Also this issue:

Soul for Sale
De La Soul finds itself hunting for a new label and walking on sunshine.
-Chris Parker

The Gig
-Nate Chinen

Hope Sandoval
-Paul Burress

Mayflies USA
-Chris Parker

Diana Krall
-A.D. Amorosi

August 22-28, 2002

musicpicks

Mercury Program/ The Six Parts Seven

Murkier than the Florida Everglades they hail from, the Mercury Program trudge through the sludge of neo-avant-rock. Their aesthetic was once rooted in the rounded monotone of liquid rhythm, found-sound and turgid rock (as on their first CD From the Vapor of Gasoline). But their most recent work, All the Suits Began to Fall Off (Tiger Style), sparkles like mica in swamp water. This chatoyancy lends a fool's gold glimmer to an already delicate interplay (the use of vibraphone with traditional rock-instrumentation), heightening each timbre and tone. Ohio brothers Allen and Jay Karpinski's viola-heavy Six Parts Seven, too, had been used to making density an angular art form on In Lines and Patterns and Silence Magnifies Sound. Their lush but precise brittle melodic beauty, muscular rhythm and Durutti Column-like ambience is stripped down to blood-coated bone on the eerie Things Shaped in Passing (Suicide Squeeze). Just a hint of E-Bow/lap steel noise remains of that evil-country-cousin prairie effervescence.

Sun., Aug. 25, 9 p.m., $8, The Khyber, 56 S. Second St., 215-238-5888.

—A.D. Amorosi