Nice and easy does it with the Casual Dots. There's nothing overly complex going on with this garage punk-pop band, composed of Washington, D.C.-Olympia, Wash., musical vets vocalist-guitarist Christina Billotte (Slant 6 and Quix*o*tic), guitarist Kathi Wilcox (Bikini Kill and Frumpies), and drummer Steve Dore (Deep Lust). But it takes an ear for punk minimalism to pull off such cinchy numbers – they're the musical equivalent of, say, a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit – and scoffers are quick to say, "Oh, my sixth-grader could do that." But guess what? Your sixth-grader didn't. That's because it would never have occurred to him or her to put across the raw, bare stuff with any conviction.

The Casual Dots, on the other hand, dare to pare it down to rock 'n' roll's skimpy, awkward, yet still attention-getting undergarments. All the better to show off the growling instrumental "Derailing," the stuttering lead guitar and menacing stomp of "Hooded," a rousing, early-Sleater-Kinney style "Evil Operations Classified," and a sweet and feisty take on LaVern Baker's "Bumble Bee." The spareness just makes the cover of Etta James's "I'll Dry My Tears" that much more poignant. Does it matter that these casual characters have been around long enough to get some skills under their belt? Not if they get the grrrls back to the barricades. (Kimberly Chun)

Luomo
The Present Lover (Kinetic)

What is it that defines "sexy" house music? Moans and groans? Wailing divas? You may as well scream, "Music for fucking!," because like bad porn, it gets stupendously boring really quickly. On his second album as Luomo, Finland's Vladislav Delay proves that the sexy devil is in the details.

Delay has a leg up on his competition, coming as he does from outside the world of big-room anthems. Trained as a jazz drummer, he first caught attention for IDM recordings under his own name on the labels Mille Plateaux and Pthalo. On those somewhat experimental works, he explored the intricacies of texture and ambience, developing the production techniques that lend The Present Lover a depth sorely lacking from most vocal house.

At first brush it's fairly easy to overlook the accomplishments of this album. when I first heard it on crappy iPod earbuds, I was somewhat nonplussed by the four-on-the-floor beats and breathy female vocals. But when the sounds were treated as intended, pumped through a halfway-decent system with plenty of bass, the clarity of detail shone through and lit Delay's talent. Those same vocals revealed subtle multitracking and judicious use of effects that on tracks like "Talk in Danger" create a distinctly tactile shape to the sounds. At the same time this is music for moving, and the studio trickery is harnessed to the groove, as on the irresistible "What Good," which has a bridge so uplifting you could call it transformative. And, more important, just right for getting down. Despite Delay's accomplishments, The Present Lover is not the perfect lover. The unified tone that makes the album coherent gives the tracks an air of sameness. Even after repeated listens, it's tough to define the real difference between songs like the title track and "Body Speaking" which end up sounding eerily like remixes of each other. But damn – they're still great songs and keep me coming back for more. Luomo appears Thurs/18, Cloud 9, S.F. (415) 355-9991. (Nicholson)

Various artists
Required Listening (Do Right!)

San Francisco likes to think it's got it going on. But one spin of Required Listening, a compilation of music from Toronto, and I realized there's more to covet in Canada than Tim Horton's donuts. Gathered under the selective eye of Do Right! label head John Kong, this baker's dozen of funk, soul, Afrobeat, and beyond stands out in a sea of compilations, not just due to its organizing principle but also because of the songs' quality.

A member of the Movement Collective, which also includes Jason Palma (CIUT, 89.5 FM), Kong has been a prime mover behind Toronto nightlife. He expanded beyond DJing and promoting, breaking into the label world by releasing another compilation, Keb Darge Presents: Funk for the 21st Century, a collection of new funk featuring Sharon Jones, the Sugarman Three, and others. On Required Listening Kong plays selector and serves up a broader array that manages to stay on this side of eclectic chaos.

Funk is still the underlying theme, but here it takes myriad forms. Five-piece band the Quartertones do their thing in a traditional manner, getting things started with a rolling, reclined groove, before Ivana Santilli heads into R&B territory with the chopped piano chords of "It Really Don't Matter." Brassmunk turn in a forgettable hip-hop track, but Required Listening really hits its stride with Quantic's New Soul Mix of Hand Polished's "So Sudden." Though I'm more used to hearing the slightly techier original version of this broken beat swinger, Quantic's smoothed-out take on the cut's loping bass and horn stabs plays up a spy-movie feel that reveals another side to the tune. With faster numbers by Nick Holder (head of underground house mainstay NRK), relentless Afrobeat from B.A.W. Collective, and the thick future jazz of Kong's own collaboration with Moonstarr on "Future Vision," Required Listening covers all the bases. If this compilation is any indicator, Toronto is miles ahead of most North American cities – even those trumpeting themselves as hotbeds of electronic music activity. (Nicholson)

Grails
The Burden of Hope (Neurot)

Despite what it looks like, I'm not going to review The Burden of Hope, by Portland instrumentalists Grails, in all its plodding, plinking, sweeping, swooping, scriddle-scree-screeing gorgeousity. I've got to resort to Seussisms here, because really, what am I going to call it? Beautiful? Not hardly. Gorgeous? When you're standing on Half Dome, looking down on Yosemite Valley, do you think "beautiful"? Do you think "gorgeous"? No, you don't. You don't think. The mind's processors are overwhelmed, at least for a second, and thus forced to deal with what William Carlos Williams called "the thing itself." But Williams's thing was a red wheelbarrow (glazed with rainwater, sitting beside white chickens). I'm not saying The Burden of Hope is all sweeping grandeur or farmyard rustic; what I'm saying is, it strikes me that the world is just too goddamned full of words. And the comparisons they entail and enable.

Driving down the freeway in America, you aren't tempted to read signs – which, to a certain extent, is a good thing, safety-wise. Besides, how important is it that you know that Brand X insurance can save you up to 10 percent and Christina Aguilera is playing at the Coliseum and there's a Burger King on McDonald's Road in five miles? Nonetheless, it's difficult to turn off the mind's systems and subsystems that process language. If you're in the back of a taxi in Bangkok, you're inundated by as much or more useless chitter chatter as you are driving down 101, but it's in Thai. So the mind can rest for a bit – it sees the pretty shapes, thinks, "Thai lettering," and stops. It focuses on something more immediate – the shapes, the colors, the trees at the side of the road. 'Course, language keeps fucking with you even then. Because you think, "Tree" – the word tree, the sound of the letters said together, their shape, and all the other times you've seen a damned tree. If you're Thai, you hear and see something different in connection to said tree, but language is still smacking you around.

There's a gap between signifier and signified, and it's good to remind oneself every now and again that there's nothing inherently treelike – i.e., leafy, green, and shady – in the word tree, and, conversely, nothing of the word tree inheres in the tree itself. It's a random attachment a bunch of cavemen slapped on leafy greenshadiness so they could communicate without pointing. The point is – and there is a point – that the wordlessness of Grails's music reaches something pre-lingual, gives the mind space to stop connecting and interpreting all the fucking time. Call The Burden of Hope a study in a kind of autistic semiotics; the glorious wordless world of a newborn; a stroke victim's symphony, but liberating, not debilitating. What do you want? A banal comparison to another band? Some adjectives? Get out the thesaurus.

It's like this: you're sitting on a couch, looking out a window at rain battering an overgrown lawn. You think, "Damn, glad I'm not out there." Then you realize you want to be part of something, you want to feel something beyond couch and climate control. So you open the window – smashing it would be melodramatic, corny; maybe you push out the screen for effect – and you climb out, take off your clothes, and close the gap between comparing and experiencing, between thinking and being. You lie facedown (or -up, your choice) on that lush green, and you get wet. Listen – the soundtrack you're hearing is Grails's Burden of Hope. (Duncan Scott Davidson)

Dimlaia
Dimlaia (Life Is Abuse)

Despite its reputation as being the music of choice for stoners, metal affords the listener few opportunities to just kick back and feel mellow. Well, maybe O.G. longhair stuff like Sab and Pentagram, but not so much nowadays with all of this black metal and grindcore rigmarole, like the ridiculous Nightmare before Christmas spooky-ookiness of Cradle of Filth. They're like elves on crack. And if it's not the music, it's the subject matter – there's unholy black metal, Viking black metal, even Egyptian black metal. Your choice is between raping a nun, beheading a monk, or, I dunno, mummification and blood sacrifice. Don't these people ever relax? Now I know Ted Nugent said that "anybody who wants to get mellow can turn around and get the fuck out of here," but there are times when a body doesn't feel like putting on some spiked armbands and vaguely homoerotic leather paraphernalia and banging oneself into a neck-ache.

Which brings me to the self-titled record by Dimlaia. It's been said that math rock is for nerds, so I may get bitched out for comparing it to A Minor Forest, but it's got a similar soft-hard aesthetic, rising tension, and interlocking textures. There's a somewhat scary "death metal subsonic Cookie Monster whisper" voice, as well as a "throbbing blood vessel in the forehead" voice, but there's also a sad, sweet female voice singing sweetly melancholy lyrics like "Only in our darkest hour are we dancing / So the man in the moon says he'll take care of you / Some ghosts will never change." There's violin and cello now and again and crisp, separate guitar notes ringing like raindrops on tin, as opposed to tasty leads and hammer-ons all the fucking time.

It's intense but bummed, brooding, and reflective at the same time. You can study biology or play chess to it. I don't know – maybe it is nerd rock. Then again, Napalm Death used to be my friend's favorite "go to sleep" music. (Davidson)

Dee Dee Ramone
Hey Is Dee Dee Home DVD (Extint/Music Video Distributors)

I'm not sure if people who collect Ramones stuff have the kind of pointy-headed devotion to getting their hands on every note an artist has ever played that, say, a collector of the music of Thelonius Monk might. My suspicion is that the half-life of brain cells marred by epic battles of glue-sniffing is such that the boundaries of "complete" are fuzzy, to say the least. Which is too bad when it comes to Hey Is Dee Dee Home, the DVD released late in the fall by the energetic folks at Music Video Distributors, because Hey is for the fan who needs everything.

In fact, this film's life began not as its own thing but as background material for a film on the life of Johnny Thunders. Filmmaker Lech Kowalski did an interview with Dee Dee, and except for a live version of Thunders leading his band through the Dee Dee-penned ode to heroin "Chinese Rocks" (which Johnny Ramone refused to let the Ramones play because he didn't want to glorify junk), the interview is the entire film. Had Dee Dee not trumped Thunders and overdosed (June 7, 2002), it's likely the material would just have remained outtakes from a film that was never released. But since the death of a Ramone by heroin is about as box-office as you can get, the world can now throw down a few bucks for a 12-year-old interview with Dee Dee in which he discusses (1) the critical role fashion played in the New York Dolls and the Ramones, (2) the significance of many of his tattoos, (3) shooting a lot of heroin, (4) partying all the time, (5) how Thunders was a pain in the ass a lot of the time, (6) shooting a lot of heroin, (7) some other stuff that's a lot like the stuff I already mentioned, only I can't remember exactly what, and (8) no Ramones music, unless you count Dee Dee picking a guitar and playing for seconds at a time.