Charles Mudede on D.Black:

D.Black, Dyme Def, They Live!, Darrius Willrich, DJ Vitamin D, Spaceman

(Crocodile) Three years later, D.Black has returned with an album, Ali'Yah, that is the day to The Cause & Effect's night. Whereas the old record had national ambitions, the new record is aimed at the local. The first looked outside; the new one looks inside. The first was mostly about crass materialism; the new one is mostly about the soul. The first had the hypercapitalism of Jay-Z as its inspiration; the new one is inspired by the mysticisms of Common. Even the two titles express a clear rupture: The Cause & Effect is empirical; Ali'Yah is paradisiacal.

In Up & Coming:

Frightened Rabbit, the Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks

(Neumos) You could sell me just about any old act with a Scottish accent, so much the better if they're brooding and miserable, alternately mewling meek and bombastically anthemic. So Frightened Rabbit, the Selkirk, Scotland, act formed by brothers Scott and Grant Hutchison, are kind of a big "no duh" in my book. Scott, who began the band as an acoustic solo project, sings with the kind of broken but tuneful wail that armchair medics like myself like to describe as "wounded." The band's 2008 album, The Midnight Organ Fight, is full of fast-sticking songs, but best among them are the dizzy, sunlit, and heart-pounding "I Feel Better," the downtrodden but determined "Fast Blood," and the charged piano ballad "The Twist." Death Cab for Cutie picked the band to support them on their UK tour last year, and it's easy to see why. The Twilight Sad are equally Scottish and appropriately sad, though they emote through more of a wall of distortion than do their tourmates and countrymen. I refuse to listen to a band named We Were Promised Jetpacks. ERIC GRANDY

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