*** Bows

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(Too Pure/Beggars Banquet)

In the past, Luke Sutherland, former ringleader of the avant folk-rock band Long Fin Killie, demonstrated his heterogeneous nature with songs that resembled punkified Olde World hootenannies -- imagine Can covering the Waterboys. Of course, as a black, Scottish, multi-instrumental, folk-inflected, post-rocking novelist with queer sensibilities, Sutherland doesn't have to go out of his way to show he's unique.

Now working under the Bows moniker, he's dropped LFK's dulcimers in favor of samplers and breakbeats. With help from home-town Glasgow comrades like a member of Mogwai, he fashions Bows into a post-electronica orchestra that brings to mind Tricky with a heart. Sutherland's nicotine-stoked whisper even recalls Tricky's suffocating drawl. "Britannica" is emblematic of Bows' multi-hyphenated grandeur -- drum 'n' bass syncopations and Bernard Hermann violins punctuate the emotional vertigo of his lyrics. "Sleepyhead" blends electric-piano fuzz and 4 Hero-style junglism. And "King Deluxe," the disc's masterpiece, is accented by funereal tom-toms and surprisingly tender breakbeat flourishes, and buffered by strings and Benedictine chanting.

-- Patrick Bryant