Bandcampin': Good stuff for your ears

Noori & His Dorpa Band, “Beja Power! Electric Soul & Brass from Sudan’s Red Sea Coast”

This record is, as the kids say, fiiiire. As in it sounds like heat rising from the streets of Port Sudan, a city in eastern Sudan that sits on the western edge of the Red Sea.

Port Sudan is the cultural center for the Beja people, nomadic desert dwellers who trace their ancestry back to 4,000 B.C. or earlier and who have pushed for political change in Sudan for decades because the government has ignored their calls for recognition and access to the wealth contained on their land. So who’s Noori?

Noori plays a four-stringed tambo-guitar, leads the Dorpa Band and believes that spreading Beja music across the world would aid his people’s quest for equity and justice.

Enter Ostinato Records, the New York label that put out “Beja Power,” providing a megaphone for Noori’s positively intoxicating blend of guitar-forward rock, soul, blues, jazz and deeply hypnotic Sudanese grooves. A must listen.

Old 97’s, “Early Tracks”

In case you missed it, the great Texas alt-country band Old 97’s are coming to Bend to play a show at the Domino Room on March 26. It’s their first stop in town that I’m aware of, and I’m excited. This news sent me on an Old 97’s bender this week, revisiting their best albums: 1995’s “Wreck Your Life,” 2001’s “Satellite Rides,” 2014’s “Most Messed Up” and their masterpiece, 1997’s “Too Far To Care,” a brawny collision of high-octane roots-rock and Rhett Miller’s sharp pop-song instinct. The Old 97’s Bandcamp presence is scattered across a couple different labels and you can’t really listen to any of the aforementioned records there, so my suggestion is to check out “Early Tracks,” a collection of unreleased songs from the band’s formative years. But then go to your local record store and buy a copy of “Too Far To Care,” an album I consider to be darn near perfect.

Pyramid Mass, “Monolith”

All hail Richmond, Virginia, home to an outsized number of great punk and metal bands for a town of a few hundred thousand people. Lamb of God. Municipal Waste. City of Caterpillar. Windhand. Strike Anywhere. Inter Arma. Next up: Pyramid Mass, a trio with a brand new album out that follows in Inter Arma’s stylistic footsteps by taking an avant garde approach to exploring the various intersections of black metal, thrash and doom. “Monolith” is an excellent introduction to the band’s brand of slo-mo whiplash, which can sound like cosmic space rock, howls from the bottom of a cave, a complicated math problem and the skin-crawling scrape of metal on metal, all in the same song. Plus … check out that cover art. It’s cool.