Ida
Heart like a River (Polyvinyl)

Even for fans who proudly wear their hearts on their record sleeves, Ida's music might initially seem a little too precious. After all, since forming in 1992, the New York trio – spouses Daniel Littleton and Liz Mitchell, both of whom play guitar and sing, and vocalist-bassist Karla Schickele – have been crafting intimate, exceedingly hushed albums that deal exclusively with the subject of love. Dig beneath the songs' pretty folk rock surfaces, however, and it quickly becomes apparent that the romance in question is often complicated and deeply unsettling. "Am I still the one you wanted me to be?" Mitchell wondered on 2000's Will You Find Me (Tiger Style), asking one of the many difficult questions that ultimately give Ida's music an unexpected emotional depth and complexity.

Ida's first album in four years grapples with similarly distressing matters of the heart. Produced by Warn Defever of His Name Is Alive, Heart like a River – an elegant, understated swirl of three-part harmonies and spare instrumentation that marries Low and Neil Young – finds lovers keeping secrets, slowly drifting apart, and reaching impasses ("If this is your idea of love, what can I do?"). But to accuse the group of covering familiar territory, both musically and lyrically, is not a complaint so much as a compliment. As they've been doing for more than a decade, Littleton, Mitchell, and Schickele simply keep honing their superb songwriting approach – and their notions of love – with thrilling results. Ida perform Sat/26, Bottom of the Hill, S.F. (415) 621-4455. (Jimmy Draper)

Count Bass D
Begborrowsteel (Ramp)

The all-in-one hip-hop hero is back with another one-man show. Count Bass D isn't from N.Y., L.A., or Atlanta – he's from nitty-gritty Nashville, Tenn. His first release, Pre-Life Crisis (Sony), hit stores in the mid-'90s and is credited as the first rap record to feature all-"live" instruments, most of which were played by him. In 2002 the Count showed the world that he could flip beats on a sampler when he released Dwight Spitz on MF Grimm's label, Day by Day. The record is essential for hip-hop fans, and it even features underground heavyweight MF Doom.

Begborrowsteel consists of jazzy beats that are periodically interrupted by scratches, rock samples, and well-written rhymes delivered by the Count. On "Down Easy," the Count sings over a melodious track in a relaxed style reminiscent of Biz Markie's. As a bonus to hip-hop junkies, "Nina and Weldon" includes the extended play of the same loop DJ Premier used for the painfully short Gang Starr track "92 Interlude."

The title of "Bullets Hit Brains" is taken from an old Jeru the Damaja track – the song is a nice piano-based loop with a long sample of a conversation between God and Noah. The dialogue ends with the sound of thunder and the Count flooding the mic with a short rhyme. "The Mingus Sextet" starts with a sample of a woman moaning in ecstasy followed by another short series of rhymes. As it turns out, most of the rhymes are short. It's a good style – lots of beats punctuated by well-executed rhymes. As an MC, producer, DJ, and musician, Count Bass D is part of a very short list, which includes Madlib, Edan, and Necro, a solid group by any standards. With six releases planned for 2005, Count Bass D is off to a strong start with Begborrowsteel. (Nate Denver)

The Flesh
The Flesh (Gern Blandsten)

The Flesh are one of those New York City bands that play like they've never seen the light of day. Salivating in the shadows, their music sweats and swoons, charged with the fascination and terror that come with the night.

On their eponymous full-length, the band make good on a pair of singles, continuing to have fire-and-brimstone lyrics, a carefully chosen musical palette, and austere production, which add up to something that feels like a worldview. "The world will wash away / A kingdom will begin," frontperson Nathan Halpern declares on the opener, "Love Your Fate." Indeed, for the next 30 minutes, we're given over to a secret world, plumbing the depths of desire, fear, and other such Old Testament staples. Songs like "Death Connection" ("We want the resurrection / We want the love infection"), "Fall to Heaven" ("I was your Sisyphus / I kept on pushing it"), "The Lack" (a Lacanian shout that would've played beautifully in Repo Man), and "Lonely Little Hunter" (a favorite: "When she was Egypt / I was the slave, baby / I tried to leave her / She wouldn't let me get away") map out the intersections of love and death with a bravura that seems as much hip-hop as it does rock 'n' roll.

So much pop music is constructed around "wanting" something, but Halpern takes a page from Nick Cave in testing how deep this sort of desire runs. The band respond accordingly, drawing from an unending stream of trashy new wave bass lines, Goblin-inflected keyboard squalls, and dicey guitar bursts. Naysayers might see the musical stew as being a little too considered to be genuine, but the Flesh are packing heat as far as rock 'n' roll songcraft and energy go – whatever the tempo, whatever the lyrical theme, it's never anything less than obvious that this band want very much to shake the streets. Hell, Halpern and keyboardist-vocalist Gabriella Zappia aren't too far off from Marvin and Tammi territory on songs like "Sweet Defeat" and "Foes," and if that doesn't send the kids into fits, I'm not sure what will. The Flesh play Tues/29, Bottom of the Hill, S.F. (415) 621-4455. (Max Goldberg)

Arthur Russell
World of Echo (Audika)

In moving away from the groundbreaking dance beats that formed the foundation of house, the late Arthur Russell returned to his beat background. Initially issued in 1986, World of Echo reflects Russell's early-'70s Buddhist study in San Francisco. On first listen, the songs here seem like rough sketches, but actually there's tremendous complexity and forethought at play – the performance is so loose and vulnerable that it seems like you've snuck into the practice space of a humble genius.

"See through me," Russell sings at one point, and this album allows just that. Russell's meditative background permeates the music-making here; his self disappears into the music (and vice versa). "Soon-to-Be-Innocent Fun/Let's See" is nine-plus minutes of pure naked loveliness, lightly rising from one epiphany to the next. On "The Name of the Next Song," Russell multiplies his fondness for duality, for allowing one song to shape-shift into (and its title to bounce off of) another – he braids seven songs into one, changing the title ("The name of the next song is … 'Anti-America' ") as he goes along.

Similarly, "Tower of Meaning/Rabbit's Ear/Home Away from Home" lightly touches at the edges of structure, allowing it to form, then dissipate. A post-punk rock song strains at the distorted surface of "Being It," on which Russell makes his cello sound like an especially expressive guitar. Throughout, his new music approach utilizes all aspects of the instrument, creating plucked funk, click-track percussion, and trombone-ish sonorousness. At its most ungainly, Russell's tenor voice is endearingly close to Kermit the Frog's; at its most graceful, it creates effects similar to mist rising from water or fog on the shore. As his body and his cello become vessels of echoed sound, the resulting music rewards a similar freedom and concentration on the part of the listener. (Johnny Ray Huston)