Lake Trout

Proposition: Even if you don't agree that Radiohead's OK Computer was the best and most important rock album of the past decade, you have to concede that the culturati have decreed it so. After all, hasn't every purportedly important album that's come out in the six years since OK Computer either been compared to it in some specific way or been heralded as its second coming?

Yet no one's been proclaiming that they've discovered the new Kid A, Radiohead's most stylistically daring work. So, in the interest of pioneering, here it is: Lake Trout's Another One Lost is such an album. The Baltimore group's third release reins its drum & bass, jazz, and hip-hop influences into a more rock-based sound, with a darkly hallucinogenic result that feels closer in mood and arrangement to Warp-style ambient techno than to any guitar rock, other than Radiohead's. Aside from the 'Head, Lake Trout's closest kin may be Bristol's now-defunct and wildly underhyped Red Snapper. The fish thing may be a coincidence, but it's also a red herring -- ahem -- inasmuch as Lake Trout's stunning live improvisations have earned the band comparisons to, well, Phish. Take the bait, and see them now.