The Kropotkins (1996)

New York avant-gardist David Soldier and a cadre of experimentalists take apart the Mississippi Delta Blues and reassemble them into a jagged, slightly nightmarish soundscape. The core instruments are fiddle, banjo, and drums (plus Lorette Velvette's flat-affect vocals). You would expect so self-consciously arty an enterprise to reek of pretensiousness; instead, The Kropotkins is funky and listenable. B+