June Carter Cash and the Neptunes.

There's a long and respectable history of deathbed recordings in American country music (my favorite being Townes Van Zandt's A Far Cry from Dead). The latest to be added to the list is June Carter Cash's Wildwood Flower, recorded at the Cash home on September 18 and 19, 2002, eight months before her death in May 2003.

Her voice here no longer has the sweet, lilting grace of her youth (a few archival snippets here show that)-but who would've expected it to? This is an old woman singing. She still sings like an angel, but an aged and experienced angel. This is especially apparent on her rendition of "Kneeling Drunkard's Plea." It's a beautiful recording, both lively and forlorn.

Speaking of "Kneeling Drunkard's Plea," there's a long and interesting history behind that song, some of it, not surprisingly, on the mythological side. As the story goes, a young Johnny Cash asked a young June Carter to write him a spiritual song he could dedicate to his mother, and so she wrote "Kneeling Drunkard's Plea." Whether the song was originally written by the Louvin Brothers or the Carter Sisters, however, still seems to be the point of some argument.

Johnny Cash recorded it a few times over the years, and-again not surprisingly-he makes a number of appearances on June's album-from a back-up vocal on the opener, "Keep on the Sunny Side," to full duets. While he's in good voice, this is June's album, and she shines.

As the album actually came from a film shoot (the crew was there to shoot a documentary about the recording sessions), you get two extra perks here. First, for people properly equipped technologically, I'm told there are some film clips you can play on your computer. I can't comment on those.

More importantly (to me, anyway), you get a few candid moments of June joking around, or explaining a song before she begins playing. My favorite is the Lee Marvin story that precedes "Big Yellow Peaches" a song she wrote after meeting him). "He liked to fight the Second World War. He fought it all the time," she says.

It's in those brief moments between the songs that you can hear that she's tired, yes, maybe a little ragged, but still happy, and still very much alive.

-Jim Knipfel

The Neptunes Present?Clones The Neptunes (Star Trak) For what seems like forever, Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo's Funkensteinian surgeries have injected (nonorganic) life into the increasingly stagnant pop mainstream. But have the pair anything new to offer their original stomping ground, hiphop? A showcase for Arista-offshoot label, Star Trax, Clones gives an equivocal answer. There are few surprises here: The two non-rap tracks-by Spymob and the High Speed Scene, neither of them produced by Hugo and Williams-seem almost like interlopers from another genre, straight-down-the-line no-nonsense college rock.

These two curious interruptions aside, Clones manages to avoid patchy eclecticism without quite cohering as an album. If the number of different MCs here-including Ludacris, Nelly, Snoop and (ODB's latest incarnation) Dirt McGirt-make for an inevitably disparate feel, consistency is provided by the Neptunes' trademark sound, at once digitally clipped and jazzfunkily luxuriant. This brand is best shown off actually, not on the perfectly functional but largely unremarkable rap tracks, but on the current single, "Frontin'," a summer-breeze of un-Ez-listening jazz hip-pop featuring Williams' own tremulous sim-Mayfield falsetto. The Neptunes might no longer be ahead of the game, but Clones shows that they remain crown princes of hiphop-and pop's-present.

-Mark Fisher