Six Organs of Admittance
Luminous Night
(Drag City)
On their first album in two years, Six Organs of Admittance (aka Ben Chasny) conjure up an intriguing soundscape that is equal parts easy listening and soundtrack to the best movie you have never seen. The latter should come as no surprise, given that during the writing of the album, Chasny also composed soundtracks to both novels and films in between touring the world with bands The Dead C and OM. Most tracks feature sparse guitar, bass and piano, but several include interesting flourishes of electronic sounds. The contributions these sounds make can be heard to tremendous effect on the song "Cover Your Wounds With The Sky," which also brags of the use of buried and excavated tapes as a source of sound. There is also room for Eastern instruments like the tabla which, although it is originally from India, appears on the album's most Western sounding track, "River of Heaven." —Michael Cimaomo
Company Flow
Funcrusher Plus
(Definitive Jux)
It makes sense that Def Jux has reissued Company Flow's cult classic Funcrusher Plus, since it was the template for much of the label's groundbreaking work. Although the album hails from 1997, it hardly sounds dated. The production serves up a dense sonic stew of amputated funk, sprightly steel drums, detuned sitars, woozy synths, dusty samples and dystopian atmospherics. The lyrics may be the most complex on wax, weaving from battle rhymes to aesthetic manifestos, from "I drop so much shit my anus is ice-packed" to "Even when I say nothing, it's a beautiful use of negative space." The album is deeply abstract, but crucially, the complex flow of El-P and Big Juss still signifies as B-boy speak and the stomping beats keep the tracks firmly tethered to the streets. Funcrusher Plus is the rare album that, by any definition, is both genuinely avant garde and genuinely hip-hop. —Jeff Jackson
Various Artists
The Very Best of Prestige Records
(Prestige)
Prestige Records recorded many of the greats of jazz history, and this collection gathers 25 instrumental tunes from the label's catalogue, spanning the years 1949 through 1969. You'll find works by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Shirley Scott and Stanley Turrentine, among many more, on the kind of stripped-down recordings most often found behind mod mid-century LP covers. The period explored in this two-volume set saw the flowering of bebop, and here you'll hear everything from anxious, hepped-up tenor sax to chilled-out piano and strings (The Modern Jazz Quartet's "Django" is a remarkable example of such evocative material). This is a history lesson stuffed full of some of the best musicianship of the 20th century, a good score for those who want to get a flavor of the era in one package. —James Heflin
