Balitsaris plays a range of guitars, and Berman handles the vibraphone and other percussion. Yeah, it's quiet and contemplative. Rather mellow. But certainly not dull.

The pair are joined by special guests Dave Liebman, Hearn Gadbois and Guy Klucevsek on three songs, but Balitsaris and Berman provide the main attraction. Eight of the ten tracks are written by one or the other, showing a nice range of intricate, intimate jazz.

The guitar and vibraphone often operate on completely different lines, converging only to convey the main point of each song. This leaves plenty of room for exploration, and the two take full advantage. The sound is small, but the ideas are large.

More proof that mellow doesn't mean insipid. Balitsaris and Berman have crafted a fine album of many soft moods. Low volume doesn't indicate low intensity, though, as An Echoed Smile is as passionate a jazz album I've heard in a while.

An awfully tinny sound, though that's not an awful thing for cheap and sleazy glam metal. The songs are typical ("Sex, Money & Drugs", "Any Way She Can Get It" and "Trash Can Lover" are certainly representative), with competent cheesy guitar keeping the whole thing moving reasonably well.

I've got a soft spot in my heart for this kinda thing. There's not a whole lot of musical talent (or songwriting skill, for that matter) wandering about here, but it's still strangely compelling. Completely absurd, but fun nonetheless.

There seems to be some intent here to paint the band in "punk" terms (the spoken intro refers to the band as "hardcore"), but I guess times have been pretty rough for glam cheese the past few years. Bangkok Shock sounds more than a little like another Asian city band, Hanoi Rocks. And God knows the last time a used store bought the latest Michael Monroe release.

Simple, stupid and pretty inane. But when turned up to 11, gotta admit I got off. Ten seconds to love, indeed.

The industrial sound of fuck returns, leading off with a really torqued rendition of "My Generation". Don't worry; it gets much better.

Actually, "Rubber Love" is worth the entire price of admission, which also includes two versions of the Who song, a demo track, a couple long-ass remixes of tracks from Teknowhore and the title track, "Degradable". And on my disc, the demo song ("Fascion") and the longer version of "My Generation" are combined onto the same track. I have been informed that this is a manufacturing defect, so the general public shouldn¹t be concerned. If you get one like mine, consider it collectible.

Anyway, those who know Bile are prepared. The sound on the two "new" tracks is really great, better than anything accomplished by the band previously. The tunes are somewhat gothic, though in a really messy fashion. You won't see many poncy goth types snapping this up (though I know a couple...)

A lot of excess, which brings the level of the whole down somewhat. Still, I'm sufficiently impressed. The new album is due fairly soon. I can't wait.

It would be damned easy to throw Lisa Cerbone into that whole girlie pop thing (you know, Jewel and her ilk). Superficial, but easy. Cerbone's voice isn't what I'd call exceptionally strong or powerful, and she has a bad habit of singing somewhat out of her range. And the music isn't terribly challenging.

With these drawbacks, however, Cerbone has managed to find a somewhat trippy pop sound, more like the Moon Seven Times. When the (uncredited) guitar kicks into a line, Cerbone knows how to play along with her voice. Nice interplay, even if it is rather artificial.

A good enough pop album. Cerbone doesn't mess around much with the music, but her lyrics are fairly insightful and affecting. She doesn't dance around with many niceties, but prefers to shoot from the hip. A nice approach. No "Fuck and Run", obviously, but then no pabulum, either. Intriguing.

The same line-up as the last album, with the addition of Kevin Kekes on bass. Not like David Chastain didn't have a little to do with those parts, anyway.

As ever, Chastain cranks out power metal with macho female vocals. French sounds a lot better on this album than Sick Society, though I can't really say why. The production in general isn't quite so self-conscious, leaving room for the band to really play.

And, of course, we get David Chastain's trademark guitar lines. You've heard them all before, really, but he twists up conventions just enough to be original. I quite liked his solo instrumental album, where he took quite a few chances. Here, it's the same old same old. Competent and reasonably amusing. But not terribly compelling.

Not many folks are making "metal" these days. Chastain has never wavered from that standard, and Dementia keeps him solidly in the fold. Okay, so the songs are too long, there isn't much in the way of original thought and I get a nagging sense of deja vu. All told, the stuff still sounds amazingly good, even if common sense directs me otherwise.

In other words, a typical Chastain album. You get exactly what you expect.

Or Barrett Jones, with a few folks helping out from time to time.

An odd sensation, this grunge-pop. Jones has tried merge the two big sounds of Seattle into one cool amalgam. It doesn't work, but some of the results are pretty interesting.

Take "One the Line", which has a very weird Ted Nugent feel. I can't explain that one at all. Jones writes his music all over the place, which is great. He's trying his ass off.

And that's one of the big problems. I can hear all of the effort that went into this recording. Not in the production so much (Jones does know what he's doing there), but in the songwriting. He really struggled with some of these songs, it sounds like. An internal tension that can lead to great things.

Not here. But there are enough cool moments to bring me 'round again.

Seven listed tracks, and three additional songs referred to as "the result of way too much Budweiser." I can smell the quality from here.

Truly sloppy punk stuff, with just enough hooks to keep some semblance of recognizable music. Silly, stupid and occasionally reprehensible. Yep, sounds plenty punk for me.

It grew on me as the songs rolled on (at least until the "Budweiser" curtain). The production is really awful, and the songs don't get much past the basics. Of course, that's true to the form, isn't it?

Amusing enough to keep me around. It would take a larger dose to really make a judgment, but the Cretins do seem to have a good idea of how to whip out a punk cock.

Awfully weak for the imagery provided by the band's name and the album title. I was hoping for some serious balls-out music; instead I get a weak rehash of stuff that would have disgraced the Westerberg solo albums (and I wasn't quite sure that was even possible).

Actually, this sounds way too much like the end of the Replacements, when the band was being pulled in five different directions at once. The label wanted some pop chart hits, Paul Westerberg just wanted to be a king-haul rock star, and various other members just wanted another hit (in a non-musical sense) or to write, say one song for the new album. In other words, completely disjointed and way too produced.

I can't imagine what Crown Heights night sound like live. It doesn't sound like any of the parts here were recorded at the same times. Just a lot of re-takes and dubbing. I know, that's how the big boys play, but it sure didn't work here.

The songs here might have worked if the band played them live to tape. All the cash for extra studio time left this album sounding wimpy and overbearing at the same time. Hard to accomplish, really. I don't think anyone could do it if they tried. Crown Heights simply lucked into disaster.

Yep, another of them Brit electronic bands. The Egg is a lot more commercial than folks like Stereolab and Chemical Brothers. In fact, the egg would play a nice New Order to those acts Kraftwerk (ignore the time and country shifts, please).

On the other hand, if you want moderately funky, well-textured pop music that's pretty damned near perfect for dancing, the Egg should work just fine. In fact, this is one electronic act with real commercial possibilities. More songs need vocals (and three here with lyrics have an odd Pet Shop Boys feel; not bad, but not as inventive as the rest of the stuff), and probably to have a big single some time will need to get chopped off a song or two.

But hell, this is electronic pop that is just cheesy enough to excite the average mall dweller. The more I listen, the more I hear the Pet Shop Boys (I guess that wasn't an accident).And that's not horrible, I suppose.The Egg isn't anything great, but easy enough to please most mildly adventurous types.

I remember that first Frehley's Comet album well. It wasn't very good, but the autobiographical song "Rock Soldiers" had a nice kick to it.

Everything after that was pretty much awful. Of course, the best tracks here are the six live songs (five of them Kiss chestnuts) played by the Comet. My God, you can actually understand the lyrics to "Shock Me" now.

Even the biggest Ace fan has to have problems with his post-Kiss stuff, and the six tracks from three studio releases and a live EP are unfortunately the best of the lot. A step away from unlistenable, really.

With a name like Ace Frehley, you've got to try and sell the goods. I hope there aren't too many buyers, though.

Produced by Rian Murphy, recorded by Jim O'Rourke (both of whom play as well), Edith Frost sure has some top-notch help. Not that her achingly painful songs, most of which deal with a love that flits past, just out of reach, need much aid.

The music is minimal, much like Palace. Frost's vocals are rather unadorned as well, as she prefers to present her songs as a way of baring her soul. The shortest path to salvation, as it were.

Beautiful, but hardly delicate or pretty. Frost has a wonderful knack for using the least amount of words to express the greatest emotions. That's a decent definition of poetry, and certainly her lyrics fall into that category. But the music is just as poetic, without simply mimicking the vocals. The interplay is crucial to the success of the whole package.

An arduous track, but one that is certainly worth walking. Frost paints a picture of a life just over the edge of reality. Close enough to touch, but millions of miles away. A true siren's call.

A fairly basic industrial outing, though Fueled is kinda trippy if you put it into the industrial metal category. Plenty of cheese riffs and industrial percussion tied with rather pompous lyrics of doom and pain.

Good as it goes, but nothing terribly exciting. The most interesting parts of the songs are the odd intros, which are quickly forgotten after the generic riff du jour opens up the track. Alright, so the band's title track ("Fueled", I mean) has a nice groove, it still doesn't go anywhere.

Oh, my, I'm getting a Skatenigs feel here. Hooky hooky, but not enough to kick it into a real feel. And plenty of recycled guitar parts to keep the rocker kids happy.

Fueled is a reasonably fun band, I suppose, but this album just doesn't grab me. I need to hear something a bit more creative, I guess.

Two songs, both astonishingly painful in conception and execution. The production is very treble-heavy, while the bulk of the music is bass-dominated. Yeah, a hack job, but it still works. I can't say why, exactly.

The Boston-area trio follows in the footsteps of fellow New England bashers Glazed Baby. Anguish and throbbing agony for their own sakes. Hey, don't ask me to explain this trend. I'll simply appreciate it, okay?

Now, these are songs in name only. Mostly random collections of crashing riffs and somewhat corollated hollers. There is no construction as such. Oh, "Omnibus" fakes some structure, but that is quickly exposed as a red herring. To move much past the garage noise phase, Gemeinshaft is going to have to actually plot out its musical moves in advance. I'm not saying this is improvised, exactly, but I bet it never sounds quite the same twice.

Which isn't so bad, either. The one thing I don't want to do is advise the guys to straitjacket their sound and feeling. Just a spot of crafting, here and there. That's all.

Smoothly aggressive, Seattle's Kill Switch... Klick has always been the embodiment of the "one-man band" sound, even though main man D.A. Sebasstian has plenty of help. Degenerate is quite the kick.

Heavily synth-laden (a nod to Vancouver, perhaps) but with more than enough real-time samples and instrumentation to keep the sound in the realm of the now. KsK has never disappointed in the past, and this album is more than I could have expected.

The production is really amazing. I know I'm focusing on that an awful lot, but you listen to this disc and tell me the sound is anything but stunning. The songs are excellent, as always, so there's no real need to pick there.

Degenerate is much more silky than the current industrial trends, but I think that might work to the band's favor. After all, trends must turn someday. Albums like this aid that process. The good stuff is what folks remember.

Gorgeous, profane and alluring, KsK has crafted another great album. With just enough electronic experimentation, even the creative jones is satisfied. Not much more to say.

If Pantera was a full-time industrial act, it might have wandered this way. Hardcore vocals, mid-tempo up-and-down riffs and a tres-artificial sound on the drums. Well, the band comes out of that NYC hardcore school (Biohazard, etc.) and is produced by Scott Ian, so I guess all that makes sense.

Reasonably catchy, once the songs truly get moving. Sometimes that doesn't happen, and I get a latter-day Ministry vibe (most unpleasant). But for the most part, this is at least comparable to Pro-Pain, so there's something good going on.

Ian left a big wall of sound, which is good, because subtlety isn't called for here. This is kick-ass boot-stomping music, and you might as well crank everything up to the breaking point. Helps hide some of the weak songwriting.

I actually liked the tech-y sound (don't get me wrong; there are no keyboards here), and enough of the time Killing Culture was able to whip out a fairly good tune. Yeah, the stuff is straight-ahead, no-look-back stuff, but that's always a nice change of pace. An encouraging album.

It took me a while to get into Burn My Eyes, and this album hits me the same way. Machine Head refuses to be type-cast or to stick to any preconceived notions of metal, with the possible exception that the music should be played very loud.

A power-metal band that manages to sound nothing like Pantera, Metallica or even Sepultura? Yes. There are more than a few nods to Fear Factory, but I'll forgive some appropriation of the labelmates style. And anyway, such traits are but a small part of the greater sound of Machine Head.

This album is really late. I mean, it's been two and a half years. All the excitement of that fine debut album has worn off. Until folks get a taste of this puppy, I guess.

Is it just me, or is Roadrunner kicking out some of the best metal around this year. Coal Chamber and Karma to Burn were much better than average, and this album, while certainly highly anticipated, has managed to overwhelm my wildest expectations.

Fifty-something minutes of pure, textured aggro. I can't begin to catalog all of the influences and sounds, except to say that the final result is nothing less than stunning.

While not the same Magellan as records for Magna Carta (and I hope I'm not creating any legal difficulties here), this Magellan also travels a byway of the prog rock landscape.

Rather poppy, with plenty of little sound sculpture tidbits lying about. The vocals are generally filtered through one machine or another, and whatever guitars appear also sound rather mutated.

Kinda in a Floyd-lite state. The lyrics and music are nowhere near as pompous and overbearing, but there is still a resemblance. I guess a comparison to the best of Alan Parsons Project is also in order. Well produced, fairly mellow, but still adventurous, pop fare. You could do a lot worse.

The funny thing about the name is that this Magellan has been around much longer. Take a check of the website and see how much this band has done. Fairly impressive, really.

The sound may be inoffensive, but Magellan still traverses some fertile waters. Prog-pop without the cheese.

The toughest thing in jazz is to keep one foot in the past, so as to keep the traditionalists placated, and to step out into the future, so as the please the young turks. A slight misstep either way can either sound dated or simply jar most listeners into the aspirin bottle.

Now, I'm a big fan of free jazz and all the wildness it can create, but I still appreciate the finer points and rules that "traditional" jazz incorporates. Now, to realize that bebop (and even a good chunk of the early free jazz) is considered part of the canon is to realize that any jazz album that doesn't keep it's eye on innovation is doomed to the mothball shelf.

McBee has assembled a fine quintet that plays with vigor and precision; emotion and enunciation are equally demanded and appreciated. McBee's compositions approach many colors of jazz without acceding to the whims of any one master. His wide swath of sounds is testament to the rigorous study of jazz.

Fresh and engaging, Unspoken is something of a jazz anthology. McBee's journey through the many styles and moods of jazz is invigorating and impressive. Sublime.

Moody pop that likes to play lots of games with the dynamic meter. Soft quickly thrusts to loud, and the harshest pounding subsides to silence in seconds. It would be even more impressive if the band didn't do that sort of thing all the time.

The music itself is fairly complex, with at least two competing melody lines (and the odd vocal set) in each song. There is a fairly diverse instrumentation (lots of unusual--for rock--bits in the percussion), but nothing that draws away from the sparse appeal of Mogwai's basic sound.

The feel often echoes moments from the first Dirty Three album (without the fiddle, obviously). Ominous clouds on the horizon, a pervasive implication of danger and foreboding. And yet, the boom is never fully lowered.

And that's what I kept waiting for: the release. The titles. Something to tell me that the movie is over and it's now time to wander out of the theater and get in my car. Mogwai is maddeningly ambivalent. I'm not sure if that's such a good thing or not, but it sure has me listening.

All the usual demo problems: muffled production, rather flat vocals and basic musical structure that is kinda lost behind the veil of fuzz.

And yet, there are some nice moments. No Device bashes out some pleasant quirky pop. This tape isn't terribly good, but there is reasonable promise.

The main guy behind No Device is Matthius Rheame. He wrote the music (the best part of the tape, easily) and had his hands in just about everything else. I'd suggest paying for better production next time out, but if he can keep writing such interesting songs, Matthius just might have something.

Much of non-LP work of the "band" is collected on this disc. Going by Palace Brothers, Palace Music and just plain Palace, these songs are further testament to the power that this musical collective based around the songwriting and singing of Will Oldham.

The songs are presented generally in order of recording, though that isn't an iron-clad rule. And hell, considering the number of different band names, why stick to any rules?

The only hard and fast proscription here is unadulterated pure music. Will Oldham and his various bandmates refuse to back down from any subject or musical sidetrip; indeed, Oldham's voice is the most soulful revelation in rock since Neil Young first howled for tape 30-some years ago.

That, of course, isn't a fair comparison. Young is, and always has been, a part of the musical mainstream, while Oldham toils in back rooms. Indeed, I saw Palace recently at a free show in Tampa. The band came on at about 12:30 a.m. with about a hundred people milling about the bar after another show had mostly cleared out. After three songs, the crowd had thinned to about 30, but those 30 were in rapt adoration. Oldham and mates seemed to enjoy themselves after the yuppie types left, and the show was a truly astonishing experience.

But not for the average person. Years ago, a Newsweek story proclaimed Palace Brothers to be the new face of country music. Of course, Garth Brooks is still destroying arenas with his Kiss Nation tours, and Palace is still rattling around the backroads, happy to be playing to any sort of audience. Perhaps all is well with the universe, after all.

Poppy roots-rock with just enough of a punk tinge to create a pleasant unstable finish. Are the Phoids more like Uncle Tupelo or Sugar? Yes.

Surprisingly accessible, considering Jac Calabro's thick-as-cement vocals. Oh, he occasionally carries a tune, but it sounds like his range is about half an octave. The thing is, his shortcomings in this area are most endearing. I started rooting for the band as soon as I realized their singer couldn't sing and the guitarist seemed to be a bit dyslexic.

A bit excessively produced, I suppose, but chalk that up to the BMG money. This probably would have been better as a honky-tonk record, but I'm not complaining too much. All in all, Marianne has done a good number of things right.

I really can't place this band in any category, and I don't want to do that, anyway. The Phoids are a bit off-kilter, but that's a nice place to play.

I thought this band's first album for Grass was a bit too reminiscent of the Treepeople. A bit heavy on the carbon-copy thing. I never got the second one (the Grass folks haven't been sending me much lately), and so this is a chance to give fresh dish.

A bit poppier than Bluette, and I can still hear Scott Schmaljohn in the guitar lines. But Pollen does seem to have found a bit more of its own sound within the whole power-pop realm, although there is still a good deal of work needed there.

The tunes are fresh and nicely biting, rarely taking a second for a breath. Pollen has a great sense of pacing for this pop stuff, and the songs reflect this great instinct. The production is pleasingly punchy, bringing out just enough undertones to color the sound nicely.

A good pop album, better than I expected. Pollen still needs to find a clearer vision of its sound, but this is a positive step in the right direction. The band has already proven itself at writing and executing good pop.

Grungy punk pop. A weird combination. The main effect is to render the guitars grey, almost toneless. Where half the great stuff about pop is usually in the bright production, Puller seems driven to dullness.

And it just grates on me. The songwriting is at least decent, and the playing is quite good. It's just the production and playing style that really bogs down whatever is good here. And just when a bright melody would inject some life into the proceedings, Puller goes grunge-anthemic. Yow.

It's surprising what one little thing can do to really drag a whole project down. Now, here, that one little thing is "musical direction", which is pretty important. I just can't get into this sound. No way around it.

Prog-styled metal, in the European tradition. Stuff I'm generally inclined to like in spite of myself.

And I do like chunks of the songs. But Seasons of the Wolf is in need of some serious production help. The sound here isn't muffled or jumbled. It's pretty precise. Just very weak.

This is music that is yearning to be cranked up to 11, but when I do that, I get an earful of keyboards. The bass and guitar just aren't there. A severe power shortage, to be sure.

And really, without proper volume and support, songs with titles like "October Moon" and "Long Cold Winter" (not the Cinderella tune, obviously) sound impossibly silly. Even I can't get my hair dancing. And that's the real shame.

My God. The fourth album in a month with a direct connection to ALL Central in Ft. Collins (Steven Edgerton and Bill Stephenson mixed the Pollen album reviewed above). The thing is, those guys know how to make great pop records. Okay, so the guitars do take on a somewhat similar sound. It is a pretty good one, you gotta admit.

And with the excellent production, the only thing left to evaluate is the music itself. Shades Apart is nicely adept at the whole power-pop thing. In fact, this puppy sounds a lot like one of the many great ALL albums. Well, the guitar lines aren't as affected, but then, that just adds to the straightforward pop appeal.

I'm fairly impressed. Shades Apart has crafted a good pop album that's bouncy enough to keep just about anyone bobbing along nicely. Much better than anything I've heard in the past from these guys.

Solid, and solidly good. Shades Apart has an album that justifies the hype surrounding the band.

While the band hails from Florida, the sound is pure NYC metalcore. Throaty, almost death metal vocals over the expected up-and-down bounce mosh. Fairly competently executed, but not terribly exciting.

The sound is quite nice, just chaotic enough to convey a sense of urgency, but clear enough to bring out all the various voices. Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot being said.

The three songs are almost indistinguishable from each other. Shai Hulud doesn't make any real change in the established sound, and even pales when compared with the Killing Culture reviewed in this issue.

Just not enough here to make me care. The songs have no life.

Seventy minutes (when you count the seven extra tracks) of pop bliss. I can't think of any other band in the past ten years that has such a consistent record of cranking out unadulterated pop. Shonen Knife is the band so good that after coming to mass fame with a big-name tribute album (Every Band Has a Shonen Knife Who Loves Them), it still continued to whip out gem after gem.

I can't imagine that there are many folks out there completely unfamiliar with the band (their Carpenters cover was used by Microsoft during the Windows 95 ad blitz), so I'll get to the specifics of this album.

The colors are a bit more blue, with some almost introspective musing wandering past from time to time. Sure enough, most of the fare is light-as-air music combined with wacky lyrics replete with non-sequiturs. There's only so much charm in Japanglish idiom forms, but Shonen Knife has progressed a long way from 15 years ago.

Love 'em or hate 'em, really. Shonen Knife is a known quantity, and this album is fully representative of the band's past. The 20 songs are more than enough to make me happy, and if you've got a problem with cheery pop, then go somewhere else.

If Codeine were an experimental electronic outfit, then it might have sounded something like Slotek. The name is instructive; while the beats are merely in the adagio range, most of the musical sounds are recordings electronically slowed down, sometimes in exponential magnitude.

Turn out the lights and crank this stuff up, and the effect is something like a sensory depravation tank. Any need to race or act quickly is replaced by a thick, throbbing desire to hold back and simply move in slow motion.

Powerfully addictive, with a solidly-constructed set of backing noise, Slotek erases the conscious world and imposes an order of contemplation and slow grace. The bass lines groove on and on, allowing the rest of the sculptures to really define the outlines of this alternate plane.

Simply dreamy. A gorgeous rendering of another world.

Hooky alterna-pop with just enough cheese to attract the kids of today. Yeah, there are plenty of other trendy styles meandering about, not to mention an almost slavish devotion to the backbeat rhythms of the Godfathers. The lyrics do not match up, but hell, that's hardly unusual.

Astonishingly catchy, and almost immediately forgettable. Pop without soul or even a reason for being. Oh, the riffs are good enough, but Slush is hollow in the middle. Absolutely no core.

The sound is sharp and crisp, with some distortion tweaked in as a concession to today's trendy reality. Too bad this fine production work can't do anything to improve the quality of the songs. They sound gorgeous, but have nothing to say.

I kept waiting for the one track to really kick this album into overdrive. It never happened. Slush is a band of competent mechanics, but art is well beyond its grasp. Merely a cheap thrill.

Some nice Vancouver boys who sound nothing like the regular local exports. Sparkmarker has a cool emo-core feel filtered through the Trance Syndicate rhythm machine. Something like Texas Is The Reason mixed with Johnboy. Um, well, that is something, now.

A sludgy pop sound with punchy bass and drums. Everything is in motion, and yet the feeling is somewhat laid back. As the songs roll on, they simply continue to kick my ass.

Another touchstone would be Kepone, that fine band which records for Touch and Go (and a recent recipient of a AAAAA review). Sparkmarker is still a little inconsistent, but the raw feed here is most impressive. If this sort of thing is the sound of the future, I'm all set to get on board.

Of course, the average mallrat wouldn't get anywhere near music of this quality. Sparkmarker has a wonderful sound and an incisive feel for songwriting. An astonishing debut; an album worth searching out. The power is immense.

Brit-pop with just enough of a glam feel to glaze me over. The a-side is a rip on a wayward member of England's House of Lords; mean, nasty and oh-so-much fun. Damned short, which is a shame.

The flip, "26 Years" is even shorter, but much the same. Peppy stuff. This is an import-only 7" that is intended to prime the pump for a full-length on Lava/Atlantic later this year.

Well, with some serious cash and effort behind it, I'm sure Speedway will do fairly well. Nice to get an early sighting.

Heavily constructed pop music, with waves of guitars and high-concept lyrics. The idea here is to make a big statement. The music wallows in anthemic excess, but the ideas behind the songs are indeed impressive. Which leaves the overall project in some kind of a mess.

The album leaves me with a good feeling, though I can't really define why. There are plenty of flaws, though most of those have to do with some serious ambition. I try not to fault people for trying, after all.

But unlike such ace practitioners as the Wrens, Tugboat Annie tries to mix things up without much success. Oh, no song is an abject failure, but a song like "Suicide Shoes", which tries at first to be a change of pace, ends up in the same territory as the rest.

Right now, Tugboat Annie has dreams beyond its means. All the basics are covered well, but there are a couple steps needed to hit a higher level. More time in the steamer, I think.

A good set of tunes from the Tooth & Nail lineup. All of this stuff is previously released, but the sampler does give a good picture of the strength and diversity of this label's lineup.

I've reviewed stuff like Klank and MxPx (not to mention the Puller in this issue), but there's more here to explore as well. It's somewhat hit and miss, but there's enough on Tooth & Nail to attract just about anyone.

A fair sampling of the label's fare. It does the job.

The "a" in Uniao has a tilde over it, but I have no idea how to represent that in ASCII. I'm not that worried about it, either.

What I am concerned with is Uniao Lisboa's lineup, of which five bands are represented here. The songs are sung in English or Portuguese.

The two Flood tracks are the most fascinating of the bunch, exhibiting solid songwriting and a real feel for airy anthems that aren't too heavy. Not metal, not pop, not industrial, but somewhere amongst the three.

The rest is alright, tending toward the metal side of the universe. Well, Capitao Fantasma is a little more horror-punk, kinda like a Portuguese Deadbolt. In any account, this sampler is an interesting look at an international label.

Recorded live at Max's Kansas City in September 1978, this set teams Sid with Jerry Nolan, Mick Jones, Arthur Kane and Steve Dior (a band that went by the name the Idols for a short while). I'm pretty sure this stuff was released some time back as Sid Sings, though it's pretty hard to hear a damned thing in the incompetent mix.

Sid riffs through such chestnuts as "I Wanna Be Your Dog", "Search & Destroy", "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone" and "My Way". Oh, and the obligatory cover of the Ramones "Chinese Rock", a song I've never liked in any form.

But even if the lackluster material and crappy performances could be improved, it wouldn't matter because this is obviously taken straight from the sound board, where it had been mixed by someone at least as fucked up as Sid was at the time.

Positively dreadful. There's no reason why anyone should want to own this fucker, much less pay for it. Indeed, the only reason for this re-issue is cash, cash, cash.

Ward's first solo album, Along the Way, is one of my all-time favorites. The way he remanufactured sounds and vocals was way ahead of its time. It's been a long time, but he's back with a new record.

I've heard that the commercial version of this release will feature a total re-recording of the first album (minus the songs featuring Ozzy on vocals) by the new band. I have no idea why, but then that is simply an unconfirmed tale as of now.

As for this stuff, Ward has gone for a much more traditional rock and roll sound, without the rampant engineering intrusions. I'm not sure this helps his voice, which is kinda reedy and weak, but Ward's songwriting touch is as sharp as before.

Still way out of time. Ward is practicing a form of prog-metal that no one has ever tried before, kinda surprising because it works rather well.

I'm not sure what to make of this, which was my exact reaction to his first album. There are many songs and elements that just don't make any sense at the moment. Ward has once again packed his music and lyrics with layer upon layer of complexity and subtext. This one will be in my discer for some time.

Jazz with a definite new age twist. Whittaker isn't as sickly sweet as many of his keyboard counterparts, but he obviously doesn't want to be stuck in any one musical realm.

I don't like the excessive flourishes, and the melodies here are far too facile to allow for much appreciation. Whittaker does have nice voicing on both the piano and keyboards, but I don't like the way he uses it. There's too much talent here to leave a sound like this.

As evidenced by many other albums in this issue, mellow doesn't have to mean insipid. But Whittaker has sacrificed his creative integrity in the name of a wider audience. Hey, if that's what he wants...

Alterna-metal with the mechanical precision of an industrial outfit. Xysma reminds me a lot of Pyogenesis, and I get the same feeling: lots of good ideas, but the execution leaves something amiss.

A nice and tight sound, with a really cool guitar noise. But the riffage is terribly cliche, which undercuts a lot of the more unusual musical ideas that permeate the mass. Really too bad.

And then every once in a while Xysma cuts things loose and goes for the catchy bit. That's a little more successful than some of the other stuff, but even there the hooks generally go awry.

I keep listening, and I keep wanting to like the band. There's so much going on, and much of it has a lot of potential. But when things really get moving, all I can hear is Sonic Temple. Yow. Perhaps the pot needs more stirring.