Cracking review for new album in The New York Times:) Invisible System : Street Clan http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/arts/music/cds-from-alison-kra

Cracking review for new album in The New York Times:)
Invisible System : Street Clan

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/arts/music/cds-from-alison-krauss-colin-stetson-and-dennis-coffey.htmlInvisible System

As an aid worker in Ethiopia and Mali, Dan Harper started recording local singers and bands. Then, as a musical project he called Invisible System, he started tinkering — extensively and transformatively — with what he collected, playing guitar, bass and synthesizers and adding collaborators. On Invisible System’s second album, “Street Clan” (Harper Diabate), the African sounds are melded with mean metal riffs, funk bass lines, dance beats, psychedelic guitar jams, dub-style echoes, the righteous declamations of a Jamaican-British reggae singer (Dennis Wint) and more. It’s a latter-day, more chopped up, more aggressive follow-through on the ideas of “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” The roiling results have some of the volatility of the Mars Volta and Jimi Hendrix and the implacability of Lee Scratch Perry. The reggae honors the Rastafarian tenet of a return to Ethiopia, although it sometimes tilts toward cliché. But the Ethiopian singers — Zewditu Tadesse, Tawebe and Mimi — are all grabbers: raspy and passionate, their voices leaping out of the tracks.