The Need may indeed be dead, as the title of the duo's final album, in 2000, announced, but its spirit lives on in the excellent King Cobra. Formerly one half of that Olympia, Wash., band, drummer Rachel Carns has since teamed with bassist Tara Jane O'Neil (Retsin, Rodan) and guitarist Betsy Kwo to create a wicked, prog-metal monster that, at least initially, sounds remarkably similar to the Need. But if the trio's zigzagging time signatures and arithmetic rock wouldn't have sounded entirely out of place on The Need Is Dead, King Cobra is ultimately less a replication than a fleshed-out, heavier continuation of that grandiose album.

Recorded at San Francisco's Louder Studios with Tim Green, the six-song EP's doom-rock riffage is Carns's most relentlessly sinister work. The rumbling grooves "March on Pompeii" and "Spook the Butcher" are all cloak 'n' dagger swagger, while the ominous "Cadence" is the stuff night terrors are made of. Still, there's levity to be found amid the horror: half of the fun in listening to Carns's bands is trying to figure out what the heck she's singing about in her hiccupped, operatic shrieks. "I don't mind your pinecone skin"? "Candied onions 'round her knees"?! The other half, of course, is not giving a fuck what she's singing about – and just rawking out. The Need is dead, long live King Cobra. King Cobra play Mon/19, Bottom of the Hill, S.F. (415) 621-4455; Jan. 22, Eagle Tavern, S.F. (415) 626-0880; Jan. 23, Metro, Oakl. (510) 763-1146. (Jimmy Draper)

Goodie Mob
Dirty South Classics (Arista)

During the mid '90s, OutKast and Goodie Mob were Atlanta contemporaries, hip-hop mavericks forming the cornerstone of the dirty South sound. Their complex musical arrangements, gospel-soul harmonies, and streetwise, confessional lyrics upset hip-hop's East Coast-West Coast bipolar disorder, and both groups gained underground cred and critical accolades. Only OutKast went on to achieve superstar status; after three cult-fave albums, creative differences and the pressures of success dissolved Goodie Mob in 2000.

Yet in their urban melodrama, the four-member crew – Cee-Lo, Big Gipp, Khujo, and T-Mo – reached a unified vision of empowerment. Along with haunting harmonies and dense studio production, the lyrics' sense of urgency, conveyed through stories of violence and street-corner hustling, transforms the songs on Dirty South Classics, a best-of disc, from battle hymns to ghetto anthems. Goodie Mob (the name's an acrostic: Good Die Mostly Over Bullshit) lead tragic, conflicted lives, and their lessons and losses are expressed in the music. "Black Ice," featuring Big Boi and Andre 3000 of OutKast, is a psychedelic, soulful warning against the perils of dealing near your neighbor. The sultry "Soul Food" celebrates the bond of brotherhood over chicken wings and grits, as Cee-Lo rhymes, "Everythang that I did / Different thangs I was told / Just ended up being food for my soul." Cee-Lo's cartoonish Scatman Carothers rasp carries the most memorable verses here; on the album's only Day-Glo party song, "Get Rich to This," his exaggerated, singsong meter bounces across crunked-up horn samples like a balloon.

It's no wonder Cee-Lo is the only Mobster to have solo success after the group broke up; like Andre 3000, his artistic ambitions transcend the dirty South and fly off into uncharted realms of postmillennial funk. (Jonathan Zwickel)

Visionaries
Pangea (Up Above Records)

"Remember – the god is in you / Remember – the god isn't you." 2Mex's rhyme on "Do Say Make Think" is a perfect example of the Visionaries' strength: subtle, deceptively simple delivery that could slip smoothly by. On their third album, Pangea, the Los Angeles collective don't try to reinvent the wheel – they just serve some straight hip-hop singing the praises of perseverance and positivity.

Pangea succeeds with strong, though rarely stunning, performances from 2Mex, LMNO, Zen, Dannu, and KeyKool, but it is KeyKool and DJ Rhettmatic's thick and sticky production that glues all the rhymes together. Sure, Life Rexall from Shapeshifters, J-Rocc of the Beat Junkies, and Triple Threat DJ Vinroc each take their turn at the mixing desk to good effect, but Key and Rhettmatic keep the levels consistently on the up and up, as on the hypnotic "Starchaser" or the bouncing, reggae-scented "Broken Silence." Wisely, the mic guest list is kept to a minimum, only bringing in MCs on "Meeting of the Minds," when the Living Legends drop by to do their thing over a smoothly shifting juxtaposition of samples curated by KeyKool, which aptly plays up each vocalist's delivery. With conscious rhymes that never get pedantic and beats that propel but aren't frantic, the Visionaries remind us that L.A. really ain't all that bad. (Peter Nicholson)

Low Flying Owls
Elixir Vitae (Stinky)

Starting with the squelch of feedback and dirty, distorted bass, Low Flying Owls' Elixir Vitae moves from sexy smack-rock, circa C.K. heroin chic, through psych-out wa-wa guitars and ethereal oohing and aahing to expansive, quasi-symphonic numbers like "Strange Connection," a song so reminiscent of the space-folk tapestries of Spiritualized I had to check the CD booklet to see if it was a cover.

The bouncing, sneering strut of songs like "Swingin' Sam" and its talk of being in the Hamptons with a "cross-dressing, HIV positive husband" recalls Seventh Dream-era Love and Rockets, but with the evil vocal vibe of Peter Murphy that Daniel Ash could never quite match. It's not an easy transition to "Looks of a Killer," with Andy Wagner's raindrop keyboards, film noir trumpet peals, and Raymond Chandler-esque lyrics: "How do you constantly wash the blood from your hands? ... I'm sad to say, it's a language I understand."