Reviews of five new releases   Mary Timony Mountains Matador Records Of related interest: shabby chic, Dungeons and Dragons, Led Zeppelin   Mary Timony catches a lot of flack. Critics disdain her otherworldly, faeries 'n' Renaissance Faire songwriting. Her last album with Helium was derided as everything from crystal-consciousness drivel to a bad Super Nintendo game soundtrack. Detractors, take this!: Mountains mines the same Baba Yaga themes, and it's fantastic. Sure, Timony probably listened to a lot of Raffi as a kid, but the Who was in the mix as well, and all that Townshend paid off. Timony's one of the best modern rock musicians on planet Earth. Period. Her voice is characteristically breathy and snarling, even though her melodies have a lightness that suggests a woodland sprite. The lyrics tend towards woo-woo ("The peacock is bigger than the bumblebee/ I see the color of his feathers on the shining sea"), but Timony's songwriting is so magically sparse and epic that they almost make sense. Mountains is headed for the prog-rock hall of fame, and Mary Timony's musical witchery will turn all naysayers into poison toads. Julianne Shepherd     Robert Bradley's Blackwater Surprise Time to Discover RCA Delta 72 000 Touch & Go Of related interest: Sly and the Family Stone, The Rolling Stones, getting stoned   Robert Bradley, a blind Alabama-born singer who drops chunks of Detroit asphalt into his Southern molasses, scored an unlikely MTV hit a few years back; now, he and his troupe of rough-shod whiteboys return for the kill. Time to Discover, a reminder of the other kind of block-rockin' beats, comes just in time to accompany barbecue season's sauce and heat. Bradley is the sort of singer you'd be delighted--but not entirely surprised--to find holding forth at a corner tavern. His bandmates, all younger fellas, know when to bristle with '70s-esque pimp strut and when to let the natural ease of a crack bar band take over. Joy for one and all, eight or 80, crippled or crazy. Delta 72, onetime DC-punk hepcats now claiming Philadelphia as home, are a lot more postmodern (i.e., fake-ass) than Bradley, but these shag-cut mods stir up a highly entertaining nest of hornet soul. The ghosts of Mick and Keith possess D72 mainstay Gregg Foreman and his hard-charging accomplices. While the band suffers from the loss of various female co-singers, the new all-male setup compensates for its reduced dynamic range with raw displays of power behind Foreman's shake. Keyboardist Mark Boyce emerges as the new star of the show. On disc, his organ and electric piano power the band's hard-jonesing grabs for the soul-music dimebag. Live, he practically eats his keyboards, while Foreman and other drop-dead-dressed fellas vamp through play-acted decadence. It may not be as real as the Blackwater Surprise, but it feels just as fine. Zach Dundas     Jessica Williams Trio The Boss of the Walking Bass: A Tribute to Leroy Vinnegar         Blue Fire Jazz Focus   Of related interest: Mel Brown Quintet   Anyone who's heard her complex swing can vouch for this hyperbole: Jessica Williams is one of the great jazz pianists of our time. She combines the frenetic swing of Art Tatum, the jagged bop of Thelonious Monk and the exquisite introspection of Bill Evans. Two new discs show off her unorthodox playing and composing. The Leroy Vinnegar tribute was recorded at Atwater's in December 1996. With the great walking bassist Vinnegar and drummer Mel Brown providing a steady flow of muscular rhythm, Williams is free to stretch out her elastic improvisations in a program of standards. The disc offers textbook trio workouts, with plenty of Vinnegar's signature sound, heavy on high-calorie tone and light on the showboating. But it's Blue Fire, with Dave Captein on bass and Brown on drums once more, that really breaks new ground. Though she owes plenty to some other jazz iconoclasts ("Somebody's Waltz" sounds like Monk meeting Chopin, while "The Vision" is a ballad Coltrane would have loved to coat in sonic squall), it's a beautiful, wistful album. Bill Smith   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published April 19, 2000