owl and the Pussycat perform Sun/30, 9 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, S.F. (415) 923-0923. (Kimberly Chun)

Turin Brakes
Ether Song (Astralwerks)

When Turin Brakes released their 2001 debut, The Optimist, a new movement of folk-infused electronic music was starting to crystallize around bands like Kings of Convenience and the Doves. But just as that genre is coming of age, the British duo release a second album, Ether Song, which formally distances them from the direct and emotive lo-fi strains and lush melodic whispers that initially won them a nomination for the prestigious Mercury Prize.

On Ether Song band members Olly Knight and Gale Paradganian show an uncomfortable fondness for the trappings of prog rock. Though the pair once eschewed bedroom production, they hired Los Angeles producer Tony Hoffer (who has worked with Air and Beck) to give the record a grander, more epic quality. Vocally, Knight sounds more and more like a pained Jeff Buckley; his lyrics strive for deep meaning but typically come across like bad poetry: "Your love is just a fucking game," he plaintively croons on "Stone Thrown" like a jilted high school student. Top that off with the boys tacking on a hidden track, and it seems like Turin Brakes are ditching the early Radiohead vibe for something a bit more akin to Pink Floyd. At times the glossy textured feel of Ether Song works to the band's advantage. "Long Distance" pairs the off-kilter vocals and elegant arrangement with the sort of dramatic choruses they seemed to be striving for before but could never quite reach. The electric organ and warm tones of "Full of Stars" are a beautiful update of Massive Attack's sumptuous strains.