Wooden Tongues

Take a four-member hip-hop tag team that raps in a variety of languages (including more than one inflection of English), and there is absolutely no guarantee that you'll end up with anything listenable. But in the case of Curse ov Dialect — an Australian quintet (including DJ Paso Bionic) known almost as much for an insane on-stage wardrobe as for its collective rhyming skills — the combination of backgrounds, ethnicities, and languages comes together with a strange and intermittent brilliance that is sometimes dazzling, sometimes merely baffling. For the former, check out the bassoon samples and flashy turntablism on "Word Up Forever," and the quirkily complicated "Renegades." For the latter, check out their clumsy attempt at waltz-time rapping on "Broken Feathers" and the maladroit lyrics on "Sticks and Stones" ("I don't blame children for having little consciousness/I can see it in their eyes, it's not real despise"). Things bounce back and forth between those two extremes until the very end of the album, when they take things out with a powerful one-two punch in the form of the dark grooves and sharp, almost corrosive politics of "Stop Sarisis" and "Letter to Athens." It's in the nature of this kind of experimentation to fail a considerable percentage of the time — but that just makes the successes all the more thrilling. Recommended.