The Twilight Singers, Dimmu Borgir, and Bebop and Destruction

THE TWILIGHT SINGERS
The Twilight Singers Play Blackberry Belle
(One Little Indian)

As frontman of Cincinnati's defunct Afghan Whigs, Greg Dulli broke with college-rock tradition by airing an entire dormitory's worth of dirty sexual laundry over his band's soul-stoked bar-band rumble. With a sneer in his voice and grease in his hair, he made no promises to treat you better than the emotionally barren dickheads littering Huey Lewis shows. On Blackberry Belle, the second album by Dulli's loosely configured Twilight Singers, the man proves he's still got plenty of bad love left to dispense: "There's a riot goin' on inside of me," he warns a potential paramour in "St. Gregory," a queasy rush of acoustic guitar and twinkling piano. "Won't you come inside, see what I see?" Since Dulli knows that dirty deeds come dirt cheap, what makes the trip worth it is how sympathetically he and his enablers wrap their playing around his singing. A current of mewing electric guitars snakes through opener "Martin Eden," whose chorus blasts off when drummer Brian Young lays into his crash cymbal as Dulli describes a river "as dark as night." "Esta Noche" is underpinned by a sample of a ringing telephone that gives Dulli's guarantee of "neverlasting love" a ripple of real-time tension. And in "Teenage Wristband," the latest in a long line of invitations to "stay up all night" and "go for a ride," Dulli gets dramatic counterpoint out of backing vocals by former That Dog violinist Petra Haden. A compelling case for romantic recidivism. MIKAEL WOOD

The Twilight Singers play Chop Suey at 9 p.m. Mon., Dec. 1. $11 adv.

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DIMMU BORGIR
Death Cult Armageddon
(Nuclear Blast)

Your typical black-metal guitar sound is like beer that's half flat and half foam. Riff and rhythm, too tightly corseted by the tonal constraints of shred and crunch to offer any real blood or muscle, do little more than embellish the smoldering ruins of nightscapes like embroidered bats on homemade pillowcases. Solos, often barely audible, are scrawnier still. Clearly, the prince of darkness is a huge lover of keyboards. (Insert Ben Folds and/or epic trance jokes hereplease.) Why else would his most devoted acolytes make so much room for them in the mix? And what other power could possibly have elevated keyboard-centric Dimmu Borgir to the very highest pinnacle of black-metal success? How high is that? Well, Death Cult Armageddon, their 15th album, finds these sincere Satanists mackin' hard enough to engage the Prague Philharmonic's services on a few tracks, notably "Progenies of the Great Apocalypse." The results resemble nothing less than a concise, slightly more diabolical retake of Edvard Grieg's Hall of the Mountain King (a big album track for ELO), with singer Shagraththe dude who put the "dim" in "Dimmu"rasping admirably over demoniac virtuoso keyboardist Mustis' loony pyrotechnics, ex-Cradle of Filth drummer Nick Baker's muscular double-kick blasts, swirling torrents of Technicolor strings, and the usual anemic other stuff. The sextet graze themselves in the collective hoof when they leave the infernal regions for a (thankfully) brief heroic interlude that finds them wandering dangerously close to Night Ranger realm. Fortunately, the song's sap recedes well before the point where it might potentially drive fans to consider turning their crosses right side up. ROD SMITH

Dimmu Borgir play the Showbox with Nevermore, Children of Bodom, and Hypocrisy at 7 p.m. Sun., Nov. 30.

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BEBOP AND DESTRUCTION
Live at the Owl 'n Thistle Volume 1
(Freetone)

B&D were one of the bands that helped knock Seattle jazz off its pricey club pedestal, drag it out of the avant-garde basement, and bring it to the loud, sticky-floored bars where kids who've never heard of Sonny Stitt or Wolfgang Fuchs can get a taste of swinging improvised music. That was nearly a decade ago. The band has since lost one of its critical ingredientsdrummer John Wicksbut has retained alto saxophonist Marc Fendel and bassist Geoff Harper, while adding the excellent keyboardist Ryan Burns and another inventive young drummer, Jose Martinez. Over many weeks, producer Tim Swetonic recorded the band at its regular Tuesday night jam session, culling five tracks for release. The centerpiece of the disc is two extra-long tracks: McCoy's "Blues on the Corner" done in straight-ahead style (with an especially inventive solo from Martinez), and the classic "You Don't Know What Love Is," which offers very nice work from fill-in pianist Kacey Evans. The musicians skillfully traverse a lot of ground, and they know how to bring some pitchers-and-wings energy to sometimes stuffy jazz. But the seams always showinstead of integrating its various sounds, the band tends to shift from one to the next: We're always in the straight swing tune or the jam-band tune but never both at once. As the soloists build, they "kick in" to different sections (Latin, double time, free), in a manner that's crowd pleasing but less interesting than groups that ride the boundaries (a skill that John Wicks has in spades). B&D may have honed their bebop chops over a decade together, but the destruction part has gotten a little lost. MARK D. FEFER

Bebop and Destruction play the Owl 'n Thistle every Tuesday at 10 p.m.