CD Reviews: Kraftwerk, Esthero

CD Reviews: Kraftwerk, Esthero

Kraftwerk 'Minimum-Maximum': Aidin Vaziri | If Bob Dylan is so great, how come he's never written a song like "The Model"? Roughly 21 percent of the population knows what he was talking about when he sang, "The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind." And most of them have hair past their elbows. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans, vegans and cannibals, skateboarders and roller-bladers -- everyone -- joined in a group hug and just for a few minutes saw things eye to eye when in 1978 Kraftwerk crooned, "She's a model and she's looking good/ I'd like to take her home, that's understood." And English wasn't even the band's first language. The legacy of the German synthesizer quartet is so great that, for better or worse, its influence has reached everyone from David Bowie and Missy Elliott to New Order and the Chemical Brothers. Most recently, Chris Martin admitted that his band Coldplay's song "Talk" was built around a borrowed melody from Kraftwerk's "Computer Love." This double-disc live set, recorded last year, meanwhile, isn't so much a tour souvenir as a source guide to the finest electronic music of the past century: "Tour de France," "Autobahn," "Pocket Calculator" and the rest. Of course, the most exhilarating thing about it is that each track sounds as if it were transmitted back here from the next century, all glistening blips and robotic vocals, digital ripples and very human soul. And to think it was all made by four balding men with laptops. Genius.

Esthero 'Wikked Lil' Grrrls': Aidin Vaziri | On her quarter-million selling 1998 debut, "Breath From Another," Esthero sang, "Music is the man that made a woman out of me." But just like a typical male, it left the 26-year-old Toronto singer depressed, broke and uninspired. Seven years later, Esthero, who plays Friday at the Fillmore, finally gets around to issuing a follow-up that is both bitter and triumphant. She calls out R. Kelly, MTV and the rest of the music industry in the fiery opening track, "We R in Need of a Musical Revolution," then almost immediately goes bossa breezy on the Sean Lennon duet "Everyday Is a Holiday (With You)." But, give or take the odd spoken-word track, this is the kind of incongruity that's actually fun.