Sound Check -- Geoff Carter: Tiptoeing through a garden of musical discs

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays in the Sun. Reach him at carter@ vegas.com

The desk of the music reviewer weeps. It makes a muffled freedom cry from underneath 5 metric tons of press releases, promotional photos, music-themed promotional doodads and promotional CD copies. Today, with this extended-play version of Stereo Dynamics portion of the column, I will contribute to the safety of my workplace by reviewing a few of those discs.

Beginning with a glorious -- and slightly dissonant -- flourish of synthesized strings that simultaneously evokes The Cure and Todd Rundgren, The Flaming Lips' "The Soft Bulletin" (Warner Bros.) may be too smart for its own good. It embodies the kind of mad genius that only music critics and audiophiles can appreciate: I cannot imagine a bunch of demographically-typical 18-year-old males bobbing their heads to the better-living-through-science anthem "Race for the Prize," nor can I imagine my buying-power peer group blasting the haunting "What is the Light" from SUV speakers.

Shame, too -- this is probably the second-smartest pop record to be released this year (just behind Wilco's sublime "Summer Teeth"). So few albums utilize the sonic freedoms recording studios have to offer; "The Soft Bulletin" flaunts them all, from gooey Moog synthesizer bleats to tubular bells. The album's 1970s-style cover is more than an aesthetic choice -- it is a declaration of style. The Flaming Lips want you to put those padded headphones back on and explore your inner space, for the first time since the Me Decade. I rather think you should. Then again, I'm a music critic and audiophile -- what the hell do I know?

At least they've got the much-needed critical consensus. Many critics tend to marginalize or outright ignore The Innocence Mission, a pop-folk trio from Lancaster, Pa. It is usually measured by the standards set by Natalie Merchant-era 10,000 Maniacs or The Sundays, a caveat vocalist Karin Peris unwittingly helped along by guesting on Merchant's solo release "Ophelia."

The Innocence Mission's new record, the glistening "Birds Of My Neighborhood" (Kneeling Elephant/RCA), should set the scribes' clocks straight. Peris' childlike (not, repeat, not childish) vocal burrows into your soul like a cat looking for a place to curl up. Her lyrics often find her deep in poetically deliberate thought; She masterfully begins songs in mid-sentence ("And I would like to cry in the car," begins "You Are The Light") and seemingly lays herself bare more than once ("We both wake up so dry/that no more tears can leave us," laments "July"). Husband Don Peris floats with her, supporting the words with quiet guitar work. "Birds Of My Neighborhood" is all of a piece, beautiful, rich and moving. You can't build something this solid on the shoulders of others.

Unless you're in Carl Cox's league. The British DJ -- recognized within the club culture as one of the world's fastest -- draws liberally from dozens of influences over the course of "Phuture 2000" (Moonshine Music). You could make a parlor game of naming them off: "Hey, that's Parliament ('Dr. Funk')!" "Sounds an awful lot like Tito Puente ('The Latin Theme'), doesn't it?" "That kinda sounds like, um, Cabaret Volitaire ('Deeper Mind')."

Never mind the fact that Cox borrows all this stuff -- the point is that, normally, these artists wouldn't collaborate, or even run into each other on the streets of the same city. Cox, like so many of his peers and equals -- Paul Oakenfold, Fatboy Slim and Sasha, among others -- makes the impossible possible: he brings the entire dance music experience to his turntables, and blends it as easily as folding eggs into cake mix. It's the way that mix rises that makes "Phuture 2000" different, and worth having.

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