Sumach Ecks is, by his own admission, a volatile man. In one of the very few interviews with him available online, he talks about road rage and facing off against 50 drunk marines who jeered “Bin Laden” at him on a San Diego street. He channels his aggressive energy into Bikram yoga (“I sweat out a lot of these demons I have in me”) and making very short pieces of music in very short periods of time. His nom de guerre, Gonjasufi, signals clear Eastern influences, though he looks more Lee “Scratch” Perry than Osama Bin Laden. His terrific new album, A Sufi and a Killer – 20 sublimated outbursts in 53 minutes – is out March 9th on Warp Records.

Musicians tend to start out rough and hone their craft until the edges have been smoothed away. Ecks, a feature on the LA hip hop scene since the Nineties (and a member of the respected Masters of the Universe crew), has graduated in the opposite direction. The music he self-released early last decade had a hint of the new record’s dusty, brokedown feel but the ruined howl that makes Gonjasufi such a compelling presence was still unformed.

Writing about Tom Waits, another musician who has roughened nicely with age, the critic Daniel Durchholz described his voice as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car”. You could come up with a similar formulation for Ecks’ vocal chords, involving shaman smoke and searing desert heat. His voice is weathered and cracked and sometimes brutish – the sort of growl that might run YOU over with a car given half a chance – but, on tracks such as “She’s Gone”, it hits that Waitsian sweet spot where the bestial becomes beautiful, even vulnerable.

The tension between volatility and vulnerability runs throughout the album, and you can hear it dramatized on “Sheep”, which sums up its predator/prey interplay in the chorus: “I wish I was a sheep/ Instead of a lion/ Cause then I wouldn’t have to eat/ Animals that are dyin’”.

That song gambols along with beguiling dreaminess for the first three minutes (an epic stretch by Gonjasufi standards), until the percussion mounts up and Ecks reveals the basic instincts beneath the cosmic empathy: “I’m a lion, babe/ Feeding of the sheep that graze/ Off the leafs and blades/ I wouldn’t have it any other way”.

Aside from the yoga and the ameliorated growl, the development in Gonjasufi’s sound seems related to his teaming-up, circa 2005, with hirsute LA producer-and-DJ the Gaslamp Killer, who introduced him to fellow Californian beatmakers Mainframe and Flying Lotus (who in turn hooked him up with the UK-based Warp label). All three producers worked on this album, and they have strewn it with sitars, dervish chants, fuzzy guitar freakouts, psychedelic breakdowns, molassesized hip hop beats and even, on “Candylane”, some sleek disco activity.

According to Ecks, he would receive beats from his collaborators, knock together some lyrics on the spot and usually polish off a track in less than an hour. Then he’d spend the bulk of his time distressing it in the mix with beat-up old analog equipment. The smokehouse stage, as it were.

What results is hazed in stylus crackle, and soaked in reverb, and the levels are all askew, but in context it seems entirely right. It is the sound of a man sweating out his demons and trying to contain, within a yogic frame of mind, the urge to throw rocks at cars. It is the sound of the lion endeavoring not to eat the lamb, and occasionally failing in that endeavor. It is the most thrilling release of the year so far.

Some things we read or watch to better ourselves. You know what these are. Others we consume in order to visit imaginative realms beyond the normal purview: Jersey Shore, Avatar, The Lost Symbol or Dominick Dunne’s new (and posthumous) novel Too Much Money.

As in Dunne’s previous novels People Like Us and Another City Not My Own, Gus Bailey is the author’s stand-in, a writer for Park Avenue magazine who is undergoing a strenuous lawsuit for slander committed against politician Kyle Cramden. In part to cover the legal bills he’s racked up, Bailey has signed a seven-figure deal to write a damning novel, titled “Infamous Lady”, about one Perla Zacharias suspected to be involved in her rich husband’s mysterious death. Meanwhile, disgraced businessman Elias Renthal is biding his time at a prison in Las Vegas waiting to wriggle back into the caste that ejected him as soon as his sentence (for financial malfeasance) is up. Too Much Money covers the return of the Renthals to society and Gus’s attempts to get the real facts of the case down for his novel. The book’s suspense rides dually on whether the Renthals will recapture the respect of their peers and whether Gus will write his book or not. As suspense goes, it is not gripping. But suspense is not Dunne’s game.

A roman à clef refers to a novel wherein nominally fictitious characters provide thinly-veiled accounts of real people; in French the phrase translates into “novel with a key”. In keeping with the genre, “Too Much Money” offers a disguised account of Dunne’s own legal tribulations relating to the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy case, as well as stand-ins for Brooke Astor (“Adele Harcourt”) Larry King (“Harry Sovereign”) Si Newhouse (“Hy Vietor”) and others.

Now. There are two ways to read a roman à clef. One is to comb it, as intended, for inside jokes and hidden truths. The other is to read it as a novel in its own right, with a language and a narrative not contingent for its pleasures on gossip. A successful roman à clef will satisfy on both accounts, and in an era free of discretion, it is more important than ever that it please the latter type of reader. Roman à clef doesn’t make quite as much sense as a form now that we have Gawker and Perez Hilton to provide us with the real names and humiliations of anyone involved in a scandal. A novel written in the whispering old roman à clef genre is hard-pressed to be salacious instead of quaint.

Too Much Money fits in somewhere between the two, as Dunne probably intended. As with Wharton novels it helps to keep a running list of the characters (with their relationships delineated) on whatever you’re using as a bookmark. There are characters named Bratsie Bleeker, Binkie Bosworth and Chiquita Chatfield. There are twenty-eight room apartments on Fifth Avenue. Characters say things like “I love giving orders to the help” and “Better nouveau than never” and “Winkie Williams told me the most hilarious story about the Duchess of Windsor being a hermaphrodite.” There are thousand-dollar orchids and bedrooms lacquered in seventeen coats of persimmon paint. It’s a novel packed with details—tangerine roses, Turnbull & Asser striped ties, Spode china—but adding up to something less satisfying than Bonfire of the Vanities or The Devil Wears Prada, both of which had their share of proper nouns. Dunne doesn’t have to give us meaty conclusions, just astute observations and a couple of laughs. Too Much Money is slightly shy of both.

Still, there’s a wit and an effortlessness that make the book delightful in small doses. Dunne is a master of dense social detail and outrageousness, and he’s at his best when he combines the two––as when introducing readers to the concept of the “walker”, an attractive young gay man employed as a companion to partnerless rich women at balls and dinners, or revealing that certain Manhattan mortuaries are more prestigious than others. With its episodic structure and New York-iness and likable if forgettable characters, Too Much Money reminded me most, and weirdly, of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children; both are expertly-constructed and entertaining books that fade from memory as soon as the last page is turned. I’m not convinced, in the end, that this is a fault. It might just be a sign that a book’s aims and achievements are perfectly aligned.