Hip-hop, swing among local releases

Matt Dusk, “Back In Town” (Decca): “I’m the type that has to lose to find out I had it made,” Dusk sings on his latest disc, and he’s speaking from experience. After underwhelming stints at the Las Vegas Hilton and the Golden Nugget, the 27-year-old is back with a svelte new disc.

Dusk’s latest is a mix of old school, smoking jacket jazz and punchy nouveau swing. Dusk doesn’t have an especially big voice, but he makes the most of it. Instead of belting out tunes, he slides and glides around the beat, with touches of programming and the occasional turntable adding a modernist bent to his classic pop. The end result is some not-so-standard sounding standards.

Young Empresarios, “The Introduction” (myspace.com/youngempresarioceo): This grizzled hip-hop duo attempts to supply the ice in Vegas’ veins, reimagining the town as a bullet-riddled Babylon. “Your city ain’t no harder than mine,” they growl on a disc rugged enough to have been chiseled from marble.

The Young Empresarios revisit the familiar gangsta tropes here. Their spare, smoky tunes are filled with broken bones, dying friends and the kind of lusty gals who exist only in libidinous rap cuts. The backdrop to all this bloodletting is just as grim, as these two prefer dank, minimalist beats, paired with buzzing bass lines and spectral synth.

It has all been done before, but like a gun to the face, the menace isn’t dulled by repetition.

The Skooners, “Shut Down Shop” (myspace.com/theskooners): The Skooners are difficult to quantify, because, like a roomful of squirrely kindergartners, they don’t sit still long enough for you to get much of a bead on them.

“It’s so hard, you drift so far,” frontman Blair D. sings at one point, and he could be talking to his bandmates, who swing from hardened soul to moody rock to sticky funk jams from track to track.

Blair, who sings in a breathy bray, frequently steps aside for some slashing piano and drum fills, which render these tunes equally busy and robust. The band doesn’t always seem to know where it’s going, but the ride is its own reward.

Love Pentagon, “Live” (myspace.com/lovepentagon): This live disc sounds like a Friday night out on the town should: loud and rambunctious, with a bunch of drunks hollering in the background. All that’s missing is a fistful of bar olives and some bad pickup lines.

Pointedly raw and off-the-cuff, this album captures Love Pentagon’s ragged charm, with lots of photon laser synth lines and squalls of scratchy guitars driving these ladies’ whirring electro. Here, they veer from chirping, space age disco to touches of Syd Barret-era Pink Floyd atmospherics with the whoosh of a Casio.

It makes sense that it was all recorded in a bar, with the crowd buzzing right along with the keyboards.

Jason Bracelin’s “Sounding Off” column appears on Tuesdays. Contact him at 383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com.