Pop

Shwayze
Shwayze
(Geffen **)

When Malibu MC Adam Smith - known to MTV viewers as Shwayze - hooked up with "producer" Cisco Adler, it was a hazy, lazy match made in beach- bum heaven.

Adler's been kicking around fantastic L. A. as his father's son (producer Lou Adler) a grunge-glam rocker and a boy-toy to Paris/Mischa/etc. forever. Somebody had to give Cisco something solid to do. That'd be Shwayze, the self-described "only black kid in Malibu." The rapper has a sleepier, more laconic flow than a narcoleptic G. Love in a hammock, and lyrics that concern themselves with weed, women, more weed, Hollywood, cars and once again, weed.

So Adler's crooning woozily alongside the chilled-out MC and producing sunshiny beat-boxed songs like "Roamin' " that come off like a third-rate Sugar Ray. Yet, despite their limited vocabulary - lines like "if you got the weed, I got the pipe, we can get high together all night" are Dostoyevsky to these guys - their debut album is contagious as all get-out in a languidly wonky way.

As long as you don't lose too many brain cells from the dumbo lyrical likes of "Corona and Lime," you'll be OK.

- A.D. Amorosi

Matthew Sweet
Sunshine Lies
(Shout! Factory **1/2)

"I need a room to rock in," Matthew Sweet proclaims repeatedly on the second track of Sunshine Lies, his 10th solo album. "Room To Rock" sounds desperate, which is apt, and forced, which isn't.

On 1991's Girlfriend, his career-making masterpiece, Sweet effortlessly mixed crunchy power pop, bitter ballads and brilliant lead guitar work from Television's Richard Lloyd and Lou Reed sideman Robert Quine. Sunshine Lies seems a self-conscious attempt to recapture that golden era, with the return for two tracks each of Lloyd and of Ivan Julian, who worked with Sweet in the mid-nineties (Greg Leisz takes the lead elsewhere). It's a mixed bag: for each rocker that takes flight ("Flying"), two are leaden ("Sunrise Eyes," "Burn Through Love"), and a similar ratio holds for the Byrdsy psychedelia and the folk pop ballads that recall Sweet's work with the Thorns.

- Steve Klinge

GZA/Genius
Pro Tools
(Babygrande ***½)

As Wu-Tang members go, GZA is all talent but no flash. He's a lyrical monster - rich in imagery and perhaps the group's most gifted writer - but his reserved delivery is easily overshadowed by, say, Ghostface's manic energy, Method Man's growl, or Raekwon's deadly storytelling.

With Pro Tools, GZA's fifth album (sixth if you count Grandmasters, his great 2005 collaboration with DJ Muggs), he's found an angle: put up or shut up. The title itself is a play on the studio software used to edit recordings, and there's an undercurrent that suggests if you can't do it naturally and purely, you shouldn't be doing it at all.

Pro Tools both puts up and shuts up. The cryptic beats ("0% Finance" and

Life Is a Movie" are incredible) are hand-in-glove with GZA's foreboding, endless rhymes, which are delivered nearly profanity-free. That's not a grab at radio spins or wider sales. And it's not a gimmick. It's just skills.

- Michael Pollock

George Duke
Dukey Treats
(BPM/Heads Up International **)

Keyboardist/producer/