Asylum Street Spankers
"What? And Give Up Show Biz?"
(Yellow Dog)

Two hours of live double prove how fulfilling it can be to shovel up behind the elephant. Originals from their mildly likable post-jug catalogue celebrate beer and toking up with your baby in the morning. Tuvan throat tricks augment songs about a CIA agent and the meth-head next door. A few flat old-timey standards leave you grateful to let your mind wander. And weaving the songs together is the patter. Top track: a long, carefully plotted ensemble tale about how their bus lost its brakes just after cresting a hill. "Amazing Grace" follows, then Nilsson's "Think About Your Troubles." Both sound perfect.

Robert Creeley
"Really!!"
(Paris)

Creeley was a jazz-loving "New American Poet" whose readings never softened the abrupt line breaks of his economical, apolitical, intensely decent verse. A poor musical prospect, you'd think. Yet the subtle flourishes of Tin Huey/Tom Waits/Carneyball Johnson saxophonist-plus Ralph Carney sharpen these 1988 recordings decisively. You have to concentrate, and if I hadn't been a Creeley fan in my poetic youth I might not have bothered. Now I've taken Creeley's 1962 "For Love" off the shelf -- and wish I could hear "The Way," "Sing Song," "Ballad of the Despairing Husband," and the list keeps getting longer.

Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip
"Angles"
(Strange Famous)

Declares big-bearded performance poet Pip: "I ain't riding the beat, it's the beat that's riding me." Take it or leave it. But Pip and his beatmaking partner, both denizens in good standing of London's working-class suburbs and record-store culture, are certainly more musical than the Streets, arguably more musical than Dizzee Rascal, and stick Art Brut in there too. As U.K. electro goes, they're varied stylistically and open-minded about hooks, and Pip's articulated Cockney has a lilt. More rhetorician than storyteller -- most momentously on the bandname-checking Brit sensation "Thou Shalt Always Kill" -- he distinguishes himself from yer average pop philosopher by having something to say. Try the suicide advisory "Magician's Assistant." Or "Letter From God to Man," which makes the Big Fella a "curator" rather than a "creator." Or "Tommy C," a definition of beauty that tells a comedian's life story, philosophically.

El Guincho
"Alegranza"
(XL)

Raised by hippie environmentalists in the Canary Islands, Pablo Diaz-Reixa won a literary prize in Paris at 18 and moved to where else but Barcelona to write a novel, which he says sucked -- "really creepy and bad." So without a hitch he turned to music, joining a band and making beats and composing soundtracks and then constructing, all by himself, a highly uncreepy album whose title is the name of a Canary Island as well as a Spanish word that suggests glee: a through-fabricated triumph of neo/pseudo communalism á la Man Man, Animal Collective, even I'm From Barcelona. At a time when communalists worldwide regard America as a scourge, here's an internationalism with no rock in it. It's Buenos Aires' Gaby Kerpel without irony, maybe even Barcelona's Manu Chao without hooks -- ecstatic yes, escapist no.

Jesus H Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse
"Happier Than You"
(jesushchristrocks.com)

Remember Lina Lamont in "Singin' in the Rain"? Imagine a woman who sings the way she talks -- only she can carry a tune and use her brain. Most guys consider her affected, but therapy has taught her that that voice is just part of who she is, like her insecurities, and she copes with both. Mostly in the first person, she explores characters like the compulsively obliging half-Broadway chameleon she is, even a guy once. She's manipulative in "Back Burner Guy," desperate in "I'm Around," over it in "I Miss Your Arm," not actually over it in "I Hope You're Happy" post-celibate in "Dry Spell": "Suddenly she feels pretty/Suddenly she feels young/Suddenly her neighbor on the co-op board is not wrong." If you have a heart, you'll wish her the best. But if you're a guy, you may be a little chary of taking her on yourself.

The Mighty Underdogs
"Droppin' Science Fiction"
(Def Jux)

Latyrx's Lateef, Blackalicious' Gift of Gab, and bass-wielding Bay Area beatmaster Headnodic celebrate their collective musicality and good lives by launching a real supergroup of mock superheroes, with Doom, Lyrics Born, Mr. Lif and Akrobatik augmenting the talent pool. These guys sure can rap and rhyme, and they do. But whether they're up to scripting comic books I'll leave to the experts. Continuity by Headnodic and his Quannum-channels-Too-Short funk. Bass players -- bless 'em. But a taste of Headnodic's Moe Pope album will have you blessing the MCs too.

TV on the Radio
"Dear Science"
(Interscope)

Having been sucked struggling into the slough of despond that is "Return to Cookie Mountain" only to swim out a wholer, if muddier, man, I first took exception to the graceless lyrics they croon and groan on top of their catchy new funk. Transmutation of the negative -- seemed too easy, a time-worn rock trick. But listen to the music as much as you'll want to and slowly the verbal opacities dissipate. You'll notice zingers like "Keep your dancing shoes off mine," "scared to death that I'm livin' a life not worth dying for." And eventually, if you pay attention, you'll hear an album that makes sense of the public lives of club-scene warrior-laborers who have kept it real and turned into affluent young professionals anyway. The thing about the indie-rock life is that even its depressives, not just mere realists like these guys, have a pretty good time. That's the point, right? So they retain their realism while celebrating the bright side. On the glorious "Red Dress," they also make clear that they haven't transcended their racial identity, no matter how much indie-rock wants to think so. Transcending race just isn't something that happens in America -- at least not yet.

Sir Victor Uwaifo
"Guitar-Boy Superstar: 1970-1976"
(Soundway)

Premier Records' sketchier and rarer "Greatest Hits Vol. 1" and "Ekassa Ekassa" suggest that a full-career best-of would be the ideal introduction to this Nigerian icon from Benin the city, who at 67 is a teacher and a government commissioner and a certified bronze sculptor in addition to a musician with many hit singles well behind him. The simple catchiness of the not-included 1967 title tune would only have enhanced these selected specimens of ekassas, Uwaifo's hugely successful commercialization of a Benin rhythm reserved since the 16th century for coronations. "Kirikisi (Ekassa 24)" and "Ebibi (Ekassa 28)" come with guitar hooks also lifted from Benin tradition, but other songs' charms are somewhat subtler. Then there's "Agho," which fuses "What'd I Say" and "Tequila." Why didn't somebody think of that before?