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ARTICLE SERVICES   Print this article      Reprint this article     Send as an e-mail     Feedback   RELATED STORIES Interiority Complex Row, row, row your Dragon Boat Rock hard WOMEN GALLERY 1 2 3 4 Next   Zoom    Read Full Story Title: The Squid and the Whale. A smart, hilarious look through the eyes of two young boys at the devastation wrought when divorce hits their Brooklyn bohemian-intellectual household. Zoom    Read Full Story Title: Everything is Illuminated. Elijah Wood’s creepy-freaky eyes have never been creepier or freakier than in Liv Schreiber’s imaginatively realized adaptation of the popular book. Still, in this tale of a young Jewish American man (Woods) who goes to the Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis during World War II, it’s European Alex (Eugene Hutz) and the deranged dog Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. (not a typo) who steal the movie. Zoom    Read Full Story Title: Action. Most modern movies that attempt to puncture Hollywood pretension wind up not winging the place and mindset despite their best intentions. This laugh-out-loud, outrageous, tragically short-lived TV series drew blood. Get this Zoom    Read Full Story Advertisement OTHER STORIES Spy vs spy ARTICLE SERVICES    Sponsored by: INQUIRER   Print this article      Reprint this article     Send as an e-mail     Feedback

Artist: South
Album: Adventures in the Underground Journey to the Stars

FOR a band that’s managed to pop up in just the right places at just the right times, South are incredibly undervalued by the listening public.

Released in 2001, their first album “From Here on In” grew up in great company—debuts from Coldplay, Elbow, and Doves hit the shelves in 2000 —and its Mo’Wax pedigree and James Lavelle production credit put it hungry for a crossover and straight under the noses of an electronic-music crowd riding the last wave of superstar DJ Bedlam.

But the songs didn’t resonate with radio, nor did they translate well to the stage.

The slightly more moody and less programmed “With the Tides” contained a stronger batch of material, but the group’s broad, atypical style again limited their appeal.

Now they’re back with the self-produced “Adventures in the Underground Journey to the Stars,” which, apart from the ridiculous title, is probably their best record yet.

The three-piece has gone back to wielding a healthy number of beats and loops, but stick by their triumphant, almost operatic, style of arranging.

Tracks hop around from drum-and-bass-heavy dance pop (“Shallow”), to handpicked ballads that borrow more from Grant Lee Buffalo than The Stone Roses (“Know Yourself”).

Joel Cadbury’s lyrics can be a bit precious at times, but his coarse, slightly affected whisper (and some slick instrumentation) do a good job masking the purple prose in songs like “Flesh and Bone” and “Pieces of a Dream.”

The fact of the matter is, no matter how much this group evolves and improves, they’ll never blow up the way they should. But given the fickle nature of a listening public that blew up Bloc Party, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.

Artist: Regina Spektor
Album: Begin to Hope

When you’re a piano-plunking pop chanteuse like Regina Spektor, you’d be forgiven for doing only what’s expected of you: running rings around the café circuit in New York, selling out shows in London, and generally seeding the niche that Fiona Apple tiptoed away from, when she ditched producer Jon Brion to see what made Mike Elizondo tick.

But Spektor’s not your ordinary songstress—after all, how many eccentric women with a background in classical piano get asked to go on tour with bands like The Strokes and Kings of Leon?

Those misadventures in the land of shaggy hair and velvet jackets are but some of the new influences in her David Kahne-produced stunner, “Begin to Hope,” and they’re perhaps the easiest to immediately discern.

It’s too easy to attribute Spektor’s bravado to the lingering lighter fluid of a modern rock tour, for this is a record brimming in confidence, as unafraid to journey to the past for a Billie Holiday séance as it is to crash the present with some delightful electronic squiggles.

Title: The Take

For years, Brazil has been the model of where the world might be headed regarding the ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots. This Argentine documentary about how a group of laid-off factory workers seized ownership of their closed-down factory and revolutionized the status quo is a must-see.

Title: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

No need to go into storyline here. It’s all about the DVD extras: conversations with the cast, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, extended action-sequence chapters, and a Hogwarts timeline and game that’s accessible by putting the disc in your PC to stroke your inner geek.

Title: The World

A leisurely paced but enthralling art-house journey into the lives of workers in a Chinese theme park, where the attractions are replicas of world-famous landmarks (the Eiffel Tower). Beneath it all is a soft but persistent critique of globalization.

Artist: Balkan Beat Box
Album: Balkan Beat Box

Balkan Beat Box’s Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan make fresh style and tongue-in-cheek hipness congruent with cultural sensibility.

Through 11 tracks of curiously creative electro-folk, Balkan Beat Box broadens a Jewish context with eccentric wit and wisdom.

Their self-titled debut wraps the melodies of traditional zest around a backbone of hip-hop and rock. Veterans of their creative process, Beat Box’s tracks are reactions to places that the group’s members have called home: New York City, North Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East.

Meticulously constructed, Muskat’s sampled layers over looped backbeats flow in consistent current, complimenting Kaplan’s jazzy horn orchestrations.

Its tracks never fail to deliver, whether spliced with Mediterranean flair and woven with Bulgarian voices a capella, or arranged with furiously danceable beats in dynamic syncopation.

Elemental constituencies of Sly-like funk, Brooklyn grit ’n’ grime, and retro ’80s hip-hop give clues to Beat Box’s elusive identity—their submission to artistic evolution and variation reveals how indefinite and malleable our cultural identities really are.

Muskat and Kaplan revise contemporary realities and labels with modest ease, dubbing their record as much an unwritten cultural adaptation as dance-floor madness.