Pitchfork

Sometimes I feel for Guillermo Scott Herren. His almost-namesake, Gil Scott-Heron, could get away with nearly anything in his prime, partly because his reputation preceded him, and partly because he had enough inborn charisma and cool to pull off virtually anything-- even to the point of making decent spoken word records. But perspective is everything, and because he's known primarily for his "glitch-hop" project Prefuse 73, even Herren's most esoteric works tend to be processed by most listeners as having some relationship to hip-hop. Like an episode of "Three's Company", hilarious misunderstandings ensue.

To be sure, Herren's new Savath & Savalas album, Golden Pollen, would make a terrible hip-hop record. In fact, it might actually have been the worst Spanish-language hip-hop record of all time, putting it about a notch below Gerardo's Mo' Ritmo-- if it was a hip-hop record at all. Fortunately, it's not: Just as Herren's work as Prefuse 73 fits neatly amid Warp Records' boundary-pushing electronic fare, Savath & Savalas plays to the Anti label's artist-as-personality aesthetic.

Golden Pollen shines a brighter spotlight on Herren himself than it does on the equipment he uses to arrange his instruments (a variety of traditional Latin American stringed instruments, percussion, vibes, and synths) into loungey, modernist folk pastiches. Granted, he does pull in help from Tarantula A.D.'s Danny Bensi, Battles' Tyondai Braxton, Triosk drummer Laurence Pike, singer/songwriter Mia Doi Todd (who sings wraithlike harmonies amid the intro's cinematic string flurries), and Ghostface, who takes the lead vocal on slow-burning anthem "Estrella de Dos Caras". Wait, did I say Ghostface? Make that José González.

But most of the album focuses on Herren himself. His voice, featured more prominently here than ever before, is a nice surprise-- a soft Spanish coo that integrates with floating vibes and skittering flamenco guitars, creating a uniformly placid yet dramatic sonic surface. Some of the songs are just a hair away from traditional: "Apnea Obstructiva" and "Olhas" betray nothing of their producer's usual post-modern leanings and wouldn't sound out of place on a compilation of modern Latin American folk.

Elsewhere, Herren shows his colors, using sturdy traditional compositions as canvases for his deft collages. The clip-clopping percussion and flecked guitar of "Paisje" emerge from abstract atmospheric rumbles, while the dense, off-kilter blur of "Concreto" seems held together only by Herren's sedate croon. The dark romantic ballad "El Solitario" blooms out of a spring-wound electro meltdown, as does the cymbal-crashed tone-droner "Faltamos Palabras". These touches, combined with Herren's consistently lively playing, make for a seamless album that should be just inventive enough for his fans, yet comfortable enough to draw in listeners for whom the term "Ableton plug-in" has no significance.

This seamlessness is at once an asset and a shortcoming. It can be exquisite in short bursts, but drags a bit over the course of this 16-track album, which is too homogenous in its dreamy, mid-tempo mood to justify its length. Despite the consistent allure of its sounds, Golden Pollen becomes tedious; by its final third, the songs sound so familiar you might keep checking to see if it's cycled back to the beginning. There's a very strong EP here, even a good short album, but you know these rap guys-- always gotta make an hour-long album, even when they don't have the material to flesh it out. And even, apparently, when they're not actually rap guys. But no one's forcing anybody to wade through the whole thing at once, and as a series of moments, Golden Pollen stands with 2004's more concise Mañana as further proof that there's more to Herren than looking for the perfect beat.