New CDs: Yeahs, Ghostface

Yeah Yeah Yeahs Show Your Bones (Interscope)

This is an underground-purist alert: "Gold Lion," the opening track on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' second album, Show Your Bones, is named after an advertising award. Last year, an Adidas television spot featuring the original composition "Hello Tomorrow," written by Show Your Bones co-producer Sam Spiegel, a.k.a. Squeak E. Clean, with vocals by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O, took the Gold Prize for Best Use of Music at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival in France.

"Gold Lion" itself is not about selling out or buying in. The song -- a strident, initially acoustic march that suggests Beck conducting the Beta Band, until guitarist Nick Zinner stomps on his distortion pedal and drummer Brian Chase frees his inner Dave Grohl -- is mostly about getting close. "Tell me what you saw," Karen O sings with sizzling impatience, "I'll tell you what to . . ." -- at which point her voice becomes a hot, spiked yelp, the obvious sound of a trip to the moon and back. But the song's title is a sly admission of ambition and self-possession, a declaration of how far this New York neogarage trio intends to go in this game. Zinner, Chase and Karen O left indie-rock piety behind when they signed to Interscope. But Show Your Bones is their true show of brass.

This album is, above all, a textural triumph, a quantum bounce from the brittle jitter and insect-chatter fuzz of the band's 2001 Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP and 2003's full-length Fever to Tell. It's as if the Velvet Underground had gone from the black-crusted minimalism of their first album right to the pop bloom of their fourth, Loaded. "Fancy" starts with guest keyboards by Money Mark, doing his impression of Ray Manzarek on the Doors' Strange Days, while Chase invokes the thunder-tabla math of Led Zeppelin's "Four Sticks." In "Way Out," Zinner -- whose guitar architecture is outstanding throughout the album -- shoves and charges with stacked power chords and basement bass lines, compounding Karen O's frustration: "The face ain't making what the mouth needs." When the song's bridge blows up like Bug-time Dinosaur Jr., Karen O's distrust and anxiety erupt with it. "When you mean it on the inside," she signs off at the end, "you still can't get to me." Rough translation: Giving is a bitch in a world where everybody wants, all the time.

Lyrically, Karen O makes sense mostly in spurts. On paper, her run-on flood of disjointed metaphors and interrupted thoughts makes Bones' eleven songs read like BlackBerry mail from William Burroughs. Consider this mouthful from "Honey Bear": "What, what did you do to your back/Kept soft thoughts cut lips carry pin back/Junk jump off too much talk/Old hope breeds/Cold needs/Undress cold keys." But where there is clarity, Karen O slices through with dagger-blade warning ("She'll make you sweat in the water" -- "Phenomena") and authority ("What's in the trash bag/Just another part of you" -- "Fancy"). My favorite lines are actually the first two in "Honey Bear": "Turn yourself around/You weren't invited," a sharp slap in the face in which Zinner doubles Karen O's saucy squeal on guitar before the whole thing swerves into a metallic goose step. I would have opened Bones with "Honey Bear," just for the mixed message: Here's our album. Now fuck off.

The one thing missing from Show Your Bones is the electrifying sight of Karen O's singing: the Tina Turner body language and steely Chrissie Hynde command that come with her Siouxsie Sioux-like whoop onstage. You have to pay at the box office for that. But in the last two songs here, she brings an urgency that deserves its own golden lion. "Warrior" begins with what seems like Karen O gasping for air, singing in exhausted tiptoe step with Zinner's acoustic-blues picking. Then the song shoots into guitar-choir time, and she accelerates likewise -- "Trouble at home, travel away" -- as if she's jumping from bad news into the unknown with deep, fearless breaths.

The confidence is even bigger in "Turn Into" -- the next word in the lyric being "hope." "I know what I know," Karen O sings repeatedly over Zinner's flamencolike strum and Chase's hardy gallop. (Extra-nice touch: the electro-squiggles that sound like they fell in from Del Shannon's "Runaway.") There is no mistaking the sexuality in her announcement and the pride that comes with it. But the momentum in the music is purely the joy of moving forward, and in control. That's the real lesson here, from "Gold Lion" on. It's not enough to show your bones. Shake 'em around, make 'em go somewhere, anywhere. Otherwise, they just go to waste. (DAVID FRICKE)

Ghostface Killah Fishscale (Def Jam)

Big ups to the metric system! Ghostface Killah is the Wu-Tang Clan's most advanced lyrical scientist, and like scientists everywhere he understands the importance of measuring things accurately. On "Kilo" -- a standout track from a hot new disc that recalls Ghost's killer Ironman and Supreme Clientele albums -- the sweet female vocal hook helpfully points out that "A kilo is a thousand grams/Easy to remember." Thanks! It's a classic Wu coke track, beginning with Ghost ordering a kid to run to the store for some baggies and "a cranberry Snapple" and punctuated throughout with the sound of a razor blade on a mirror. The album's grimy, sample-fueled production -- by Just Blaze, Pete Rock, MF Doom and the late J Dilla -- comes off as an inspired homage to Wu mastermind RZA; Ghostface's emotionally charged stream-of-consciousness flow is as off-the-wall and amazing as it's ever been. Listen for the tough-as-nails mix-tape hit "Be Easy" ("Tell your crew to be easy/Niggas run around with the fake frown/Sell 'em on eBay"), the amped-up Wu reunion "9 Milli Bros" and the jilted-lover ballad "Back Like That," featuring labelmate and rising star Ne-Yo. "Fishscale" is apparently slang for uncut coke -- and the perfect title for an ambitious disc with almost no filler. (JONATHAN RINGEN)

Fats Domino Alive and Kickin' (tipitinasfoundation.org)

Champion Jack Dupree returned to New Orleans to cut inspired music before he died at eighty-two, and the entire city outdid itself post-Katrina on Nonesuch's Our New Orleans 2005 compilation. But it's Fats Domino's devotion to music, not his nearness to tragedy, that infuses this unexpectedly winsome old-man's album. The beloved Fifties hitmaker, now seventy-eight, had recorded its thirteen tracks by 2000. Always a model of pop economy like Allen Toussaint rather than an eccentric skyrocket like Professor Longhair, he pares down further here: The extremely fetching piano parts on "I'll Be All Right" and "One Step At a Time" could be played with one or two fingers. And the two assured covers -- the Bobby Charles R&B, the Jimmie Davis country -- don't overshadow Domino's originals, many of which play as prophetic love songs to his hometown. Alive and Kickin'. The twenty dollars this will cost you at tipitinasfoundation.org can help make such optimism a reality. (ROBERT CHRISTGAU)

Mogwai Mr. Beast (Matador)

Guitar-wielding Glaswegian five-piece Mogwai have long delighted in the seeming contradiction of playing somber, go-deaf-to-this noise rock while peddling bitingly funny slogancentric T-shirts (BLUR ARE SHITE, proclaimed a Brit-pop-era classic). These twin sensibilities come together in the humorous but revealing name Castle of Doom, the Glasgow home base where they recorded studio album number five. With its plodding tempo, slow-woven guitars, melancholy piano chords and moments of crushing loudness, "Friend of the Night" is representative of much of the album, but Mr. Beast's best bits are those that dare to be different. "Acid Food" combines a rudimentary drum-machine beat and pedal steel guitar to sound like the Jesus and Mary Chain way out West, and the precious elegy "I Chose Horses" features a vocal incantation from Tetsuya Fukagawa of Japanese hardcore band Envy. This sturdy Beast is the ideal steed for your next epic trek to Mordor. (PETER RELIC)

James Hunter People Gonna Talk (Go/Rounder)

Colchester, England, native James Hunter has long been championed by no less an R&B gatekeeper than Van Morrison, and one listen to these fourteen Hunter-penned gems will incite a rush to second that endorsement. Bits of Van the Man and Sam Cooke can be heard in the aching grain of Hunter's voice, but his clearest antecedent is Charlie Rich, the Sun Records singer whose late-Fifties/early-Sixties sides hit the sweet spot where country, soul and rock & roll come together. People Gonna Talk was produced by Liam Watson at Toe Rag (the strictly vintage-gear London studio that birthed the White Stripes' Elephant), and its laid-back title track combines a reggae rhythm and pizzicato strings for something timeless yet fresh. The double-saxophone attack of tenor man Damian Hand and baritone Lee Badau swings hard on "Tell Her for Me," and "'Til Your Fool Comes Home" is a wry warning against philandering where Hunter's twangy guitar comes down like the lash. Ten years after his debut long-player, Believe What I Say, came out in the U.K., Hunter's first album to see stateside release is a treat not to miss. (PETER RELIC)

Hard-Fi Stars of CCTV (Atlantic)

When Hard-Fi claim they're "making movies out on the street," they mean it: They're singing about security cameras. This is petty-criminal music for bored teenagers stuck in a nowhere U.K. town and ready for action. Hard-Fi come from Staines, the same British city where Ali G claims to reside, which gives you a good idea of why they're so desperate to get out. Their Clash-inspired punk funk bites music ideas from the Specials and the Happy Mondays, but singer Richard Archer gets his songs from street life, dead-end jobs, run-ins with the law. "Cash Machine" and "Living for the Weekend" are chant-along rants about killing yourself all week to get deeper in debt. In "Stars of CCTV," Hard-Fi grab the loot and strike a pose for the surveillance cam, because it's the only eye in town that doesn't ignore them. It's the best shoplifting anthem since Jane's Addiction's "Been Caught Stealing." (ROB SHEFFIELD)

Various Artists Dave Chappelle's Block Party (Geffen )

This soundtrack to Dave Chappelle's documentary about a 2004 concert in Brooklyn plays like a greatest-hits of neosoul and mama-friendly hip-hop from the past decade, with open-armed performances from luminaries like Common, Mos Def and Erykah Badu. Even with snippets of Chappelle's recruitment phone calls to the artists tacked onto each cut, the disc feels short at only twelve tracks, but the execution is mostly solid: On "Golden," Jill Scott breezes through elastic croons, jazzy scats and poetry-slam wisdom over warm funk from a crack live band, and Dead Prez rhyme with brawny command and studio clarity on the opening "Hip-Hop." Compared with the film's offhandedly captivating mix of music, behind-the-scenes footage and comedy bits, the CD feels too polite -- it could have used more block-rocking moments like "Boom," on which the Roots work up some urban-jungle mayhem with huge assists from Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)