****
Polly Jean Harvey's songs don't so much break your heart as pinch nerves you never realized you had. Over the course of an outstanding 12-year career, the unsettling songwriter has only increased the depth of emotion pooling in her music as she stretches her enigmatic aesthetic, and her latest album, Uh Huh Her, is no exception. From the carnal caterwauls of "The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth" ("Your lips are poison/everything is poison/you'll be in the corner crying") and "The Letter" through the Rid of Me rawness of "Who the Fuck?", the dense album hovers in the shadowy corners between falling for someone and falling apart--familiar territory for Harvey yet she still manages to find new sweet spots in almost every song. And also true to Harvey's form, the record is breathlessly sexual in tone--especially the buzzing, naked lust of "It's You"--which should leave her fans weak-kneed in rapture once again. JENNIFER MAERZ

THE FALL

The Real New Fall LP

(Narnack Records)

**
It's not exactly a criticism to say that the new Fall record, which must be their billionth release (the grillionth if you count the unofficial live albums), is a bit of an endurance test. Every Fall record is an endurance test. The problem with this one is, there's no pleasure in it. It's just something to endure. Mark E. Smith is one of the great rock singers, and has achieved this status without saying more than a few intelligible words per album. It's more like psychotic rap than singing; at its most glorious, Smith's vocal delivery feels like speaking in tongues. A phrase will pop out--"I have no time for Western medicine-uh"--and stick in your head like a dada mantra as the simple rock drives relentlessly onward. (Reading the lyrics, if you can find them, offers even greater rewards.) But on The Real New Fall LP, Smith's trademark quotability is largely absent. His voice is buried, as always, but the sounds that surround it are aggressively synthetic, as has been the Fall's wont for the past few years. The result is a record that diehards may dig (gluttons!), but novices could happily avoid. (You'd do way better with the great new double-CD compilation, 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong.) SEAN NELSON

BUTTERFLY BOUCHER

Flutterby

(A&M)

****
Butterfly Boucher is the new Donovan Leitch. Songs like "Don't Point, Don't Scare It" are lilting, cello-hummed, renaissance-fair kettle-boilers that jive with Donovan's trip-the-lights-psychtastic Sunshine Superman--without all the magical witch-queen/sad-princess bullshit. "Drift On" is a forest-elf ballad--by way of Pedro the Lion's David Bazan--that you wouldn't feel silly or guilty bumping at your next indie rocker happy-hour DJ set. The rest is "Mellow Yellow"/"Season of the Witch" pop, upbeat but filled with dark, young-minded yet ambitious existential dialogue that belies the polish of the thing. Although A&M will surely mishandle this lady and not push her where she needs to be pushed, Butterfly remains a damn fine lyricist and composer. And the potential! This is, of course, her first record. NOT TO MENTION the fact that the arty Boucher family has SIX more daughters lined up to make music! ADAM GNADE

DECEPTIKON

Lost Subject

(Merck)

***1/2
As Portland's first Laptop Battle winner, Deceptikon has a winning combination--solid beats, cool sounds, and interesting songwriting. His ability to keep heads bobbing with hiphop-rooted breakbeats and a large palette of sounds helped him win the battle; both elements also make his debut full-length hot. The songs flow together with rhythmic patterns and are full of melodies that can be playful, eerie, and beautiful. The arrangements show a mature restraint by not getting bogged down in too many layers or too much complexity, but they're far from formulaic. This is an exciting debut, especially because Deceptikon can represent it all live, and there's got to be more heat on the way. AARON MILES

ROCKET FROM THE CRYPT

Circa Now! + 4

(Swami)

****
At one time or another, all fans of San Diego's Rocket from the Crypt (and shame on you if that group doesn't include you) have debated which of the band's albums is the best. Clearly, that's Circa Now!, their second release and one created before the stage personas--flashy matching outfits, funny names, expanded horn section--became as big a part of their act as the music. Circa Now! + 4 shows the band back when it was just four guys in jeans creating one of the most hard-rocking, precedent-setting albums that more than 12 years later other acts still struggle to emulate. The best thing about Circa Now! was that it was filled with vitriolic lyrics but catchy rock hooks, making each song sound impossibly upbeat. "Dollar," with its yeah-yeahs, and "Glazed," with its repeated threat "take that" and "everybody smoke pot," made for perfect closers. In the liner notes, singer John Reis admits that the four added songs were the result of thriftiness, and honestly, they aren't the greatest songs, but I doubt any fan of the long-out-of-print original release would give a shit about that. KATHLEEN WILSON

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Fort Worth Teen Scene Vol. 1

Fort Worth Teen Scene Vol. 2

Fort Worth Teen Scene Vol. 3

(Norton)

***
You know, somebody once said, "If it ain't "garage" rock, it ain't music." The way I see it, she was off... 'cause I think, "If it ain't music, it's garage rock." Shit, I gets to twitchin' like a junkie kickin' gets to scritchin' when it comes to hearin' MORE of this kinda heat, especially when it's the real deal... mid-'60s raw TEENAGE action... from Texas! And on FWTS there ain't one track Oxy pads gonna be able to "fix" 'cause shit like this you gotta SHAKE clean! Seriously, imagine a buncha kids tryin' to get bent, and making the hell out of it... the beauty and energy is in their struggles and success. And all three of these collections are packed DEEP! MIKE NIPPER

KID606

Who Still Kill Sound?

(Tigerbeat6)

***
This Kid is more than all right; they're in robust health. Oakland PowerBook gadfly and Tigerbeat6 honcho Kid606 (Miguel Depedro) hasn't met a style he can't warp to his own impish designs. Kid has no qualms about copyright or cultural imperialism; all is fair game for his omnivorous, recontextualizing mind. His new odds-and-ends compendium, Who Still Kill Sound?, rounds up bastardized rave anthems, unfinished remixes, genre homages, and pisstakes--basically, miscellaneous shit too strange for other labels to issue. While ruffneck ragga-jungle burners with Caribbean alpha-male toasting dominate Who Still Kill Sound?, its most memorable piece is "Robitussin Motherfucker (DJ Screw RIP)," a cough-syrup tribute to the deceased Houston producer who slowed hiphop to an eerie crawl that made you think your batteries were dying: Imagine crunk stunned to a stupor. DAVE SEGAL

BLACK DICE

Creature Comforts

(DFA)

****
If the Teletubbies formed a band after accidentally digesting "special" mushrooms, the musical output from those unintelligible, cartoonish happy heads would probably sound something like Black Dice's latest compendium of sound effects, Creature Comforts. For a group that was first described as avatars of scattershot violence--a post-hardcore noise band firing at targets far outside the Brooklyn hipster scene yet getting corralled within its hype ranks--the Dice boys have already mellowed with age. Beaches and Canyons was an ocean of mostly ambient instrumental pleasantry without much roughage, and Comforts lives up to its name (although there are darker moments that sound like a clogged sink choking on giant, watery hairballs). It concentrates disparate commotions into a playful, oddball--yet completely intriguing--mix. On much of the album, the instruments/soundmakers converse in unknown languages all at once, bouncing notes/beats, squeaks, and lulling guitar loops into a buzzing dialogue of original, unusual voices. Listening to the album on headphones is an extra-special trip, as both organic and manufactured sounds feel increasingly dislocated, taking off and landing from all angles, but somehow connecting together to create a record that's more intoxicating every time you listen to it. JENNIFER MAERZ

KINSKI

Don't Climb On and Take the Holy Water

(Strange Attractors Audio House)

***
Kinski - drummer + improvisational freakouts + spontaneous experimentation = Herzog. Except when it's Kinski, like on this release. Don't Climb On and Take the Holy Water bears similarities to guitarist Chris Martin's isolationist/bliss-out/Frippertronic CD as Ampbuzz, This Is My Ampbuzz, and Kinski's split CD with Acid Mothers Temple. Three of the disc's five tracks capture the queasy trepidation in sci-fi flicks when humans take their first steps on a foreign planet, thanks to Kinski's deft feedback-sculpting and disorienting drones. "Bulky Knit Cheerleader Sweater" is a clamorous FX-pedal orgy whose swarming tones recall Fennesz's mighty Instrument EP. Holy Water climaxes on the 29-minute "The Misprint in the Gutenberg Print Shop," a pure LSDification of Kraut-rockin' time/space compression and mind expansion that worships in the Ash Ra Tempel. DAVE SEGAL

**** Bill Clinton *** Chelsea Clinton

** Monica Lewinski * Hillary Clinton