Sound Check — Geoff Carter: Bands ‘shaking and shimmying into the unknown’

Friday, April 14, 2000 | 9:18 a.m.

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

Every single piece of art doesn't have to be definitive. Every painting doesn't have to be a Van Gogh; every film doesn't have to be "Citizen Kane." "Good," as a quantitative measure, is sufficient; we love David Hockney and "The Sixth Sense" not because they redefined their respective genres -- maybe they did, maybe they didn't -- but because they're good. Think how tedious lightning would become if it struck every single day.

Two new trip-hop releases, Bowery Electric's "Lushlife" and Supreme Beings of Leisure's self-titled debut, do not break new ground with their arrival. The former travels the path of Portishead and Hooverphonic, while the latter trails Morcheeba and Sneaker Pimps. We know the sound; we know the attitude. We've heard many of their samples and sonic treatments before, many of them in the same musical context as presented by these discs.

We've also seen three "Star Wars" follow-ups and countless films that think they're "Star Wars" sequels. Every other television show is about cops, lawyers and/or doctors. You follow?

"Lushlife" is Bowery Electric's fourth album. Its quality is such that one can't help but wonder where the band has hidden out since 1995, and why it took it five years to fire this rocket out of Manhattan. Everything about "Lushlife" feels like a debut: its audacity, raw technical punch, and tacit insistence that You've Never Heard Anything Like This Before.

You have, and you will again. That's not to say that most of the tracks here aren't terrific. "Lushlife" does what trip hop, at its best, has always done -- taken the current beats and electronic equipment so new it still has factory tags on it, and made music that's soulful, sensual and eccentric enough to place it in the swank '60s, alongside Esquivel, John Barry, Burt Bacharach and Serge Gainsbourg.

That's not to say that any of those artists could have made this music. The Garbage-like "Freedom Fighter," with its near-subliminal guitar drone, ambling drum loop and no-government politics ("A gift from a foreign land / comin' atcha from over the sand / that's what the bellicose do"), is very much a product of its time. Ditto the sexy-scary "Floating World" and slinky title track; Martha Schwedener's breathy vocal is warm enough, but too detached to be anything but the siren call of the future.

Bowery Electric is a very good armchair-with-headphones record, but won't leave the house. Supreme Beings of Leisure isn't half the homebody -- from its second song, the hip-shaker "Golddigger" onward, "Supreme Beings of Leisure" is more fun and more suited to a party background. Not coincidentally, it's much less rich and contemplative. Who's got time for that stuff, when there's a party going on somewhere?

There's nothing wrong with that way of thinking, but for one thing: Supreme Beings of Leisure don't always believe it. More often than not, the group unnecessarily tries to prove it's got something more ponderous on its mind besides flirting, dancing and that other, horizontal boogie-boogie. It can be an unintentionally amusing effort, particularly in "Last Girl on Earth," in which vocalist Geri Soriano tries to get a post-apocalyptic date.

At the opposite end, there's "Nothin' Like Tomorrow," which invokes some of the dopiest imagery outside of a Spinal Tap number ("time is such a funny thing / it pulls you on like Silly String") and makes a deliberately adolescent rhyme of "pain and sorrow" with "beg and borrow." Not to belittle Soriano's talents -- she's credited with the melodies, as well as the lyrics -- but "Supreme Beings of Leisure" holds up better if you treat her vocals as part of an elastic, pulsing wall of sound.

Could trip hop have existed alongside the free jazz and space-age pop music of the '60s? Not really. But it's nice to be reminded, every now and again, that it's on the same road. If Serge Gainsbourg or Ennio Morricone had the eyes then to see ahead to now, they'd be pleased to see Supreme Beings of Leisure and Bowery Electric shaking and shimmying into the unknown. "Good stuff," they'd say.

That is, if Portishead and Morcheeba don't happen to be in the way.