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Originally published Sunday, August 24, 2008 at 12:00 AM

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CD Reviews: Local and national rock and pop

It's been a busy summer for dropping CDs, with everyone from Lil Wayne to Coldplay to Mariah Carey getting chart hits the past few months...

Seattle Times staff and wire reports

It's been a busy summer for dropping CDs, with everyone from Lil Wayne to Coldplay to Mariah Carey getting chart hits the past few months.

Here are a handful of reviews of local and national recent and about-to-be-released rock and pop albums.

Local acts

The Dead Science, "Villainaire" (Constellation, coming out Sept. 2)

Seattle band the Dead Science's "Villainaire" is equal parts ambitious, masterful and annoying, a singular slice of musical antilogic that must be heard to be believed. It's like Dracula doing jazz-rock fusion.

If there's a more audacious vocal stylist in Seattle, that person can fight frontman Sam Mickens for the crown. His breathy tenor falsetto is augmented with an aggressively exaggerated vibrato, a truly love-it-or-hate-it stamp. Taking on a sinister tone for lines like "Villainaire, Ice Grillionaire / Tonight I fear there's something in the air," he mashes mystery and camp with weird, flamboyant formality.

The tracks are car crashes: Jazz and avant-garde guitar pop get decorated with violin, cello, harp and the horns of local jazz group Orkestar Zirconium — and then there's the vocals. With too many ideas, but never boring, "Villainaire" is also beautiful: The hand-crafted CD packaging and liner notes are first-rate, making it as much a visual prize as sonic oddity (www.myspace.com/thedeadscience).

The Dutchess and the Duke, "She's the Dutchess, He's the Duke" (Hardly Art, released July 8)

From the South Seattle suburbs, guy/girl duo the Dutchess and the Duke (Kimberly Morrison and Jesse Lorentz) present "She's the Dutchess, He's the Duke," a lesson in ripping off — and brilliantly pulling off, with great songs and gritty production values — classic cigarette-and-shades cool from 1960s urban-folk music.

The album is minimalist, largely percussionless acoustic guitar songs, with rhythm in strumming and harmonized vocals. The lyrics are lots of rhymes about disillusionment and love and death, sung detached and with bitter authenticity.

Hardly any contemporary-rock band isn't inspired by Wayfarer-era Bob Dylan and early Rolling Stones, but it's rare one copies their sounds outright. Why? Probably most are afraid of plagiarism (bad) or think those acts, or those acts at those times, are canonized, elevated, untouchable (worse). God bless Morrison and Lorentz for their sacrilege (www.myspace.com/thedutchessandtheduke).

The Moondoggies, "Don't Be a Stranger" (Hardly Art, released Tuesday)

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Fronted by 22-year-old Kevin Murphy, the Moondoggies are stuck in the '70s. And stuck somewhere other than Everett, where they're from. There's a lot of "ain't no" in Murphy's lyrics, and his pronunciation on "Jesus on the Mainline" is "Jee-zus on the main-lahn." When the band warmly harmonizes the refrain "I'll be your hometown" on "Old Hound," it's clear Moondoggie Country is a state of mind.

They are from Everett, though. How else to explain "Vern Fonk" in their MySpace "Influences" list?

"Don't Be a Stranger" is classic down-home rock for your driving, fishing, drinking and dancing pleasure. There's big numbers with belted-out choruses, delicate acoustic songs, a bunch of talk about Jesus, and vocals harmonies all over the place.

The difference between the Moondoggies and all the other bands out trying to sound like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the Band is they show no evidence of "trying on" the '70s. This is the Moondoggies, trendy or not (www.myspace.com/themoondoggies).

Andrew Matson, Seattle Times staff reporter

National releases

Conor Oberst, "Conor Oberst" (Merge, released Aug. 5)

Still wearing his heart on his sleeve at 28, indie songwriting godhead Conor Oberst continues his self-conscious maturation process on his first solo album in 15 years. (For the record, this album is not credited to Bright Eyes, the group Oberst has long been synonymous with, because partner Mike Mogis was busy with other projects.)

On "Conor Oberst," Oberst's songs are as well-crafted and laced with poetic imagery as ever. And his nuevo Americana musical approach is as deeply relaxed as the cover shot of him lying in a hammock would suggest.

He does work himself up a bit, though, on the rollicking boogie woogie "I Don't Want to Die (in a hospital)," one of a handful of tracks, along with "Danny Callahan" and the delicate closer "Milk Thistle," that continue Oberst's obsession with his own mortality.

Dan DeLuca, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Randy Newman, "HarpsandAngels"(Nonesuch,releasedAug.5)

Randy Newman can do saccharin and he can do sour. At his best, though, his songs deliver complex flavors, with a pungent but searching ambivalence. "Harps and Angels," his first album of new songs since "Bad Love" in 1999, presents a mess of conflicting feelings and motives.

Intermittently brilliant, occasionally belligerent, it presents a vision of American identity as sprawling and ultimately as confused as the country itself.

Politics looms large here, as it has for Newman since the Vietnam era. "Laugh and Be Happy" is a gaudy high-stepper addressed to illegal immigrants, while "A Piece of the Pie" is a bitter lament for the increasingly chimerical American dream.

"Living in the richest country in the world," Newman asks, "wouldn't you think you'd have a better life?" The symphonic bigness of the arrangements — fanfares, oompahs, stentorian background vocals — underscores the earnestness and the wryness behind such a question.

Nate Chinen, New York Times News Service

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company

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