The Benevento/Russo Duo

Best Reason to Buy the Sun (Ropeadope)

The Best Reason to Buy the Sun is that sunspots cause your stereo to secrete dopamine. What Medeski Martin & Wood began with last year’s space-age End of the World Party (Just in Case), Brooklyn’s Marco Benevento (keys) and Joe Russo (beats) broil into their own inner instrumental universe. Unsealing the duo’s Ropeadope debut with searing intensity, “Becky” sets off a rusty tin-can timpani contorted by tone and texture, sending it back out into orbit with a cut-beat/rock spine distorting another galaxy’s worth of Cloud 9 organ groove on “Welcome Red.” That BRD has come 15 Earth years to get to this point is clear in the singular trajectory of each track. The piano-head simplicity of “Sunny’s Song” houses Sun in the constellation of jazz, alongside the organ smear of “Bronko’s Blues.” The disc’s molten interior (“Vortex,” “9×9,” “Scratchitti”) settles into a probing mood, knobs continually twisting out hot new sound bubbles. Horn alien Skerik and Beck head Smokey Hormel add to the shrieks of “The Three Question Marks” before 15-minute “My Pet Goat” parachutes the pair out of their capsule and back into your sound system. Photosynthesis cranked to 11. (Stubb’s inside, Thursday, May 5)

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This article appears in May 6 • 2005.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.