Mon: 06-05-06

Thom Yorke: "Black Swan"
genre: electro-pop

Thom Yorke always thinks big, scaling glacial edifices that make open spaces claustrophobic. Solo albums, meanwhile, are often a reactionary province-- Billy Corgan goes synth-pop, Craig Wedren MOR, and everyone from Mike Ness to Amy Millan takes a stab at country. But Yorke, a certified pop music visionary, just doesn't truck with the inessential, carving in miniature the same sort of exquisite ice sculpture that Radiohead would stadium-size.

"Black Swan" glides through glassy darkness with exactly the sinister elegance its title implies, churning a simple yet complexly overlapping turbulence in its wake. An eel-slick bass line undulates and percussion spits like steady rain, while a sinuous guitar lead intones a tight pattern of tiny chimes. Yorke sings without reverb, sounds relaxed and terrestrial and beautifully anomic, and says "fuck" a lot without making a big noise about it. Playing over the closing credits of Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, this should make the perfect coda, a final ricochet in the director's existential billiards. [Brian Howe]

Mon: 06-05-06

Regina Spektor: "Fidelity"
genre: pop

At first, "Fidelity" seems to have Spektor diluting her eccentricities to appease the major-label gods, who were generous enough, after all, to deliver Soviet Kitsch. For starters, there's no piano, even though the song must've been written on Spektor's signature instrument. Second, it samples plucked strings for its tidy beat, which is bolstered by some 1990s-era Springsteenian synth washes.

But then the chorus comes around and throws everything else into sharp relief. As a real drumkit kicks in, those plucky beats transform into a quirkily minimalist melody, and her broken syllables on the chorus-- "it breaks my hea-aa-aa-aa-aa-rt"-- are immediately Spektorian, a few seconds' goofiness in a song that finds both hope and heartbreak in self-analysis. [Stephen M. Deusner]

Mon: 06-05-06

Ronnie Spector: "All I Want"
genre: rock

On paper, this sounds mighty: The great Ronnie Spector covering the superlative Amy Rigby song. The execution, however, disappoints mightily. Aside from some of her trademark "whoah-oh"s, which are as usual sublime, Spector doesn't change the original very much at all, even mimicking Rigby's resilient phrasing. Keith Richards' guest guitarwork, meanwhile, sounds subdued and anonymous-- hey, you pulled him away from his busy schedule of falling out of palm trees, why not give him something to do? And while Ronnie invests the lyrics with an emotional authority that undoubtedly comes from experience (someone's betting you'll think of Phil when you hear this), she somehow can't match Rigby's performance, which, ironically, was deeply indebted to the Ronettes. Who saw that coming? [Stephen M. Deusner]