Pop

Gnarls Barkley has such a well-founded reputation for eccentricity - dressing up as tennis players, airplane pilots, and Wizard of Oz characters, or just acting "Crazy" - that it's easy to forget how serious the genre-bending duo of Cee-Lo Green and Danger Mouse is. It's hard to miss it though, if you listen closely to The Odd Couple, the soul-rap-

rock-experimental-pop duo's follow-up to their celebrated 2006 debut, St. Elsewhere.

On the surface, the long-awaited and now rush-released album - expected April 8, it came out digitally last week and hits stores Tuesday - comes off as effusive, idiosyncratic, and downright kooky enough to satisfy fans. And Danger Mouse's production is simultaneously subversive and pop-savvy. But as a soul man whose crackly, bottom-heavy voice is an underrated instrument, Green unburdens himself of many a verse suggesting that being the popular class clown isn't always such a laugh riot.

"I don't have any friends at all / 'cause I got nothing in common with y'all," he sings in "Whatever." "So who's going to catch me if I fall?" Similar desperation is voiced in the ghostly "Who's Gonna Save My Soul?" "Surprise" uses a Hawaii Five-O style surf-rock wave to inform us that "everything that's alive eventually dies." This follow-up doesn't include anything as outrageously undeniable as "Crazy," but it's consistently stronger than its predecessor.

- Dan DeLuca

Destroyer
Trouble in Dreams
(Merge ***)

"I was caught in the middle of a word war," Dan Bejar sings to begin "Plaza Trinidad," and it's an apt description of listening to Trouble In Dreams, his eighth Destroyer album. Bejar sings knotty, verbose tunes full of non sequiturs and wordplay, and one could get lost trying to parse their labyrinthine content (and many indie-rock bloggers have done so). He's a cynic whose voice and penchant for glam-rock recall Bowie's Ziggy Stardust phase (and who contributes three songs to every New Pornographers album).

Trouble In Dreams mingles acoustic folk rock, sprightly Brit pop, declarative anthems, and sighing meditations. It mixes images of a world at war with references to flowers and specific girls (Susan, Nicole, Jenny, etc.) and to Tulip, who may be both.

"A woman by another name is not a woman," Bejar sings, cryptically. "I'll tell you what I mean by that. Maybe not in seconds flat, maybe never."

- Steve Klinge

The Kills
Midnight Boom
(Domino ***)

The South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, last week was crawling with girl-boy duos: The Raveonettes, Matt and Kim, She and Him. Grungiest of the lot was the Kills, the tandem of American Allison Mosshart and Britisher (and Kate Moss boyfriend) Jamie Hince. Midnight Boom is the duo's third and best album, a raw burst of punk-blues riffage dolled up with catchy handclap rhythms and ooh-oohing backup vocals. The Kills sometimes announce their predilection for the dark side with too heavy a hand - "I want expensive sadness/Hospital bills, parole/Open doors to madness," Mosshart rhymes, too tamely, in "Cheap and Cheerful." But if Midnight Boom is never spectacular in its depravity, it is consistently pleasurable as it takes a satisfying stroll on the wild side.

- D.D.

Flo Rida
Mail on Sunday
(Poe Boy/Atlantic **)

Having a name like "Flo" might not seem overly masculine. But from his gruff nasal whine and all-around misogyny to his quoting the ultimate bad-boy band, Guns n' Roses ("call me Axl," go the lyrics to "American Superstar") Flo Rida's Mail on Sunday is nothing if not musky. The innuendos fly fast and thick on the Carol City, Fla., native's debut. "She's stuck on my elevator" goes the no-duh hook that he and producer/rapping partner Timbaland came up with for "Elevator." There's more where that came from.

Luckily for Flo Rida, he's got some inventive beats and a curious flexible flow to back it all up. He adapts a light lilting rap atop the rat-tat-tat of "Ms. Hangover," nyah-nyahs his way through the nursery crime of "Act Like You Know," and takes to the bottom-heavy groove and snide sexual asides of "Low" like a duck to water.

But there's still not enough cleverness, innovation, roguish charm, decent beats, or even guest appearances (Lil Wayne and T-Pain among them) to save the rest of the record or warrant a special Sunday delivery. Good, not great, this.

- A.D. Amorosi

Country/Roots

She grabs you right from the start: "I've got a cold beer in my right hand/In my left I've got my wedding band," Ashton Shepherd belts over the hard-edged honky-tonk of the lead-off track and first single from her terrific debut.

"Takin' Off This Pain" sets up an album that presents the big-voiced young Alabama native as a torch-bearer of tradition-

minded country (dig that rare reference to Keith Whitley), albeit one wrapped in a very attractive physical and commercial package. Her verve and charisma recall that of a young Terri Clark, and she's already a pretty sharp songwriter - she wrote or cowrote 10 of the 11 tunes. The sap runs high on "How Big Are Angel Wings," but with the rest she exudes freshness even while covering familiar ground, revealing a fetching blend of feistiness and vulnerability.

- Nick Cristiano

Jim Lauderdale
and the Dream Players
Honey Songs
(Yep Roc ***)

He's an exceedingly prolific songwriter, but Jim Lauderdale has a canny way of keeping himself out of a rut. Whether switching between honky-tonk and bluegrass, teaming with mountain music patriarch Ralph Stanley or rootsy jam band Donna the Buffalo, he has usually managed to keep things interesting.

For Honey Songs, Lauderdale has indeed assembled a dream team: It features three alumni of Elvis' last band, including guitar great James Burton, steel whiz Al Perkins, and E Street Band bassist Garry Tallent, while Buddy Miller, Emmylou Harris and Patty Loveless are among the harmony vocalists. They all serve a set of songs that, in typical Lauderdale fashion, manages to be both original and accessible, echoing strains of classic country as well as the Dead and the Burritos, all of them held together by Lauderdale's own rich North Carolina drawl.

- N.C.

Jazz

There are no halfway measures here. Guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and his working quintet of two years ago get captured on the hallowed ground of the Village Vanguard in New York in a disciplined but far-ranging session.

The results on this new release can be loud and clanging, but it's also the kind of jazz that can change the way you think about the world - if only for a listen.

Rosenwinkel is a Philly native who broke in with vibraphonist Gary Burton and drummer Paul Motian in the early 1990s and is now a much-lionized player and a professor at the Jazz Institute of Berlin. After fours discs on Verve, he launches here on artistShare with a quintet recording with tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Eric Harland.

Rosenwinkel, Turner and Goldberg hit some incredible high points as soloists, yet it's not showboating. It's all deep in the service of the group's sound. Rosenwinkel also shows verve as a composer. Some tunes, such as "Terra Nova," inspired by a trip to Russia, project a mystical quality.

- Karl Stark

Peter Paulsen
Change of Scenery Sextet
(Wahbo ***)

Bassist Peter Paulsen creates a quiet and sophisticated sextet recording that continually tweaks a listener's interest. The overall vibe can go from classical to jazz, but building to a climax is a constant.

An instructor in Jazz Studies at West Chester University who's also a regular in the Harrisburg and Allentown Symphony Orchestras, Paulsen writes tunes that are tightly composed and feature some fleet work from Greg Riley and Chris Bacas on reeds, Matt Hochmiller on piano, and Bob Meashey on trumpet. "Random Width" is a free tune collectively composed that really moves, while "B's B" is a clever reworking of the Charlie Parker tune "Billie's Bounce" in an unexpected, South African form. Wayne Shorter's "Nefertiti" also gets reworked and lengthened to give drummer Joe Mullen some steaming soloing to do.

- K.S.

Classical

Mozart Piano Concertos
14, 25 and 20
Rudolf Buchbinder, piano and conductor; Vienna Philharmonic.
(EuroArts DVD ***)

Mozart Piano Concertos
23, 22 and 24.
Rudolf Buchbinder, piano and conductor; Vienna Philharmonic.
(EuroArts DVD ***)

Pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, who plays Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Philadelphia Orchestra this week, celebrated his 60th birthday with a series of marathon concerts. The Beethoven concertos were recorded live over a single day, as were the six Mozart concertos (though not the same day). No signs of strain are apparent, though the excitement of the occasion is definitely audible, along with the decades of Beethoven specialization that made him one of the most authoritative performers of these great Viennese composers.

Though you might expect the performances to have an etched-in-stone quality, their spontaneity is their most distinctive feature. It takes the form of chamber-

music-like interaction with the orchestra in the slow movements and downright recklessly fast tempos in the final movements.

The DVDs are best for Buchbinder fans; they aren't particularly arresting visually, and there's so much fine Mozart on the market.

The Beethoven set ranks among the very best. It doesn't depose my live-performance favorite, Rudolf Serkin and Rafael Kubelik on Orfeo, but it's close. - David Patrick Stearns

Legendary Piano Recordings
Various works performed by Edvard Grieg, Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, Claude Debussy, Raoul Pugno and Louis Diemer.

(Marston, two discs, ***1/2)

No, your eyes aren't lying. This isn't a disc of piano rolls, but genuine recordings of composers playing their own works. The existence of these recordings hasn't been unknown, but most were only issued in strange, palsied sound caused by defective equipment that left them barely listenable. Swarthmore's Ward Marston, already a near-legendary figure in historic recording, may warrant canonization for reissuing these discs made by the Gramophone and Typewriter Limited company (apparently, records and typewriters were sister industries) with sound corrected by a newly devised computer program.

That doesn't change the fact that many of these recordings are more than a century old. But the sound is such that you feel that you've had a genuine encounter with the firsthand music-making of these composers. A particular revelation is Debussy accompanying soprano Mary Garden in a section of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande that casts a moonlit spell with fascinating phrasing choices.

Grieg plays his own work with great unfussy character, and little of the usual nostalgia (the composer apparently wasn't looking back at anything), while Saint-Saëns brings marvelous flexibility to the Bach-like opening of his Piano Concerto No. 2.

The most enjoyable recordings are by the then-famous, now-forgotten pianist Raoul Pugno. Full of flash and style, he plays Chopin's Nocturne in F-sharp with a strangely slow but convincing tempo said to have been handed down directly from Chopin himself, and gives a reading of the "Funeral March" that's full of intractable drama and infused with genius-caliber insight.

- D.P.S.