Music Reviews - Sloan, Other Dimensions in Music, Smith and Mighty, Ultra Bide

Listen to ODM: Real Audio Format For the Glass Tear

Download the RealPlayer FREE! OTHER DIMENSIONS IN MUSICNow! (Aum Fidelity)

When the first track is a 33-minute improvisation, you know you're dealing with absolute fearlessness. Then you get to the booklet notes and read bassist William Parker speculating, "What if you could play ballads . . . that would never end? . . . Is it possible to stay in one groove - one color - and burn? No dead spaces, no lulls. Now that's a challenge."

Sure is. And what if, you're wondering, we could grow hydroponic vegetable gardens in our ears and live off the proceeds? You begin to suspect Parker and his three Other Dimensions in Music cohorts need a little vacation in Happytown. So it's remarkable that they succeed as well as they do. Not that Now! is a triumph, but it provides enough moments of rarefied convergence to make you wonder what else sheer will can accomplish.

If these four were just idealistic kids, it would be easy to blow them off. ODM's association goes back a decade and a half, though, and Parker especially, with his powerful In Order To Survive recordings, has shown he can rip human emotions out of his ensemble and hurl them bleeding onto the table. Here the goal is more purely musical, with trumpeter/ flugelhornist Roy Campbell Jr., windman Daniel Carter and drummer Rashid Bakr closing their eyes and imagining new worlds together, a process that requires enormous concentration and mutual respect.

Still, individual moments make a stronger impression than the whole. In the epic "For the Glass Tear/After Evening's Orange," the breathy opening trumpet-sax interplay is an apt welcome, and Parker molds a solid thing in the air with his plucked solo before squealing his bow into a conversation with whispering drums and a buzzy, ghaita-like trumpet. The highlight of "Blue Expanded" is a flash of the two horns' incidental harmony over a quick bass-drums pulse. And the clusters of high timbres that form around Parker's bowing on "Dawn" are unrepeatable. The spaces between tend to stay in the "one color" Parker was talking about - a probing energy that reveals little beyond the commitment of four skilled players to a shared notion. That's not something you'll want to hear every day, but it ain't hay. (Greg Burk)

SLOANNavy Blues (Murderecords/Never Records Group)

"We're still the same after all these years" goes the chorus to "Iggy & Angus," one of the standout tracks on Sloan's new Navy Blues. The song is an obvious tip of the hat to the gladdening consistency of Messrs. Pop and Young, but the sentiments could also easily apply to the men of Sloan themselves. Hailing from Halifax, Nova Scotia (the rock & roll capital of, um, eastern Canada), bassist Chris Murphy, drummer Andrew Scott, and guitarists Patrick Pentland and Jay Ferguson have somehow managed to sweat out six years of label upheavals and frustrating semi-obscurity while continuing to make excellent pop records. Navy Blues, their fourth album, is no exception. While its 13 tracks vary stylistically (all four members write and sing), they still form a coherent whole; the record's warm, uncluttered production (courtesy of the band and Daryl Smith) highlights Sloan's eccentric but impeccable playing, as well as the band's collective gift for inspired tunesmithery.

Not all of it is immediately absorbing, but Navy Blues baits the hook by opening with three of its catchiest numbers. "She Says What She Means," a pun-filled rocker that recalls the angular brittleness of Big Star's Radio City, is followed by "C'Mon C'Mon (We're Gonna Get It Started)," which in turn sounds like the Nazz doing the theme for a Saturday-morning cartoon. Up third are the chugging power chords and harmony-guitar runs of the aforementioned "Iggy & Angus," which deftly straddle the precarious line between Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back in Town" and Orleans' "Still the One" before drowning sublimely in a sea of overactive phase shifters.

If the above sounds good to you, chances are you'll stick around for such modest gems as the piano-driven "Chester the Molester," the wistful "Stand by Me, Yeah" and the sunshine pop of "I Wanna Thank You." And frankly, you should; whether you get off on tasty drum fills and oddly placed minor sevenths, or you just appreciate perfect pop songs, Navy Blues totally delivers the goods. (Dan Epstein) Listen to Ultra Bide: Real Audio Format Super Milk Capitalism Sleeping on Bowery Street

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ULTRA BIDÉSuper Milk (Alternative Tentacles)

While Japan has left its mark on the pop map in a variety of subgenres - from turntablists DJ Honda and DJ Krush ravin' it up, to Pizzicato 5 and Cornelius flirting with retro, to noisicians Masonna and Zeni Geva making our eardrums bleed, to cutesy trip-hoppers Cibo Matto charming our socks off - what of the mighty island's contribution to "rawk"?

On the surface, Ultra Bide seem like the world's most incompetent garage band. Vocalist-bassist Hide, drummer Tada and guitarist Satoru hammer out their scruffy punk rants with the grace of kamikaze avatars shitting all over the American musical patrimony. Prettifying the a-melodic tendencies of God Is God, Puke Is Puke from 1995, Super Milk is awash in bobbling bass, squalling guitars and bedrock drums finessed with cymbal crashes and cowbell syncopation. My friend, there's nothing callow or workmanlike in the deliberately clunky aggro-rock of this power trio, domo arigato!