THRASH ATTACK

Poland's Metal Mind Productions has signed one hell of a licensing deal with Roadrunner Records - and they've made arrangements with other labels as well. The result is a deluge of high-quality reissues of '80s and early '90s thrash and death metal records by bands like Pestilence (their super-proggy fourth and final album, Spheres), Defiance, Artillery, ZnöWhite, Paradox, Blessed Death, Sadus, Tröjan, Kinetic Dissent, Quick Change...I'm, like, drowning in this stuff all of a sudden. And it's fucking great.

I think ZnöWhite are the band that's leaping out of the pack right away, because they're the most atypical - a bunch of black dudes from Chicago (including two brothers on guitar and drums) with a blond, white girl singer who's every bit as vicious a fire-spitter as Angela Gossow is today, but occasionally opts for a Runaways-esque ballad like "Never Felt Like This," from their debut album, All Hail To Thee. Their best stuff combines furious thrash with melodic guitar solos and choruses. And when I say furious, I mean furious - AHTT only has seven songs, only one of which, the aforementioned ballad, is longer than three minutes; most are under two, which puts them closer to the Bad Brains than Metallica, frankly.

The other band that totally kicked my ass last night, while waiting for Mad Men to come on, was Defiance, a Bay Area thrash crew that released three great albums between '89 and '92. More street and a little more complex than Metallica, they were definitely a group destined to be appreciated by diehards, but that's probably why Metal Mind is only releasing 2000 copies of their 3CD career-overview boxed set.

Right now, I'm listening to Blessed Death's Kill Or Be Killed. Makes me wanna put on skin-tight black jeans and big white basketball sneakers, I tell ya.

THIS WEEK IN HACKERY

In the Village Voice:
DEATHSPELL OMEGA
Fas - Ite, Maledicti, In Ignem Aeternam
Ajna
When your album title's in Latin and your lyrics come in paragraphs as opposed to verses, it's easy to seem overly serious, to make jaded rock hacks wish you'd included a jokey cover (say, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown's "Fire") at the tail end of your latest opus. But the truth is, Deathspell Omega's very seriousness, along with their mix of frostbitten Northern roar and Gothic guitar clang, is what makes them one of the most impressive black-metal acts around right now. [Read the rest here.]

In the Cleveland Scene:
NORMAN HOWARD & JOE PHILLIPS
Burn Baby Burn
ESP-Disk
Burn Baby Burn is a lost treasure of Cleveland avant-garde jazz. Trumpeter Norman Howard was a contemporary of saxophonist Albert Ayler; the two worked together on one of Ayler's earliest discs, Witches & Devils. The title track, one of the sax legend's signature pieces, was actually composed by Howard. [Read the rest here.]

A FEW THOUGHTS

I'm not sure it would be possible for Throwdown to sound any more like Pantera without actually earning themselves a cease-and-desist letter from Phil Anselmo's lawyers.

Is there anybody out there who can tell they're listening to As I Lay Dying, and not Darkest Hour or Every Time I Die or...or...or? An Ocean Between Us is so generic it should come in a plain white jewel case labeled "Metalcore Album."

On the other hand, the new Black Dahlia Murder disc, Nocturnal, is great. A major recovery from the half-assed sham that was Miasma. (Once you've come up with a title as good as "Statutory Ape," you've set yourself a high bar, songwriting-wise. They never came close to clearing it.)

The album as a whole ain't metal by a long stretch, but Circle's Sunrise, from 2001, is about to come out in the States on No Quarter, and it's worth the purchase price just for the opening track, "Nopekunigas," and the closer, "Loki." The former is seven minutes of howling Judas Priest-meets-Can madness, and the latter is a 15-minute proggy drone that'll make your limbic system very, very happy at high volume. (Their new album, Katapult, is notable mostly for "Four Points Of The Compass," which sounds like a lost Tangerine Dream soundtrack to some early '80s Michael Mann project. Put your sunglasses on and drive a rain-slick, midnight highway with this one blaring.)

WHY I BOUGHT KALA

I've been on vacation since Friday, August 24; I'm going back to work on Tuesday. Surprisingly, I've done relatively little record shopping during that stretch. I bought the following titles from Amazon early in the week:

Willie Colón, Guisando
Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, 5 and El Progreso
Andrew Hill, Change

And I bought the following on Wednesday at a local store:

Tego Calderón, El Abayarde Contra-Ataca
V/A, Echo Presenta: Invasion
Fania All-Stars, Live In Japan 1976

(I also picked up seasons 2 and 3 of The Wire, which I've been working through one disc (two or three episodes) per day; I'll be done tomorrow.)

And that was it, until today. Today, though, I went to Target for some other stuff, and left with Belanova's Dulce Beat (Mexican electrodiscopop; two programming geeks and a cute girl up front; their live album's awesome) and M.I.A.'s Kala.

Now why the fuck did I buy Kala? Okay, it was only $9.99. It didn't hurt much. But I didn't like Arular or Piracy Funds Terrorism - I came away from both thinking

1) Nerd-ass whiteboy critics are letting their dicks do their listening for them, and
2) This chick is nothing but Tom Tom Club with a tan.

I know a guy - a former co-worker - who was practically doing the pee-pee dance on one foot, waiting for Kala to drop. And you couldn't venture online to ILM or Pitchfork or any other place where pasty, trainspotting elitists congregate without seeing five or ten simultaneous swirling discussions of the record's imminence. I didn't take part in any of those discussions, because I genuinely didn't give a fuck. I didn't like the last records, I'd been taken in by the hype once already and was sure I wasn't gonna get suckered again.

So why the fuck did I buy this thing?

I hate to say it, but I think some vestigial part of me still cares what Pitchfork people and Paste people and ILM people think. Not in the sense that I care about, or solicit, their opinions on the music I like and choose to write about (I'm damn sure not gonna be putting Pitchfork or Paste on the Metal Edge comp-subscription list), but in that I privilege - and mark your calendars, 'cause I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've ever used that word as a verb - their tastes over my own. I have a critical inferiority complex.

It doesn't surface very often. I swiped a copy of the last Wilco album off the Relix editor's desk, and listened to as much as I could stand before lapsing into a coma. I think I made it partway into track three. (I might have tried the same thing with the new White Stripes disc, had I not seen a couple of videos on MTV and known what a crapfest it was.) But in the case of M.I.A., and Dizzee Rascal before her, I've been suckered twice in a row. Which leads me to believe this is a two-part problem.

Problem 1: I believe that other critics, most of whom went to college (unlike me), know something I don't. This is almost certainly bullshit, since I know things they don't - namely, how to actually make records. I studied audio engineering. This makes my perspective on recorded music qualitatively different from that of someone who's caught up in the romanticism of singer-songwriter "authenticity" or indie guilt. Still, as someone who grew up in a middle-class New Jersey suburb and was groomed for college and some sort of socially acceptable career path but who then took a series of sharp turns off that path, I'm very vulnerable to the urge to defer to those who seem to have similar backgrounds to me but who made the "right" choices.

Problem 2: On some subconscious level, I have retained my own suburban whiteboy ideas about music made by brown-skinned people - that it has some inherent value greater than music made by people who look like me. No matter how much I love metal (and I really, really do), I still in some small way give the new rapper on the scene, whose stuff I'm going to have to download or (shock, horror) buy, a little more creative leeway than the new metalcore band whose CD lands on my desk with the day's other mail.

Combine the two - brown-people music beloved of the educated white elite youth - and you understand why I bought Kala today, and why the purchase fills me with shame.

THIS MONTH IN JAZZIZ

(In addition to these two reviews, I've also got a one-page feature on producer/guitarist David Torn, which accompanies a CD review written by someone else.)

FEDERICO AUBELE
Panamericana (ESL)
This album is sung entirely in Spanish, but the label name, ESL, doesn't mean English as a Second Language. It stands for Eighteenth Street Lounge, a collective of Washington, D.C.-based DJs and programmers, with the most notable members being the Thievery Corporation.

The ESL "house sound" - a mix of dub, electronica, lounge and trip-hop - is represented in Aubele's work as well, although there are plenty of elements from his own Argentine background. Guests, too: legendary ska-funk band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs loan their horn section, and vocal cameos abound from Natalia Clavier, Vernie Varela, and Amparo Sanchez of Amparanoia. The album, from its title to its compositions, is meant to reflect the panoply of experiences that make up modern Latin American identity, and indeed, there's a strong feeling of cultural mixing and blending here, especially when the Spanish guitars and gentle, yet passionate, vocals are combined with dubby harmonica and horn parts and thick bass lines.

Jazz fans should know with no doubt that this isn't in any sense a jazz album. It's a programmed electronic disc with some live instruments and a collection of cool vocalists on top. But once accepted on its own merits, it's a thoroughly enjoyable journey up and down a highway that leads from tango to trip-hop and beyond.

CHICK COREA & BÉLA FLECK
The Enchantment (Concord)
An album of piano/banjo duos might not initially seem like the most logical project, but Chick Corea and Béla Fleck are in fact highly complementary musical spirits. Each man uses relentless displays of virtuosity to suck all the fun out of music, and neither Fleck's Ken Burns-esque hairstyle nor Corea's Scientology beliefs inspire enough laughs to tip the balance back.

Sure, there are some moments of relative levity here, bt for the most part, it's two poker-faced masters of their instruments tapping and plucking away for 54 minutes and change, sometimes following concurrent paths but more often wandering afield of each other.

Another drawback to The Enchantment is its strict "two instruments only" formatting - the utter lack of guest stars makes it very difficult to tell one track from the next, never mind livening up matters with, say, a kazoo or washboard solo. Except for the weird and honestly quite beautiful take on the old standard "Brazil," that is.

That track is a genuine standout. Corea plays the melody line and embellishes it organically, while Fleck hovers in the background like some kind of tiny robot hummingbird, only briefly taking the lead role himself. That's followed by the title track, though, which brings us back to the pattern of simultaneous monologues, punctuated by cursory acknowledgement by each player that there's another musician in the room.