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.

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)

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).