Audio Files

OLLABELLE, OLLABELLE (DMZ/COLUMBIA) Ollabelle, a group of six New York blues and jazz musicians, has been getting together for Sunday night jams to perform gospel music in a Manhattan club as an extracurricular project outside the performers' main gigs.

Turns out, the gospel music was so rewarding, it became the main gig. The group worked up several originals, christened itself after folksinging great Ola Belle Reed, and recorded a rootsy, self-titled debut album.

Ollabelle caught the attention of famed producer T-Bone Burnett (O Brother, Where Art Thou?), who signed the band to his DMZ/Columbia label and released it in March.

Ollabelle features rural, male and female harmony group singing on buoyant traditionals such as Jesus on the Mainline and I'm Willing to Run All the Way. While the right archaic touches are there, Ollabelle isn't afraid to add punchy modern touches on many tunes - 1960s Memphis soul, slide guitar. The result is thrilling. John the Revelator, made famous by Blind Willie Johnson, is given an electric blues workout that's invigorating.

Lead singer Amy Helm talked dad Levon Helm, of the Band, into drumming on the classic gospel gem, Soul of a Man. Covers of both the Carter Family's The Storms Are on the Ocean and the Rolling Stones' I Am Waiting somehow work with a band this imaginative.

The originals are as striking: The swamp-bluesy Get Back Temptation and I Don't Want To Be That Man are sincere testaments to struggles with faith and desire in the modern age. A-

- GINA VIVINETTO, Times pop music critic

DAVID BYRNE, GROWN BACKWARDS (NONESUCH) Former Talking Head-leader and unparalleled art rocker David Byrne returns with a whopper of a new album. Grown Backwards marries Byrne's rhythmic experimentations with stunning, lush string orchestrations and, occasionally, a sense of humor.

On Civilization, Byrne mocks high culture with his naive verse; his playfulness is matched by a zippy accordion. The Other Side of This Life swells with string-soaked glee, thanks to accompaniment by the Tosca Strings.

Things turn funky on Dialog Box, a ditty about society's obsession with technology that combines an erratic drumbeat, Byrne's sing-speak delivery and squiggly trombone.

Byrne also indulges his artier side with forays into opera and more classical territory. And he succeeds. The winning Au Fond du Temple Saint, an aria from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, finds Byrne dueting with cabaret crooner Rufus Wainwright. Listen to their voices mesh in operatic bliss. Wainwright sings in a lower register, his rich voice playing a delicate foil to Byrne's higher part.

Grown Backwards does include a duo of duds - Glad, a staid, two-minute bore and Astronaut, too moody and spacey for its own good - but Byrne's adventurous spirit and innate funkiness keep things nicely afloat. A-

- BRIAN ORLOFF, Times correspondent

PATTI SMITH, TRAMPIN' (COLUMBIA) Patti Smith may don bifocals now, but that doesn't mean the punk-rock luminary is fading in intensity, focus or musical dynamism one bit.

Trampin', Smith's latest album, fuses a fierce political consciousness with an adventurous, rocking musical palette. Things get sizzling immediately with the opening track, Jubilee, where Smith steers listeners toward empowerment. "Be a jubilee," she shrieks in a voice that has not lost any of its craggy power.

Longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye delivers an assaulting guitar riff to match.

Smith's album is politically topical, especially on the smoldering Radio Baghdad, a tirade against the war in Iraq that draws on history as much as it does on Smith's righteous rage. And Gandhi, a paean to the leader who espoused peace, is simply commanding with its repetitive, chantlike style.

Smith mourns her mother on the delicate Mother Rose and gets impressionistic on the smoky-sounding Cartwheels. On the pop front, My Blakean Year features a kicky chorus even as Smith sings of high art. The title track, a spiritual, with Smith backed just by plangent piano, is utterly haunting. A

- B.O.

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