Variable Unit

Live hip hop bands have had it tough lately, and for the most part they deserve it. It's hard to feel sorry for any group of able jazz-funk musicians who didn't think audiences would eventually tire of watching them and a turntablist halfheartedly back one or two MCs. With major labels now strictly spotlighting rappers, the smart bands have taken at least one album to explore the unlikely realm of hip hop aesthetics without a rhymer. When this approach fails, it comes off like a record of bland funk breakbeats. When it works, it sounds something like San Francisco quartet Variable Unit's first instrumental offering, Cold Flow.

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More About

• Matt Montgomery
• Kat Ouano
• Hip-Hop and Rap

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Over a dozen tracks, VU captures hip hop's gratuitous, yet crucial, urge to tweak funk music with new sounds. Between DJ Zeph's cut-up elephant roars on "Royal Jack," Crown City Rocker keyboardist Kat Ouano's outer-space messages on "Hare of the Taurus," and bassist Matt Montgomery's grinding melody on "Floating Butterfly in the River Nile" lies the kind of restless energy that gave rise to the human beat-box or the turntable scratch. The clutch of percussion-driven tunes the band places in the album's middle -- the gracefully midtempo "Unity Gain," the dubby, 3/4-timed "Jechno," and the African-flavored "Durumin Time" -- offers a diverse salute to the drum, hip hop's essential ingredient. Although the record loses some steam with the unfocused and overly long "Mugabe's Dub Re-distribution," it does recover. Ironically, you get the feeling as you listen to these experiments that almost any one of them would actually sound fantastic behind the right MC. Ultimately, however, Cold Flow finds Variable Unit pushing live hip hop forward by wreckin' shop without saying a word.