• ROCK

GRIZZLY BEAR

Veckatimest

Warp Records

*** ½

Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear: These days, there's a zoo full of melodically gifted indie-rock mammals who have spent ample time hibernating in their bedrooms with their Beach Boys records. Grizzly Bear, which doesn't sound the slightest bit ferocious but comes by its moniker honestly (the drummer's name is Christopher Bear), is a Brooklyn quartet of NYU grads whose third album is named after a small island off Cape Cod. Sometimes tunes from songwriters Daniel Rossen and Ed Droste can come off like academic exercises. But for the most part, and particularly on the stunningly beautiful Two Weeks, Grizzly Bear lives up to its burgeoning reputation as an acoustic American counterpart to Radiohead that skillfully makes intricately experimental and gorgeously sung music every bit as inviting as it is challenging.

-- DAN DELUCA

The Philadelphia Inquirer

HIP HOP HOODIOS

Carne Masada: Quite Possibly the Very Best of the Hip Hop Hoodios

Jazzheads

** ½

Hip Hop Hoodios is a Latino Jewish hip-hop group working triple cultural entendre wordplay (hoodios is for judios, Spanish for Jews). Which should make it just a novelty act, except the music is good, the rhymes rock and it's passionate (if often silly) about the music. No, we can't get too serious about songs like Havana Nagila (with a Cuban Ahi Nama mix) or the klezmer-urban antics of K**e on the Mic (''My sound is fresh, like a pound of flesh''). But we sure can enjoy them. And hey, with Hoodios working a fourth ``best of'' release already, we may no longer be able to ignore the power of Latin-Jewish-urban culture.

The Hoodios are Josh ''Josue Norek'' Norek and Abraham Velez, both of whom work in the Latin alternative music biz -- ergo illustrious guests from Ozomatli, Delinquent Habits, The Klezmatics, and others who pump up Hoodios' musical chops. Juan Caipo of Orixa helps make Ocho Kandelikas into a ska punk Hanukkah breakdown, and there's some real Cuban swing -- and sharp rhyming from Kemo the Blaxican of Habits and Wil-Dog of Ozomatli -- on Viva la Guantanamera, an attack on the Cuban prison.

Hoodios show its conscience in songs like Guantanamera and Agua Pa' La Gente, about the corporate theft, um, buy-up of water rights in Latin America. But they're at their best with gleefully cheesy, sleazy, cliché-takeback songs like D---s & Noses (``You like our [bleep] and you like our noses, you see a Jewish guy and you forget where your clothes is'').

Oh, and if you're disappointed, the Hoodios are offering the ''First Ever Reverse Madoff Digital Money Back Guarantee.'' Anyone who doesn't like Carne Masada can send in their sales receipt for a full refund. How's that for messing with cultural stereotypes?

-- JORDAN LEVIN

jlevin@MiamiHerald.com

PHOENIX

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Glassnote

** ½

Optimistic high school band teachers and the dapper French quartet Phoenix might be the only people who can envision a wave of ''Lisztomania'' sweeping today's youth. But the title of the leadoff track from Phoenix's new album is an apt synopsis of their mannered yet effervescent romanticism.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, a truly marvelous album title if ever there was one, is danceable but only a little disco, synth-driven but clubland averse, an easy record to like but a more difficult one to love.

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