Are LCD Soundsystem already losing their edge or are they defining the Zeitgeist? Both, it seems. Over the past three years, LCD producers James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy have spurred lock-hipped hipsters to sweat to their jittery, intrepid disco-punk-funk singles, inspiring more air cowbell than anybody since War. But the hotly tipped debut album, LCD Soundsystem, ain't the revelation expected from these studio savants. They're just trying whatever the hell they want to try, damn the consequences--including lifting a synth riff from Kraftwerk's "Home Computer." The disc starts tantalizingly with "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House," a peppy burst of stripped-down funk rock powered by a coquettish bass line and falsetto "ooh yeah"s, like ESG covering the B-52's--fun, fun, fun. "Too Much Love" further stokes hopes with its subliminal, mantric funk shimmy, insectoid guitar screech, and cowbell pyrotechnics. But conventional songs--including ballads that echo post-Syd Pink Floyd and Before and After Science Eno, and a lame Rapture simulacrum--sap the disc's energy. What ultimately makes LCD fascinating is their ability to squeeze highbrow drones and textures in amid lowbrow contexts like rock raveups and disco-punk jams. LCD are most inspirational when parodying the Fall's repetitious churn and drone or cramming poppers up funk's nose, not aping canonical rock. Despite my quibbles, though, LCD's debut album throbs with excitement and the bonus disc of their singles makes purchase mandatory. DAVE SEGAL

EZEETIGER

EzeeTiger

(KimoSciotic Records)

EzeeTiger is the moniker San Francisco's Anthony Petrovic uses to corral this labyrinth of overdubbed pandemonium. Live, he's a one-man static magnet, tracking and looping loose feedback and functional guitar riffs, drum beats, bass lines, keyboards, and a whole lotta turntable madness--generating a psychotic electro-rock rumble fit for vaporizing any hint of high end in the room.

This eponymous album for KimoSciotic Records (Zeigenbock Kopf, Panther, Crack: We Are Rock) perfectly captures that performance torrent--from the opening salvo of the speaker-blowing "The Tiger Bounce" through the demonic, lo-fi death-metal racket "For the Sweater Kids (For Hightower)." Most of these songs are speedy in delivery and hypnotic in their repetition, oscillating between fuzz-crunching acid rock and boomeranging vocals that stray into warbling orbits across your headphones. The disc is a balance of accelerating noise landslides and more innocent dreamscapes--"Ballad of the Scooter Heshian (S.P.)" is Spiritualized burning in a Lightning Bolt funeral pyre while "White Castle Gestapo (Song for Paik)" sends My Bloody Valentine drone down an industrial-sized drain. "How to Rock… For Red Bennies" is similarly bass-heady, but heavily tongue-in-cheek, with hyper rock yelps and bits of School of Rock-like lyrical lesson plans. How can you refuse a song that ends, "I don't need fucking pants anyways/Fuck off"? Better yet, how can you refuse a record cover showing EzeeTiger dressed as a bear and smoking a cigarette? Impossible. JENNIFER MAERZ

THOMAS FEHLMANN

Lowflow

(Plug Research)

This Swiss-born producer has been releasing music for 25 years, but, defying logic and typical career trajectories, he continues to forge vital music that holds its own with the most creatively acute whippersnappers. Revered for his dubalicious work with the Orb and his cool-headed schaffel techno for Kompakt, Fehlmann here deviates into a highly stylized form of downtempo funk. Now, downtempo funk hasn't been exactly pushing envelopes lately--not since, say, 1997. But in Fehlmann's liver-spotted hands, the genre (or triphop, clickhop, glitchhop, dubhop--they all apply) becomes a thing of unearthly beauty. And for a German dude creeping up on 50, he sure makes some crispy, head-nodding grooves. Ghostly International goldenboy Dabrye puts his distinctively lush, stuttery stamp on three interludes, but this is Fehlmann's show, and the Mensch reaches a new peak on Lowflow, a title that aptly sums up its aquaspheric, bassomatic pressure. DAVE SEGAL

CASS McCOMBS

PREfection

(Monitor/4AD)

1/2
If there's one thing I've learned from all the time I've spent drooling over Cass McCombs' first two Monitor releases (2002's Not the Way and 2003's A), it's that with the right pair of lungs and enough reverb, even the most asinine, antiquated phrases can sound heartfelt. That's not to slight McCombs' songwriting--it's precisely the way he marries near-nonsensical colloquialisms with his own subtle sense of story telling that makes his one of the most effective, nostalgia-drenched voices in contemporary pop. Unfortunately for McCombs' latest, the sure-to-be breakthrough PREfection, he's done a good deal to bury that voice--in synths mostly, but also in the record's syrup-thick production sensibility. When the approach works, it does so masterfully--and PREfection surely contains some of McCombs' best songs to date--but as an effective whole, the record lacks the glimmering, wistful nostalgia that made his previous records so effective. Still, when it hits, PREfection is awe-inspiring. ZAC PENNINGTON