As fall turns to winter, the Seattle area music scene is firing on all cylinders. From a wealth of recent releases, I reviewed two albums and three EPs. My reviews are below.

The Seattle Times is also running an article about the best box sets of 2010. See that here.

"Roll With the Winners," La (2010, self-released at la206.bandcamp.com)

"Intro" by La

"Roll With the Winners" is a portrait of the rapper as a boxer, with Seattle man La (abbreviated from Language Arts) throwing combo after combo. His delivery creates a persona — deadpan tough guy, syllables spat out.

On opening track "Intro" he kicks down the door over heavy horns, snarling answers to questions nobody asked: "I'll tell you what the hell is the deal / You want to summarize my music in two words? / Intelligent, real." In the same song, with the same tone of voice, he drops small, hopeless asides about people he knows: "Most [of] my old associates are broke or smoking opiates / locked up, shot down, acting inappropriate."

In "Carry On," some of those dark rhymes are about himself, and the internal poetry becomes furiously dense, a flurry of body blows: "We carry the ratchet before we bury the hatchet / Watch mags flash, burn each other to ashes / Look how fast we dash from bassinets to caskets."

"Roll With the Winners" is a little uneven, because sometimes the poetic focus becomes strictly phonetic, and Language Arts gets off-topic or forces a punchline that doesn't really make sense. Also, something in the mixing or mastering makes the album pop on home speakers, but sound flat in a car. On the bright side, the album-length production by Blu-Ray is good, built from orchestral samples and live keys for a smooth, organic feel, and Language Arts' syllable clusters are often thrilling.

"Cold Jungle," Various Artists (2010, Cairo)

"Tribal Nap" by M. Women

Tough to find a more vital Seattle album in 2010 than "Cold Jungle," which compiles tracks by guitar- and synthesizer-based acts who congregate at Cairo, the tiny Capitol Hill retail space that doubles as a silk-screening studio and triples as a performance venue.

The Cairo scene represented on "Cold Jungle" focuses on experimental music that prioritizes groove and mood over formal songwriting, and that's enough of a theme to make a cohesive album. The mood sure does swing, though.

M. Women's "Tribal Nap" sounds menacing with a gravel bass hum and brutal, simple drums. By contrast, USF's "Lunar Halo" couldn't sound happier, as pastel clouds and fake steel drums swirl its digi-clack beat. Could there be two more different songs than Big Spider's Back's pulsing breakbeat epic, "Pyramids at Night," and Love Tan's static-drenched pop punk "Fuzzy Grave"? But they do have something in common. They're all about momentum.

Each "Cold Jungle" song seems in tune to a primordial spirit. Mongrel Blood's "Oh Sister" channels down-to-the-river industrial blues. Flexions' "Half Pint Shuffle" is martial dub that sounds like it's submerged in some parts, full of shadows in others. Secret Colors' "Cruiser" is ambient, mostly made of guitars that sound like wind chimes.

"Number Two," Butts (2010, GGNZLA Records)

"Taco City USA" by Butts

When everything around you seems pumped up with phony importance, that's the right time to listen to Butts. The Seattle punk duo's sophomorically titled sophomore EP "Number Two" is all about deflating the idea of cool. Set to four-chord guitar riffs and caffeinated drums, it's funny, sad and after a few minutes, over.

Opening track "Wiggle Drip" is a 17-second burst that asks, "When you're in the bathroom and you ain't got no toilet paper, what you gonna do about it?" Butts takes a trip inside the mind on track two and finds another dead-end. "Anxious" starts with singer/guitarist Rachel Ratner yelling about how awful she feels: "I hate my job, I hate my life, I'm underpaid, I'm so afraid." Then the song turns into a skit, with drummer Shannon Perry trying to calm Ratner down, talking and shout-singing about how Ratner needs to chill out. The exchange is a little bit radio theater, a little bit rock'n'roll, and captures the mental loops of a panic attack, how they feed on thinking about thinking, destructively encouraging further analysis.

"Good News" zips along to single-string hook, while Ratner and Perry sing about trying and failing to find any good news on TV. "Taco City USA" recalls a summer spent swimming at Madison beach and eating at the Central District taco truck on 23rd and Union. "Alcohol" shows up in rerecorded form; originally on Butts' debut self-titled EP, also released this year, now it has a sequel called "Hungover."

After listening to Number Two, what can you say? Its been real.

"Transitions," THEESatisfaction (2010, self-released at theesatisfaction.bandcamp.com)

"Foliage" by THEESatisfaction

Seasonal references are a theme in THEESatisfaction's music, so the "Transitions" title might have something to do with leaves changing colors. But change is nothing new for the Seattle girlfriend jazz-rap duo. THEESatisfaction has been all about blurring social and musical traditions since day one. This nine-song EP further develops Catherine Harris-White and Stasia Irons' unique brand of homemade hypnotism.

Single "Do You Have Time" is about love and marijuana. As engrossing as Harris-White's hummable melody is, the song reinforces a disorienting edge with its sample-collage choir of disembodied voices.

"Foliage" brings back the naturalist-psychedelic tics from early song and same-named album "Snow Motion "(2008). But instead of tripping out on the death of a loved one in the middle of Seattle Snowpacalypse '08/'09 (which is what "Snow Motion" was about) "Foliage" is about getting rained on in the fall months. Harris-White feels a wonderful sensation as water washes over her. With a calming keyboard loop and pitter-patter drumbeat in the background, Irons' internal call-and-response onomatopoeia describes walking on branches — "feet, crunch, feet, crunch" — until the forest becomes the rhythm — "beat, crunch, beat, crunch."

"Nphared October," DJ Nphared (2010, self-released at npharedoctober.com)

"Red October" by DJ Nphared (feat. Sol)

Redmond DJ Nphared (pronounced infrared) is primarily known in the Seattle area hiphop scene in a supporting role, standing behind rappers on stage as a concert DJ. But he's always been a composer of songs. With two artistic breakthroughs this year as a producer — summer anthem "Coronas on Madrona" for Seattle group The Physics, and now the four-song Nphared "October" EP, featuring local rappers — it's time to take him more seriously.

On two songs, Nphared gets atmospheric mileage out of sampled melodic loops. The keys on "Air Max Em" (which features rapper Grynch) could soundtrack Mister Rogers entering the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The electric guitar arpeggios on "Lyrical Gangbang 2010" (featuring rappers The Good Sin, Fatal Lucciauno and Dice) are spiky, constantly escalating the situation.

"Red October" is the EP standout and belongs to twenty-one-year-old UW student/rapper Sol, who takes up the whole song with one rhapsodic verse that never pauses and never gets boring. It wouldn't be as easy to appreciate Sol's performance without Nphared's simmering church-organ notes propping the raps like a pillow, background music in the best sense.