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Every decade has its secret history. Behind the suburban front of the Fifties, beatniks and juvies, horror comics and maryjane laid the foundation for the revolution to come. Behind the New Left and flower power of the Sixties, the Birchers and the Stooges created their antitheses, which would find ultimate expression in Reaganism and punk. This CD is a document of the secret Seventies. Even as the Brits ripped off Mussourgsky and Tolkien, and Yank rockers discovered their inner hick, the Germans chose a far weirder path. Bands such as Faust, Can and Amon Duul created what became known as "Krautrock." A fertile, fevered mix of improvisational skill and studio wizardry, a hybrid of flower child and man-machine, Krautrock took the progressive urge into a realm somewhere between Slumberland and the Volkswagen factory. My fave Krautrock band is Neu! A druggy, dynamic duo (and founding members of Kraftwerk), Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother created a driving, hypnotic sound that influenced such trend-setters as Sonic Youth and Stereolab. Astralwerks has done a great service by re-releasing Neu!'s long out-of-print albums. This, the debut, is a beautiful thing. "Hallo Gallo" is surf music for spacemen; "Negativland," surf music for cyborgs. "Sonderangerbot," five minutes of cymbal distortion, leads into the majestic psychedelia of "Weissensee." Bubbling sounds and the song of synthetic whales wend through "Im Gluck" - indeed, the whole album has an aquatic feel, like tripping in a bathysphere down in the kraken-haunted depths. Neu! sounds as fresh, as pioneering, as mind-boggling as they did thirty years ago. If you dig wigged rock, get all their stuff. NEU! NOW! -Bill Widener
 Paul Oakenfold Travelling Perfecto Travelling, the recent two-disc release from British turntable maestro DJ Paul Oakenfold, holds its ground as a well-produced, well-constructed, and unabashedly bland piece of electronic art. The release, and the genre as a whole, must be called art because it isn't really music. Travelling, like most work in the electronic (throw in techno and all of the other electro-jargon words that describe the new, frenetically-paced dance tunes) genre, is nothing more than a montage of computer sounds and MIDI-esque bass loops. A tapestry woven from the fruits of modern technology - Travelling is computer generated from conception to release. Without a human, or dare one say a "musician," behind the compositions, most of Travelling begins to sound the same - each track dissolving into the next to create a two-hour techno-opus. Yet, in the decaying world or popular modern music, the aforementioned gripe is by no means a mortal sin. Oakenfold's Travelling is fun, mood-elevating background noise - a perfect antidote to the following social maladies: a dull day at work, a slow-moving party or general Monday-blues. As such, Travelling is art, not music. Oakenfold can elevate one's mood in the same way that the colors of a painting can elicit an emotional response. However, there is no denying Oakenfold's digital behind the studio mixer. A master of the electronic medium, he stands paramount to his over-hyped and often cartoonish American contemporaries (reference DJ Skribble and Funk Master Flex). Yet, Oakenfold is still unable to leave his audience with anything memorable. In the end, Oakenfold is unable to overcome the limitations of his chosen field. Travelling is nothing more than background noise; Techno's answer to elevator music. Save your hard-earned money, folks - the two-disc Travelling isn't worth its weight in pennies. -Eric Newman
It would take a hard heart indeed to not consider this as a crossover event. The Blind Boys of Alabama have been singing professionally since 1939, and now these pillars of gospel are finding inspiration in the likes of Exile on Main Street. The four main singers are surrounded by a small ensemble of almost-household-name session players. The songs come not only from Jagger/Richards, but also from Tom Waits and even Ben Harper. After a few listens, it becomes clear that this isn't one of those "let's compromise with the mainstream" affairs. It's more like, "We can show you that the Lord is in most everything." If only they'd consistently kept that attitude, the collection might've been most gratifying in its consistency. Unfortunately, some of the traditional tent-raising numbers feel like holdovers from some other, more by-the-numbers session. The prime example is "Soldier," which gets a stark atmospheric instrumental introduction, only to turn into a soul-shouter that goes on and on and farther away from the "other" arrangement that the intro could've led to. All of the most daring arrangements work. "Amazing Grace" done up to the tune of "House of The Rising Sun" is the most audacious. They somehow also get new mileage out of "Motherless Child" - and aren't there already more versions of that song than the national anthem? The strength of the voices is great throughout. The closing "The Last Time" is such an appropriate tribute to the strength, faith and friendship among these gentleman singers that any listener who deserves to hear this should be able to tolerate the slight whiff of sentimental manipulation. -T.E. Lyons
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NEU! 
The Blind Boys of Alabama