Several years ago, Simon Reynolds (who writes about pop culture

for the New York

Times, the Observer and Melody Maker, among

others) coined the

term "post-rock."

Don't ask me what he meant it to stand for, but it's

evolved into a catch-all term for instrumental music -- that is,

music played on instruments and without vocals -- that's not dance

or jazz. We need categories like this as rock critics because it

helps us avoid actually talking about music. Oh, Trans Am?

They're post-rock. Arial M? Post-rock. Trio? Pre-post-rock.

Post-rock is a useful idea -- bands like Slint and Tortoise needed

rock to exist so they could break it apart, after all -- but it so

quickly became a catch-all that it's lost any potency. So let's

say it now and be done with it: Ui is a post-rock band.

They don't sound anything like Slint, and only marginally like

Tortoise, but they're reconstructing rock 'n' roll, and they're

doing it in interesting, engaging, maybe even catchy ways.

Ui's new album, Lifelike, comes on the heels of a

collaboration with Stereolab (the resulting collective dubbed

themselves -- what else? --

UiLab), which produced the album Fires. Ui share some of

Stereolab's

obsessions -- there's a precision to Ui that's intriguing,

though it lacks the Lab's rigidness; plus there's a similar

sense of texture at play. Ui songs can be experienced on a very

tactile level, like a

lot of the best songs from Stereolab's Transient Random Noise

Bursts with Announcements.

Lifelike is a lively album; it skips and burbles and even

galumphs from time to time. Ui are introspective, maybe, but

they're not exactly somber. Made up of two

multi-instrumentalists who lean toward their basses and one

percussionist, their songs are obviously rhythmically oriented,

but more to the point, they have a massive backbone. Songs like

"Digame" and "Spilling" stand straight up. There's a more

contemplative side to Ui, but you couldn't accuse them of

navel-gazing -- they've always got their eyes on the groove.

There's precious little noodling on this album. Every track,

every performance, works off the others. No one takes a solo,

literally or figuratively. It's like listening to three

musician-psychics, especially on the numbers, like "The

Fortunate One Knows No Anxiety," that are almost entirely two

basses and drums. There's so much drive to these songs that

they're never just experiments or instrumental workouts.

You're never left

wishing for that guiding top note -- a vocalist or solo guitar to

fill up the empty spaces. The absences balance the sounds.

There's a grand tradition of rhythm-oriented bands who were more

than just a rhythm section -- from Booker T. and the MG's to the

mid-'80s output of King Crimson (Discipline,

Beat, Three of a Perfect Pair). These groups made

compelling music that was more than the sum of its parts. Just

make sure not to tell any self-respecting post-rocker that the music

he's

listening to is part of any kind of tradition.