Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx, We’re New Here.

Still so far out there that many people can’t locate him, even an underdone Gil-Scott Heron collaboration like this one (with Jamie xx, the musician/remixer from the band which shares his surname, adding his stamp to Scott-Heron’s earlier album I’m New Here) has a revelation in every track. There’s grooviness which gets coarse quickly (“The Crutch”), bubbly sounds that devolve into Tom Waits-ish blues (“Home”) and muddiness which turns unexpectedly crisp and danceable (Ur Soul and Mine). Nothing on the album ends the way it began, except the wistful “Piano Player,” a one-minute-and-21-second late-in-the-album-interlude that seems flown in from some farflung Brechtian cabaret climes. Not a mindmeld by any means, but Jamie xx enables Gil Scott-Heron to mess with your head as handily as ever.