CD Reviews

Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog

Party Intellectuals | Pi

By TED DROZDOWSKI | June 25, 2008

4.0 Stars

“Out” is in within this NYC avant guitarist’s sonic universe, which, though it’s still expanding, gets covered border to border by his new-kinda rock trio. The Tom Waits and Alison Krauss/Robert Plant band MVP bolts from an elephantine psycho-delic rip through the Doors’ “Break On Through” to the 10-minute soundscape “Digital Handshake” (where Ribot swaps among e-bow textures, dirty keening melodies, and hailstorms of sampled notes) to the ’70s funk echoes of “Todo el Mundo Es Kitsch” and “Pinch” to the campy Eurotrash arrangement of “For Malena” to the ambient “SHSH SHSH.” Humor, melody, and weirdness rule, and that makes Ceramic Dog lighter than both Ribot’s Los Cubanos Postizos Afro-Cuban band and his aggro-noise outfit Shrek, even when his playing — supported by percussionist Ches Smith and bassist Shahzad Ismaily — is impossibly heavy.

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