The Review staffers rate their CDs out of 5 stars:

Scenes From the Next

JV

Number of Stars: ***

Oberlin campus bands are generally deemed "successful" when they graduate from house parties and the bowels of Harkness kitchen and on into the 'Sco. If they're really good, they might even score a gig all the way past the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. And once in a blue moon, Oberlin bands actually venture into the real indie rock world and go on to play shows outside of the BuckEye State.

Scenes From the Next, composed of seniors Tyler Kord and Jesse Woghin, fifth-year Nate Cavalieri and junior Ben Arenburg, has passed the first two hurdles. Of course, the natural next step is JV, the band's introduction to the catalogued music world, officially released today. Recorded, mixed and mastered entirely by Oberlin affiliates, JV sports eye-catching aesthetics and an impressive 44 minutes of music. Treat the record as just another release from your typical up-and-coming dual-guitar Boy Band, and it's good enough to compete with the rest of the label-owned market. Treat it as just another release from your cesspool of Oberlin indie rock bands, and Scenes From the Next no longer sound typical; they're a step ahead.

While the occasional pre-pubescent wail seeps through the scratching and sheathing of chords, Scenes manage to pull off a fairly well-read familiarity with their genre, despite their short 54-week stint as a band. Slower ballads like "The Locking Method" and the instrumental "Cold #3" boast good melodic part writing, while "Sanders Vs. Walsh" moves the record forward with a catchy percussive intro and solid harmonizing in the chorus. The album doesn't flow all that well from track to track, save for the obviously intentional bleeds between selected songs, but this isn't necessarily a major flaw in the record. Instead of beating one style of song writing with a stick, the band has pulled from various aspects of their influences to round out their debut. And it works; JV reads like an anthology of Scenes From the Next's progress so far.

- Lauren Viera

to venus and back

Tori Amos

Number of Stars: ***

This is the album that wasn't supposed to happen. At the end of the massive "Plugged" tour in the winter of 1998, Tori Amos and her band were exhausted. At the time, Amos wanted to take some time off, try to have a kid (after the miscarriage that prompted many of the songs on her last album, from the choirgirl hotel) and then take an extended vacation from the record industry. Her crack crew of techies had been religiously recording every show for a stopgap live album, to be bundled with a disc of b-sides and slated for release this Christmas.

Then something changed.

Reports began leaking out that Amos, who had ventured into the studio to record a few new songs for the b-sides disc, had become suddenly prolific and produced an entire new album. The two-disc set expanded to three, then shrunk back down to two as the new album was confirmed and the b-sides were scrapped. Thus, to venus and back, the new Tori Amos album, arrives just a scant year after the last. Currently on tour with Alanis Morissette (after claiming that the "Plugged" tour would be her last for some time, prompting fans to make all kinds of sacrifices to see her while they could), the new album was released on Tuesday.

The problem facing any new Amos album is that it has to live up to the standards of two near-perfect outings: Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink. Further complicating matters is the divergence in style Amos has affected from her early work; while her mind-blowing piano work seemed reasonably comfortable on Boys for Pele and slightly out-of-place on the band-oriented choirgirl, it seems to be huddled in a corner somewhere, drinking whiskey and pining for the good old days on venus. So are many fans, who resent the recent mainstream turn Amos seems to have taken - at least stylistically, because her lyrics have gotten, if anything, more obscure. This turn is exemplified by the shrewdly marketed Morissette tour package. Many fans saw this tour as a betrayal and came to the new disc expecting to be disappointed.

I'll be honest: I'm one of those.

I went to eight shows in three different countries on the last tour, and the songs I always disliked most on previous albums ("China", "Cornflake Girl", "God") were the ones picked as singles. They were also the kind of songs she had chosen to emulate on choirgirl - namely, midtempo techno/tribal natterings and sappy, AOR-ready piano droolings far removed from the brilliance and fury of songs of old like "Winter" and "Icicle."

It was worrisome, as good as an album as choirgirl was, that this might be the direction Amos was set on, a harbinger of things to come. After hearing some pre-release tracks, it seemed pretty clear that this trend was to continue on venus. In fact, the first two singles off the record were a tribal ("Bliss") and an AOR ("1000 Oceans"), leaving little doubt. Amos even admitted that she basically mucked around with a computer until songs popped out, which is a bit different from her old practice of improvising on the piano.

So what's the verdict? Well, venus is no Pink, but it's worth it. After all, any album whose first line is "Father, I killed my monkey" has to have some redeeming qualities, and indeed, venus does. The second track, probably the standout, is called "juarez" and features amazing programming, amazing playing and amazing lyrics, chronicling a series of rapes from the perspective of a desert. It's an encouraging sign that maybe Tori just needs to settle into this new form a bit. The two major piano ballads come at the end, and the first ("spring haze") is actually pretty good, almost vintage-form. "1000 Oceans," though, is crap, plain and simple.

In between is a group of songs not as outstanding or passionate as I would have liked, but good nevertheless. The sampler-thump gets a bit tiresome after a while, but it's nicely broken up by infusions of the band. Comparisons reign: "glory of the 80's" is "Tear in Your Hand" with better lyrics, "suede" is a less harsh "iieee" and "riot proof" plays off the live version of "God." Overall, it's refreshing to hear the drum loop lead-ins we expect to become Orb-ish trance workouts overlaid with more melodic piano or synth lines. After a while, though, you begin to wish that the backing would just drop out and let the piano speak for itself, as any Tori fan knows it can. You begin to wonder what - and why - she's hiding.

As for the live album, suffice it to say it's brilliant. If you missed the tour, you'll want to get this to hear the massively reworked versions of "Precious Things", "Cornflake Girl" and "Waitress." If you went to the shows, then you know why you have to have it. Amos and the boys have done amazing things with these previously familiar tracks, and as anyone will tell you, a live Tori show is an experience not to be missed. It's recreated faithfully here, in the same general order featured on the "Plugged" tour. The purchase price of the album is almost worth it just for this, especially after hearing the quality (wow!) as it compares to the usual bootleg being circulated.

All in all, it's probably a moot point; at the Co-op Bookstore, the cashier said "about 50" people had already bought the album when I went to get it on the release date. Hell, I got it, and I didn't even like most of the tracks I heard beforehand. If you're a Tori Amos fan, you'll pick this up regardless, because that's the kind of creature we are. And maybe we'll get disillusioned gradually, or maybe we won't. But for now, to venus and back is still worth getting.

- Michael Barthel

Premiers Symptomes

Air

Hoping to establish a strong fan base in the United States after the surprise success of their 1998 debut, Moon Safari, Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin of the French band Air reached into their past to find the material that would comprise their next American release. The result? Premiers Symptomes, a remarkable but previously obscure collection of singles that was originally released in early 1996 but was re-released on Sept. 14 in the wake of the band's latest world tour.

Although Premiers Symptomes was recorded nearly five years ago, the seven tracks assembled on it seem to have hardly aged a day. The album immediately draws listeners in with the slow, seductive "Modular Mix," a dreamy piece that fuses acid jazz riffs with classical music and subtle electronic effects. "Les Professionals" continues in this vein, layering its pretty acoustic and electric guitars over the sounds of distant horns and a smooth, irresistible synth melody; the results are as haunting as they are hypnotic, providing a nice blueprint for "All I Need," the hit single from Moon Safari. The highlight of the album, though, is clearly its centerpiece, the stunning "J'ai Dormi Sous L'eau." With its spacey effects and its soft, mesmerizing piano riffs, "L'eau" combines the best qualities of Safari songs like "All I Need," "La Femme D'Argent" and "Kelly, Watch the Stars" into one beautiful instrumental that comes as close to perfection as any song could.

Premiers Symptomes closes with "Le Soleil est Pres de Moi," "Californie" and "Le Soleil est Pres de Moi (Brake On Mix)," a musical trilogy that, according to the band's website, strives to capture the emotions that accompany the transition from night into day. (Normally, it would be difficult to stomach such pretentious dribble, but Dunckel and Godin have always mixed their music with healthy doses of cheese, so they can be excused.) "Le Soleil" begins with lazy synthesizers that lull listeners into a blissful trance. That momentary calm is soon dispelled, however, by "Brake On," an all-out, bass-heavy attack that moves with more energy than almost any other track on the album. Needless to say, the trilogy falls short of matching the beauty and intensity of "L'eau," but it remains a fitting conclusion to a brilliant record.

In retrospect, it should come as little surprise that the recording of Premiers Symptomes preceded the making of Moon Safari by two years. Symptomes, after all, is a less conventional (and significantly less produced) album of innovative instrumentals, stripped of the luscious but sometimes intrusive Beth Hirsch vocals that accompanied radio-friendly Safari songs like "All I Need" and "You Make It Easy." But with Symptomes, Godin and Dunckel have raised the ante, elevating their unique blend of seductive pop, raunchy funk and smooth electronica to new levels.

Indeed, they do not simply provide fans with a satisfying follow-up to their impressive debut; they actually manage to improve on that debut, wringing musical gold out of a computer and a couple of old Casios. And though Premiers Symptomes is a remarkable album by any standards, it barely whets the appetites of understandably greedy fans who crave the true follow-up to Moon Safari. They have seen the past; now, they can only anxiously await the future.

- Rossiter Drake