Key to the Perceptionists' multipronged attack is their willingness to just kick back and have some fun on a few tracks. After Mr. Lif's relentless appraisal of current black society on the title track ("We'd rather teach each other how to fire chrome / Than to buy a home"), it's a charge to hear him light it up with Humpty Hump, a.k.a. Shock G, from Digital Underground on "Career Finders," a hilarious ode to the limited career paths for rap stars. And the penultimate track, the smoothly soulful "5 O'Clock," which features the golden tenor of Little Brother's Phonte to delicious effect, balances rhymes about empowerment with a simple appreciation for the relief that hits with the end of the work day. The Perceptionists can have it all. The Perceptionists play Wed/11, Independent, S.F. (415) 771-1421. (Peter Nicholson)

Mountain Goats
The Sunset Tree (4AD)
It takes a professional. Before he started plumbing the depths of the human psyche and setting sordid tales of human vermin to music, John Darnielle worked as a psychiatric nurse. But after a decade of singing about fictional characters such as the warring, alcoholic "Alpha Couple" of Tallahassee (4AD), last year's We Shall All Be Healed (4AD) marked a turning point for the prolific folk hero, adding Darnielle's personal experiences to the mix with songs of wild years spent with "all you tweakers with your hands out."

The Sunset Tree reaches further into Darnielle's past to paint an all-too-vivid portrait of an abusive stepfather who hurled dishes at his wife's head ("Dance Music") and could only be pacified with pills and wine coolers ("You or Your Memory"). The traditional Mountain Goats dichotomy between pleasant acoustic melody lines and mildly disturbing lyrics is as solid as ever, though a string section heightens the drama of the heavy "Dilaudid" and the climactic "Lion's Teeth" with perilous ostinatos.

Still, Darnielle's unpretentious instrumentation and nuanced vocals – which range from insistent chants ("I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me," on "This Year") to soft crooning ("Love Love Love") – continue to possess all the subtle impact of an archetypal Raymond Carver story. "Getting good songs rather than cry-fests from these experiences is a really excruciating process," he has said, but The Sunset Tree succeeds as a moving paean to the redemptive power of music. (Leah Freeman)

Fannypack
See You Next Tuesday (Tommy Boy)
Why lie? I don't know if See You Next Tuesday is any good. I don't listen to a lot of "booty music," whatever the hell that is.

Anyway, I was listening to this Fannypack album with a friend, and I said, "It sounds like Salt-N-Pepa," and she said I was old, but fuck that – this record came out when I was 17, and it was by Salt-N-Pepa. The only difference is that these girls make a connection between Salt-N-Pepa and cheerleader chants, which is the sort of hipster postmodern commentary that really can suck the suckiest of shits.

But as far as whether or not Fannypack are too hipster or too hyped or actually any good doesn't matter. The fact is, when Fannypack peel off a good tune, with the big marching-band drums and whistles and gym-floor squeaks and the whole Salt-N-Pepa rap style, it sounds great. The drums are loud, loud, loud, and that's all I really want, anyway. There are a couple songs on which they try to show how "real" they are by recording crappy R&B ballads, and they toss in laugh-free skits like real rappers, but you will probably keep this record for the first two songs. You never know, there might be a party some night where playing slightly too-smart retro hip-hop from overly New York college grads will be exactly the right thing. Or you are 12. (Mike McGuirk)

Adult.
D.U.M.E. (Thrill Jockey)
The worst thing about electroclash was the way otherwise solid groups got tarred with the same brush by an overenthusiastic media. Take Chicago's Adult., whose icy avant garde somehow was lumped in the same camp as mindlessly manufactured pop groups like W.I.T. Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller, however, are anything but mindless, and you can be damn sure that if their music occasionally sounds flat or atonal, it's because they want it to, not because they don't know any better.

D.U.M.E.., their first release for Thrill Jockey after a string of singles and two albums released on their own Ersatz Audio label, is queasy, uneasy listening that truly deserves the term edgy. Kuperus's keening, quavering vocals stridently ring out over Miller's tortured synths and lurching, clanging beats for an in-your-face sound that is refreshingly divorced from typical conventions of pleasure. Landing somewhere between electro and industrial, Adult. blend the art-world archness of Throbbing Gristle with the more danceable tendencies of Cabaret Voltaire, but the slicing synths of songs like "Don't Talk (Redux)," on which Kuperus wails, "Really I have nothing to say / So I'll just listen to you breathe," build a frosty, freaky atmosphere that is completely contemporary and entirely their own. Adult. play Sat/14, Bottom of the Hill, S.F. (415) 621-4455. (Peter Nicholson)