December 4, 2002

In England hip-hop artists who have been reared on the distinctly British-Jamaican sound system tradition are coming of age. The new crop of U.K. rappers grew up in the shadow of dads, cousins, and uncles whose block-party DJ sets would run the gamut of U.S. soul and funk, roots reggae, and electro, and they're less interested in following an American idiom than in creating their own collage of influences.

Roots Manuva was the first to break this new sound, which Big Dada is calling "bouncement," on his 1999 debut, Brand New Second Hand, and his insolent patois appears on four tracks on Extra Yard, where he operates more as a guiding light than as a key player. The new voices (Gamma's gruff dancehall chat, the clipped cadences of New Flesh) are much more interesting and raw. As far as rhymes go, Extra Yard's MCs are less about tea and crumpets than about burning spliffs, having sex on E, and – rap's most timeless theme – killing the competition. "Overconfident, perhaps / but I've been this fat since you've been up your mommy's pissflaps," Jack Tarr raps on "Niceness," sounding every inch like a missing member of the Wu-Tang Clan.

While a roughneck attitude is standard fare for hip-hop, Extra Yard really differentiates itself from El-P or P. Diddy through its music. The most noticeable signifier of this collection's foreignness isn't the accents – it's the synthetic beats. Tracks such as New Flesh's "Lie Low" and LoTek HiFi's "Fire" borrow more from dancehall's syncopated bumps and U.K. dance music's skittering drums 'n' bass than from U.S. funk and soul standards. The results are party cuts such as Gamma's "Killer Apps," which plays like Los Angeles's Jurassic 5 partying at a U.K. 2-step rave. (Vivian Host)

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet
The Year of the Elephant (Pi)

Despite his avant-garde "creative music" credentials, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has never renounced his affection for Miles Davis. Smith has been a longtime member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and has collaborated with Anthony Braxton and many others, but his allegiance to Davis was evident in his pivotal participation in Yo Miles! projects with guitarist Henry Kaiser, and it surfaces again with his Golden Quartet.

The touchstone here is less the jazz-rock of Davis's mid-'70s electric period (although the closing homage, "Miles Star in 3 Parts," boasts an indelibly funky hook) than the reflective spaciousness of such earlier transitional Davis albums as Filles de Kilimanjaro.

Individual résumés qualify this foursome, which first recorded for Tzadik in 2000, as a bona fide supergroup. Bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut has long anchored the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jack DeJohnette drummed for Davis, records and tours with Keith Jarrett, and leads his own groups. And classically influenced pianist Anthony Davis has established himself as an esteemed composer of symphonic, chamber, choral, and operatic works (including X and Amistad). Pooling their talents within the loose-limbed harmonic and rhythmic frameworks of six Smith compositions, they communicate so fluidly that a listener can focus on each musician's contributions (Favors's warm, resilient bass lines, Davis's unique chordal ideas, and DeJohnette's proliferating patterns and occasionally Wurlitzer-like synth accents) while embracing the overall flow.

Smith, who teaches at Cal Arts, is especially brilliant, using his breath, lips, mute, and amplification to adjust his trumpet and flügelhorn tones to the mood of each piece, employing silence to dramatic effect, and balancing delicacy and brute force in his obliquely melodic blues-tinged solos. Pulling up far short of free jazz cacophony, The Year of the Elephant nonetheless embodies principles of empathetic improvisation across breathtaking vistas. (Derk Richardson)

Manitoba
Start Breaking My Heart (Domino/Leaf)

Electronic music lends itself to exploring darker emotions, but Dan "Manitoba" Snaith's debut album revels in the playfulness of machines. Made up of pure, bell-like tones, children's voices, and quirky rhythms that turn in on themselves like the colors of a kaleidoscope, Start Breaking My Heart – which came out last year on the U.K. label Leaf and was recently picked up domestically by Domino, with the addition of the three new tracks – is a work full of wonder.

Snaith himself is a bit of a wunderkind: he's a 22-year-old Toronto mathematician with classical and jazz piano training, as well as a revelatory producer. But then again, Snaith's original label, Leaf, seems to have a knack for finding artists whose approach to music is well removed from generic dance fodder.

That isn't to say Snaith isn't capable of beats for the feet, as evidenced by the throbbing 2-step bass collisions of "Dundas, Ontario" (included from his Give'r EP as a North American CD bonus). Yet Snaith is at his best on slower songs like "Children Play Well Together," with its layers of soft, seemingly random snares, curling acoustic guitar, and tones from a push-button phone. While there are hints of Boards of Canada and Autechre, Start Breaking My Heart manages to allude to those groups subtly, rather than becoming indebted to them, through a willingness to embrace melody. There are even moments of pop sensibility, as in the lilting "James' Second Haircut."

On occasion Snaith's ambition gets the best of him: the spiraling beat and tempo changes of "Schedules and Fares" end up a tangled mess. But then he pulls off the toy-box-tinkle-meets-Steve-Reich throb of "Lemon Yoghurt" and I'm left wondering just where he found the equations for such entrancing, joyful music. (Peter Nicholson)

Butthole Surfers
Humpty Dumpty LSD (Latino Bugger Veil)

For anyone who has only heard the Butthole Surfers' last three or so records, listen up. Kiddie, there was a time when they were the most fucked-up, far-out rock band in America. People just didn't put the word "Butthole" on their record covers in 1985. Even to many in the burgeoning post-punk, pre-indie rock, underground whatever-the-fuck crowd, the Butthole Surfers were actually frightening. Before singer Gibby Haynes grew a beard, his faced looked deformed, and he would play without a shirt, with gut a-hanging and dirty long hair. They were kind of hippies, kind of punk, and their songs all had that clanging sound in them, the sound you hear when you do a Whip-It! and the air around you begins to ripple. Everything about the band was a joke, but the sense of humor was demented in a new and, I suppose, groundbreaking way. It made the music evil. I don't know that so many bands create this sort of vibe anymore. Making people uncomfortable is one of the time-honored and essential facts of rock and roll; it goes all the way back to Elvis, and the Butthole Surfers were supreme masters of the art. But then came the beard, the bad records, the suing of Touch and Go, and now they're hated by many of even their hardest core fans.