Rather than feeling hemmed in, he sounds liberated and awake

In 1998, Talib Kweli said, “Every day someone ask me, ‘Where all the real MCs at?’/ They underground.” He was proudly pinpointing a shift in hip-hop’s values, how mainstream rappers wanted to be Hugh Hefner while those primarily concerned with artistry were netting only cult appeal. In subsequent releases however, Kweli endured criticism as he tried catchier hooks and wove pop culture references into his lyrics. He epitomized “conscious rap,” but he also struggled to stay within its confines.

So on his fifth LP, Prisoner of Conscious, Kweli raps to music rooted in the time before all that. While 2011′s Gutter Rainbows updated the neo-soul sound of Kweli’s onetime label Rawkus, Prisoner reaches back to even older genres. Samba revivalist Seu Jorge adds wistfulness to “Favela Love,” a song about wandering abroad. On “Come Here,” R&B singer Miguel does his best Marvin Gaye while Kweli composes a valentine made of hip-hop references: “We can do it like Common and Mary and ‘Come Closer’/ We can do it like Barack and Michelle, give me a fist bump.”

Throughout the album, Kweli raps of his connections to people and music. On album opener “Human Mic,” Kweli scrambles through a few opening lines before landing on a memory of 9/11: “I seen them crossing bridges by the masses, covered in the ashes of both towers.” Over celebratory horns in “High Life,” he and Rubix exchange dizzying verses that simulate the bustle of a block party. “Prisoner of Conscious? Nonsense,” Kweli raps at one point. Rather than feeling hemmed in, Kweli sounds liberated — not “conscious,” just awake.

The trio goes from side project to supergroup

In his 2012 memoir Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young gave a rave review to the Pistol Annies, observing that the Nashville trio was “writing their asses off.” It was an unexpected shout-out, to which the women responded via tweet that they nearly peed their pants with excitement. Such praise was warranted. On their 2011 debut, the group — which consists of Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley delivered a batch of sharply observed country tunes that ranged from hilarious to heartbreaking and that appealed even to listeners who profess to love everything but country.

Despite that success, it’s still a hard-knock life for these Annies, who smartly chronicle the joys and trials of being a woman in the 2010s. On “Being Pretty Ain’t Pretty,” they spend a lot of time and money applying make-up and even more time and money taking it off, but they never play it off as a joke. Instead, they sympathize with the woman in the mirror and their close harmonies invest the song with a deep melancholy. Songs like “Trading One Heartbreak for Another” and “Dear Sobriety” are quietly devastating, but the Annies’ sass and smarts remain. First single “Hush Hush,” a kissin’ cousin to Robert Earl Keen’s “Merry Christmas from the Family,” is a devious ode to the open secrets and hidden conflicts that bind a family, even if it sends Monroe out behind the barn to spark one up. The Pistol Annies may have started as a side project for these solo artists, but on Annie Up, they prove themselves as a supergroup.

A Dixie Chick returns, scarred but smarter

Still scarred from the backlash she endured for dissing George Bush 10 years ago, Natalie Maines has jettisoned any trace of the twang that survived the Dixie Chicks’ last album, Taking the Long Way, and has made her first real rock ‘n’ roll record. Mother is not merely a shift in musical direction or a crossover attempt; instead, it’s the sound of a woman fighting defiantly to redefine herself with a harder, steelier sound. Fortunately, Maines’s commanding voice remains intact. She nimbly navigates the slow build from soft melody to full gospel finale on “Free Life,” while “Trained” binds a torrid sex metaphor to a rowdy blues-rock groove courtesy of co-producer Ben Harper. Her cover of “Lover Your Should Have come Over” may be too faithful to Jeff Buckley’s original to transcend karaoke, but Maines picks up some intriguing vocal tricks — especially a new way to treat vowels — and applies them throughout Mother. Best of all is the Jayhawks’ “I’d Run Away,” which shows the Dixie Chick at her most unguarded. Despite the tough rock exterior she constructs, the song reveals a bruised self-doubt that haunts the album. Maines might love to run away, but she knows she has to stay and keep fighting.

A travelogue through America and American music

Patty Griffin’s seventh album — and her first collection of new songs in six years — opens with “Go Wherever You Wanna Go,” a delicate rural blues number that bristles with slide guitar and promises of travel and escape. That song establishes American Kid as a meditation on wanderlust of all kinds — emotional, physical and musical — and it may be Griffin’s most adventurous and diverse effort yet. Rather than record again in Austin or Nashville, Griffin decamped to Memphis, where she absorbed the Bluff City’s deep, rich history and recruited Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi All-Stars as her backing band. Fortunately, this is no kneejerk approximation of local blues or soul. No musical tourist, Griffin is not interested in re-creating that Sun or Stax sound; instead, she hits the crossroads and goes in all directions at once.

The songs on American Kid represent points on a map. Griffin pleads for her life on “Don’t Let Me Die in Florida,” whose urgency is sharpened by Luther Dickinson’s gritty guitar work, while “Ohio” (inspired by the Underground Railroad) establishes a rustic folk drone that’s simultaneously lovely and unsettling. Even on the more direct tracks, like the lusty beerhall sing-along “Get Ready Marie” or her tender cover of Lefty Frizzell’s “Mom and Dad’s Waltz,” her exquisite twang gives life to a range of characters: prodigal sons, itinerant laborers, deserting soldiers, horny bridegrooms. Griffin loses herself not only in American musical traditions but also in American history, as though to escape some horrors of the present. As a result, American Kid sounds like her own version of the Great American Novel, expansive in narrative scope and generous in its earthy humanity.

Synth-pop chanteuse favors more eclectic synth sounds on her long-simmering second LP

A lot happened very quickly for synth-pop chanteuse Little Boots: Her 2009 debut Hands generated hit UK singles, a gold album, worldwide tours and topped the BBC Sound of 2009 poll. What followed in the ensuing four-year gap between albums wasn’t quite silence: Victoria Hesketh filled it by DJing, making mixtapes and working with more club-oriented cohorts, such as Hercules and Love Affair’s Andy Butler and Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford. But like her compatriot in ’80s-derived dance-pop La Roux, Boots has distanced herself from her initial hype simply by dragging her heels.

Nocturnes, the long-simmering sophomore effort, isn’t a total break from her buzzy beginnings. For “Broken Record,” Hesketh writes with veteran songsmith Rick Nowels, spinning the same obsessive love angle as her attention-grabbing first single, “Stuck on Repeat.” But here and elsewhere, she downplays the ’80s vibe in favor of more eclectic synth sounds largely overseen by former Mo’ Wax/DFA honcho Tim Goldsworthy. Album opener “Motorway” steers in the urbane direction of indie-dance pioneers Saint Etienne, gradually building up a mood that’s more wistful than amorous. “Confusion” pairs her with ex-Junior Senior member and “Born This Way” co-creator Jeppe Laursen, who helps Boots write a troubled, simple love song that shines over Goldsworthy’s finespun production.

Nocturnes hits its stride halfway, where she digs deeper both lyrically and groove-wise. “Beat Beat” repeats the octave-jumping bass bumps of ’70s disco funk, while both Butler collaborations, the house-y “Every Night I Say a Prayer” and the slow-grinding ballad “All for You,” reveal a spiritual side to Boots previously hidden behind her glossy pop veneer. She doesn’t have a big or distinctive voice, but she does pick the right henchmen, and here she even bares a soul, an aching one that compliments all that’s tidy and efficient elsewhere.

A diverse but simpatico mix of American songbook standards, pop hits and group originals

This is Joshua Redman’s “ballads with strings” record, a venerable tradition that most includes such torrid beboppers as Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown. It continues Redman’s recent penchant for putting himself in new settings — his membership in the egalitarian ensemble James Farm and the knotty skronk he’s delivered guesting with The Bad Plus are other examples — but on Walking Shadows he allows himself the security blanket of deploying sidemen. It isn’t easy to come up with three more acutely creative jazz balladeers than the other members of his core quartet — pianist (and album producer) Brad Mehldau, drummer Brian Blade and bassist Larry Grenadier. Their low-key sensitivity is a secret ingredient here.

The material is a diverse but simpatico mix of American songbook standards, pop hits and group originals. Redman plays with gorgeous aplomb on Kern and Hammerstein’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” (the latter also features Mehldau’s best solo). He teases out the familiar melodies of The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and “Stop That Train” by John Mayer before taking transformative liberties with them via deft improvisations. The most arresting of the originals is Redman’s atmospheric “Final Hour,” in which his tenor has the low-toned plangency of a bass clarinet.

The presence of the strings — conducted by Dan Coleman, who also arranged them along with Mehldau and Patrick Zimmerli — varies significantly from song to song. Ironically, Bach’s “Adagio,” featuring a sublime Grenadier bass riff, is among the least ornamented offerings, while on the ’30s standard “Easy Living” and the intro to Mehldau’s “Last Glimpse of Gotham,” they’re more integral to the song than Redman’s sax; Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” is a compelling but messy pastiche. Nothing here is trite or bathetic however — no mean feat for jazz-with-strings endeavors. Walking Shadows is another colorful plume in Redman’s steadily adventurous career.

Inspiring grandeur while remaining taut and gripping

When a band makes music that is repeatedly, almost invariably, described as “ethereal” or “dreamy,” it’s fair to worry whether things might fall too far into the soup. Although the signifiers that often provoke these descriptions — heavy reverb; breathy, obscured vocals; layered effects; wading tempos — can produce a soaring, satisfying cumulative effect, the pitfalls are just as clear: Focus too much on piling up and tweaking lush sounds, an album can end up as a sort of unformed mass of pretty stuff.

Greg Hughes, the primary songwriter, producer, instrumentalist and lyricist of Still Corners, is conscious of this tightrope walk. He spoke to Sub Pop, the label releasing Strange Pleasures, about his evolving approach: “I started taking the production more seriously this time; instead of listening to records and going, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ I actually studied everything: sound absorption, speaker placement, mixing, mastering, microphones…I see it principally as a widescreen pop album, clear, with upfront vocals…There aren’t a ton of layers this time; everything has its place and is focused.” This thoughtful, balanced method shines through on Strange Pleasures.

Hughes smartly juxtaposes the more traditionally “dreamy” elements of Still Corners’ sound with some crisper textures and more insistent rhythms. On album opener “The Trip,” a delay-heavy, snaking, spacey guitar lead and Tessa Murray’s washed-out, wispy vocals are anchored by prominent, raking acoustic guitar and a krautrock-like pulse. “Beginning to Blue” has wonderfully inside-out sounding production with wobbly, reverse-flanged keyboards and backward cymbal crashes, like a loping, screwed “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Hughes’s songwriting and production style still skews sweeping and epic: On single “Fireflies,” the synths stack — pillowy pads, twinkling upper-octave melody lines and punchy synth-bass — and are buoyed by Murray’s vampish vocals. With Strange Pleasures, Hughes has carefully crafted a set with songs that inspire grandeur while remaining taut and gripping — an impressive feat.

Remaking himself as a soulfully wronged but never spiteful lover

More than a decade ago, indie rocker Sean Tillman was reborn as a campy R&B leg-humper keen on tickling your unmentionable zones with his freaky antics. Now Tillman has re-remade himself as a soulfully wronged but never spiteful lover, his vocals filtered for full retro effect, his effortless swoop drawing inspiration not just from Sam Cooke, but from white Cooke heirs like Rod Stewart.

“Please Don’t Make Me Hit You” accentuates that persona shift, as Har Mar resists a lover’s S&M demands (rhythmically indebted to Cooke’s “Cupid”) with a heartfelt “I’m not so into all that kinky stuff.” But it’s the opener, “Lady, You Shot Me,” with its pained virtuoso cry soaring over tricky Stax-via-Daptone horns and a sharp tempo shift, that justifies his newfound fascination with classic soul. And the jaunty “Restless Leg” suggests that Har Mar might fancy himself a haircut, a gym membership, and the right licensing deal away from becoming Bruno Mars. Stranger things have happened.

Lonely treatises about loss and redemption

Marcus Ryan is a songwriter from Texas who wound up traveling to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Somewhere along the way, he found time to write and record Walk to the Light, an album full of lonely treatises about loss and redemption. The tunes are big in the sense that they are heavily produced, with power guitars, acoustic pianos and processed drums layered over hooky themes. The core of the pieces is the bedrock messages. Ryan leaves a woman in “If I Fly” and tells her, “It’s gonna be alright,” but, despite the soaring guitars, you get the sense that it might not be. “Who would be there for you if nobody knew where you stayed?” Ryan asks on “The Road That Has No End.” The entire album is preoccupied with questions like this: What happens to people who leave their homes, leave those who matter to them and head toward an unknown and solitary future? There’s a sense of inevitability about these departures, a dour fatalism that surfaces in many of the tunes. There’s also a kind of dark honor. In “On My Own,” he tells the woman he’s leaving that it “doesn’t mean I don’t wish I was there,” and it rings true.

There’s a long musical tradition of restless songwriters, lonesome travelers all, who struggle to find solace. Ryan is part of this tradition, and the album plays like a man searching for a way to make peace with himself. That its final track is Walk to the Light, suggests that Ryan’s wanderings might have at last brought him to a place where he can rest for a while.

One of ESP's lost gems, a convincing effort from start to finish

During the 1960s, Bernard Stollman’s ESP label worked a side of the street that was largely left untouched by any other labels. The jazz end of their roster was dedicated almost entirely to obscure (at the time) avant-gardists, and although Stollman claimed to know little about the music he was presenting, his historical track record has turned out to be remarkably good. Some of the musicians represented by ESP have acquired legendary status: among them, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Paul Bley, Sunny Murray and Gary Peacock. But even the artists who eventually drifted into obscurity turned in efforts that are worthy of close attention.
Alto saxophonist Byron Allen is one of them. The Byron Allen Trio is a no-frills affair by Allen, bass player Maceo Gilchrist and drummer Ted Robinson. It’s evident that they’re young players, largely still in thrall to the Live at the Golden Circle trio of Ornette Coleman, David Izenson and Charles Moffett. But they’re good students, finding ways to make valuable use of what they’ve been taught. That makes The Byron Allen Trio a fine album on its own terms, although you wonder what the trio might have turned into, given time to develop.

“Time is Past” begins things briskly, with Robinson skillfully pushing an engaged Allen forward. The altoist is by turns bluesy, boppish and free. There are times when his linear playing resembles Jimmy Lyons, but the twisting lines are straight out of Ornette, and they retain the master’s sense of order and logic. Maceo Gilchrist’s role is harder to define. When he’s not using the bow, he tends toward observational commentary. He doesn’t add much to the pulse and he doesn’t engage in dialogue. Still, he’s effective; he knows what to put in and what to leave out. The music needs a third voice as a kind of mediator, and GIlchrist provides one. “Three Steps in the Right Direction” is a blindingly fast piece that features long, articulate lines by the leader. Robinson utilizes some left hand snare figures that come out of Sunny Murray. Although “Decision for the Cole-man” is, like the other tunes, taken at a fast tempo, Gilchrist’s lyricism is on display during large segments of his solo. Dedicated to Ornette, it’s the piece that most strongly pays homage to the Golden Circle trio. There’s enough individuality to keep it from being Coleman-lite though, and the prowess of all three players is easily apparent. “Today’s Blues Tomorrow” is the genuine article — a real blues in spirit, loose and funky and slightly off-kilter in an appealing way. The drums bully the saxophone a little (which works in this context) while Gilchrist holds down the fort with a steady walk. Gradually Allen takes up the challenge of the drums, ratcheting up his playing enough to hold his own, but steadfastly maintaining a heartfelt blues feel. After a thoughtful bass solo, the saxophone returns elegiacally, but again intensifies, moving briefly to a 6/8 semi-flamenco, to take the piece, and the album, out. The Byron Allen Trio is a convincing effort from start to finish, and one of ESP’s lost gems.

Dance-punkers drop us back to the mid-'00s

Considering all the factors working against !!! over the past 15 years — major lineup changes, members who live on opposite coasts, the questionable expiration date of “dance punk” — you’d think they’d be a part-time prospect by now. But no, here they are, delivering a filler-free album that feels like a carefully-curated DJ set, including the disco inferno diatribes of “Get That Rhythm Right,” the convulsive funk of “Station (Meet Me At the)” and the locked grooves of “Fine Fine Fine,” which washes its chest-caving drum circle down with disembodied harmonies. And then there’s the peak house-party hooks of “Slyd,” a runaway single that raises the bar on the rest of the record by pairing flesh-and-blood beats and carefully constructed samples with the call-and-response choruses of Molly Schnick. A longtime friend of the band, Schnick used to play in the !!! side project Out Hud; if there’s any reason for them to reunite in the near future, it’s this floor-filler.

Now that the dance scene’s dominated by laptop-tethered EDM producers and the robot-rock of Daft Punk, it’s almost quaint to hear a record that drops us right back in the mid-’00s, a time dominated by club-ready bands like Bloc Party and LCD Soundsystem. Next thing you know, James Murphy will be hosting a “Losing My Edge” package tour, featuring long-lost pioneers like Liquid Liquid performing their prized 12-inches in full. We can only hope, right?

A wonderful place to start for those unfamiliar with Carter's work

There are ghosts on this record. Of course, the gaping maw left by the recent death of Elliott Carter — just shy of his 104th birthday, mind you — still echoes. But there is another spectre here, that of Charles Rosen, not only one of Carter’s staunchest advocates and one of the world’s great writers whose topic happened to be classical music, but among our accomplished and special pianists. So it is unsurprising that the collaboration on Carter’s ferocious mid-’60s Piano Concerto is one for the books, and Bridge has done us excellent service by making this recording (a live recording, but still) available.

This record, this ninth volume in Bridge’s important Carter sequence, is a wonderful place to start for those who might be unfamiliar with — or scared of — Carter’s work. Spanning seven — seven! — decades of his work, this collection acts as an excellent toe-dip. There is a thorough sampling of his later, more high-modernist work for which he is best known, like the behemoth Piano Concerto (in good hands with not only Mr. Rosen but the Basel Sinfonietta under Joel Smirnoff) or the solo piano works Two Thoughts About the Piano and Tri-Tribute (sumptuously rendered by Steven Beck), not to mention or the delightfully twittering, moody, breathy and ferocious Nine by Five (excellently dispatched by the Slowind Wind Quintet), but these are not even the real gems of this de-facto retrospective. Here, alongside the more jagged offerings are a few gorgeous pieces penned by the younger man: the orchestral songs “Voyage” and “Warble for Lilac Time,” thrillingly performed by Tony Arnold and the Colorado College Festival Orchestra led by Scott Woo, show a deft way with harmony and a gorgeous sense of melody — a sense that never left him, just took a radically different turn — as does the positively downright lovely “Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred,” a lilting turn for guitar and soprano (the sensitive David Starobin and Rosalind Rees).

The thrill of this record as a whole (if anyone listens that way) is that these earlier and later works do us the service of informing each other, creating context. But if a lesson is not what you seek, this disc can be listened to for the sheer glory of the sound — from the concerto’s delicious dissonances to the raw emotion of the earlier songs.

A little less bleak, but still as ugly as ever

Doom metal is a cathartic outlet for depression and loneliness and, yeah, it sounds pretty great under the influence of recreational pharmaceuticals, since the rhythms are generally slow and repetitive enough to separate the individual instruments and sink into the full, echoing effect of their sound. Howl’s 2010 full-length debut Full of Hell was an angry stoner’s paradise, a feast of trudging riffs, plodding beats, serpentine guitars and tumbling drums that appealed equally to fans of Black Sabbath and Mastodon.

Who knows if frontman Vincent Hausman stopped smoking weed or if he’s merely evolved as a songwriter and musician, but Howl’s second album Bloodlines is far more intricate and diverse. Some of that might be because the band hired a second guitarist, Josh Durocher-Jones, who adds counter-melodies and extra heft to Hausman’s leaden chugs (Since recording the album, Hausman has actually focused strictly on vocals and handed his guitar over to new member Jonathan Hall).

Clearly, vocals have become a priority to Hausman. On Bloodlines he expands his parameters, spewing various flavors of venom, including Lamb of God-style roars (“Attrition,” “Demonic”), shouty growls (“Your Hell Begins, “Of War”) and even moody melodic baritone crooning (“One Last Nail,” “Down So Long”).

The abundant musical flourishes are even more impressive. Howl can still stomp and drone, but they’ve added new tricks to their arsenal, including southern power-groove riffs, twin-guitar harmonies and unexpected shifts in rhythm; the tempos range from mid-paced (“Embrace Your Nerve”) to double-time (“Your Hell Begins”). Clearly, Howl worked exhaustively to overhaul their sound (captured expertly by producer Zeuss and they’ve done so without sounding like a completely different band than the one that recorded Full of Hell.

Maybe that has something to do with their overall aesthetic. No matter how much they’ve strayed from their roots, Howl are still filled with animosity and contempt. Just check out the album art, which depicts a naked woman bleeding from her eyes, a spurting heart, a skeleton with a spear, a wolf and ravens, all of them swimming in an ocean of blood. “I will tear limb from limb/this is where your hell begins,” sings Hausman on “Your Hell Begins.” “Drink up the blood you maggot/spit on the open wound,” he rails in “The Mouth of Madness.” Howl’s music may sound a little less bleak and a bit more multifaceted than they did two year ago, but at the core they remain as ugly as ever.

The frequent indie collaborator proves most formidable and impressive on his own

Avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson’s credits as a collaborator include a slew of indie friends — Arcade Fire, Feist, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and TV on the Radio among them — but he’s most formidable and impressive on his own, with just a metal horn and a pair of heaving lungs to help push air through its twisty, peculiar channels. Stetson’s expansive style finds fine form in “Hunted,” an unusual instrumental track that matches ghostly, wordless cries to a sax treatise in which Stetson taps on keys percussively while blowing out sounds as if summoning some strange prehistoric beast. “High Above a Grey Green Sea” follows in a comparatively subtle mode, abstracting the sax until it’s mostly a tool for texture and extrapolations on timbre and tone. Stetson is credited for playing alto, tenor and bass saxophones (the latter a burly monster of an instrument), but the presence of each, in all cases, conforms to the whole of his unique sound-world. Another habitué of that world is Justin Vernon from Bon Iver, who contributes vocals on four songs in a very Bon Iver-ian way (see, especially, “Who the Waves are Roaring For”). His nuanced presence is never unwelcome but it is also ultimately unnecessary — a testament to the powers that Stetson wields on his own.

Florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say

With Infernal Machines, Darcy James Argue seemed to come out of nowhere: Who was this guy who wrote tunes drawing equally from the big band tradition as well as post-rock and classical minimalism? Why did he call his music “steampunk-jazz?” The reality was that this composer-bandleader came from the practice hall, where he’d been drilling his band for several years. Infernal Machines bowled us over with a fully formed, highly unique vision.

Brooklyn Babylon is his follow-up and, after a Grammy nod as well as three of DownBeat’s “rising star” awards, the album has got a lot of following up to do. A 53-minute suite originally written as one half of a visual-art-and-music spectacle at the Brooklyn Academy of Music back in 2011, the studio-recording version of Brooklyn Babylon raises a few questions of its own: Is this a proper jazz record, or is it a one-dimensional document of a live multi-media project? And: does it matter?

The answer does matter. If this were just a callback to some live event, it would be of interest mostly to those who attended the shows. But the first two tracks — “Prologue” and “The Neighborhood” — advertise that the new music here will be able to carry this idiosyncratic album on its own terms. The first piece features some high-spirited marching band romping-about, as well as a striking tenor sax solo from Sam Sadigursky. The second tune, after opening with a minimalist piano quote from LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” pairs electric bass with a sweetly idyllic clarinet solo that never gets too saccharine, thanks to some tart, brassy interruptions in the background. (Argue didn’t win that “arranger” DownBeat award for nothing.) The whole thing blooms into an electric guitar-driven section that, in turn, deftly morphs back into a reprise of its opening piano motif.

And there’s still more than 40 minutes of inventive music like that left to discover. Some of the pieces feature wooden flutes, others Afro-Peruvian percussion. Ingrid Jensen’s electric trumpet solo in “Building” calls to mind Miles’s best fusion bands. That all these sounds work together so elegantly is evidence of expert execution, not just singular vision; the entire program flows in a way that many modern-classical composers ought to envy. And you don’t need to look up the plotline of the (wordless) stage show — it was about an architect commissioned to build the world tallest carousel amid “embattled neighborhoods” — in order to enjoy the music. Argue’s curiosity and skill at integrating all his fascinations represent the humanism of the narrative capably on its own. Both florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say (and the ambition to match), Brooklyn Babylon is essential listening for all sorts of musical communities.

Scuzzy, no-nonsense blues-rock

Tracked entirely at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye studio in Nashville, Hanni El Khatib’s sophomore outing lives up to its title. Head in the Dirt is loaded with raw, scuzzy, no-nonsense blues-rock, its lyrics telling of misfit isolation, relationship angst and hardscrabble street life.

Plenty has already been said about the garage revival spearheaded by the likes of Ty Segall, JEFF the Brotherhood and Mikal Cronin, but what sets El Khatib apart is his fascination with the rootsier end of rock ‘n’ roll — think Bo Diddley and Ballin’ Jack. Thanks to his Bay Area skate-park roots, he absorbed these influences through the dual prisms of hip-hop and punk, which made his 2011 debut Will the Guns Come Out a muzzle-blast of slashing guitars, gravel-crunching beats and rebel swagger.

El Khatib’s growth as a songwriter takes Head in the Dirt a step further, but it doesn’t hurt that he has an ass-kicking band behind him (Auerbach on bass, Bobby Emmett on keyboards and Patrick Keeler on drums). The title track swirls out of a psychedelic haze into a razor-sharp groove, with El Khatib snarling into a distorted microphone, “Don’t want your empathy/ The road to my heart is narrow and covered with thorns.” Despite that grim sentiment, El Khatib is mostly having fun; you can hear it in the guitar solo that rips through “Skinny Little Girl,” in the twists and shouts of “Save Me” (which reprises the evergreen “Not Fade Away” shuffle beat, and in the pure elation of the scuzz-pop ditty “Penny” (“You’re my perfect little penny/ So please shine on”). Vintage amps buzzing all around him, El Khatib sounds right at home in the Black Keys’ sandbox.

A reassuring and comforting text, played by a remarkable ensemble

First, I feel it’s important to say that, as of this writing, David Lang is nowhere near death. I see him walking through the neighborhood from time to time and he is his usual cheery, deadpan self. And yet the Bang on A Can co-founder has produced an incandescent string of pieces in recent years focused exclusively on death and dying. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Match Girl Passion gravely watches a poor young girl freeze to death as passersby ignore her. His yet-to-be-recorded Love Fail takes an oblique look at the fatal love affair between Tristan and Isolde. His haunting, drifting Salle des Departs (recorded here under the title “Depart”) was written for a hospital morgue. And then there’s Death Speaks, a five-movement work which takes up most of this recording. Here, death is not an event, but a figure, like something out of an engraving by Albrecht Dürer. But unlike the American folk song “O Death,” in which Death is a scary, implacable foe — the singer asks, “oh Death, won’t you pass me over another year” — Lang has assembled a text in which Death is addressing us, with a message that is ultimately reassuring, and comforting.

The text is built around the many and varied instances in the songs of Franz Schubert in which the figure of Death speaks. The music, as in the other death-themed works named above, has a transparent texture that sets off and subtly colors those texts, and the voice delivering it. That voice belongs to Shara Worden, one of the current breed of musicians who move fluidly between the worlds of classical music and indie rock. While still leading her own band, My Brightest Diamond, Worden has become the go-to voice for the so-called “indie classical” crowd. The rest of the ensemble here is equally remarkable: Bryce Dessner, one of the twin electric guitarists from the popular rock band The National, and a fine composer himself; Owen Pallett, the violinist, vocalist and composer who formerly recorded as Final Fantasy; and Nico Muhly, the in-demand composer and keyboardist whose works range from choral to electronic. With essentially an all-star band, Lang has chosen to write music which is not conventionally virtuosic, relying instead of the quartet’s musicality and precision. The results are quietly stunning. Highlights include the gentle, chiming minimalism of part 1, “You Will Return”; the resonant percussive use of the piano’s bass end in part 2, “I Hear You”; the deft, rhythmic use of the violin in part 3, “Mist Is Rising”; and the lovely duet that blossoms in part 5, “I Am Walking.”

After Death Speaks, the album invites you to relax in the dark-hued but warm ambience of “Depart,” for chorus and strings. Probably best not to think too much of the French morgue for which it was written.

The band's sincere love of music of all kinds really shines through

When The Melvins put out an album of covers, a little irreverence, both in song choice and in execution, is to be expected. Deciding to replicate the electric piano intro to Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” with some chintzy-sounding Casio tones, and completely disregarding the second verse of the song: par for the course. Turning The Jam’s “Art School” into an oi-punk anthem, complete with introductory chanting and a spoken outro from someone affecting an over-the-top British accent (“Is this too Rough Trade?”): not surprising. And if any other group puts a Throbbing Gristle homage and the theme to John Waters’s Female Trouble on the same LP, please contact us immediately. But when Buzz Osbourne, in the press materials, states unequivocally that “we REALLY like all of these songs,” he’s not just flapping his gums. The group (joined by a handful of friends, including Neurosis’s Scott Kelly, Foetus’s JG Thirwell and Mudhoney’s Mark Arm) tears through obscurities from nearly forgotten California punk groups like Pop-O-Pies and Tales of Terror with the same eagerness and fervor that’s bestowed upon faithful renditions of Venom’s “Warhead” and David Bowie’s “Station To Station.” That said, it’s when The Kinks’ fuddy-duddy late-era track “Attitude” is turned into a great Buzzcocks outtake, or The Fugs’ “Carpe Diem” becomes a long-lost Nuggets track, that the adventurous spirit of Everybody Loves Sausages, and The Melvins’ sincere love of music of all kinds, really shines through.

Working with adventurous influences to brute, yet majestic ends

A cabin on the side of an active volcano is a captivating image. There, pastoral peace shares space with violent bombast; the world is a fury, a wonder. As a metaphor it’s an exceptional fit for Akron/Family’s music; as a real place, it served as the location from the writing of their last release, 2011′s ecstatic S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT. Some two years later the band has come down from the mountain and crawled down into the doom basement (studio) of Seattle producer Randall Dunn. The new songs take aim at familiar targets (harmony, frenzy), but find the band working with an adventurous set of influences to brute, yet majestic ends.

The album flips between prog-psych freak-outs, monastic slow jams, Afro-pop rhythm and noise-addled soul. Reverb drenched vocals, swells of minor-keyed strings, futzed electronics, complex drum rhythms smack against handclaps, jangly guitars and lightly spaced tambourine, and horns. The tracks skid from one time signature or influence to another, but feel of a whole — like some take on American roots by way of a post-industrial Africa invaded by Eastern shamans. On paper, it sounds haphazard, incomplete. But Akron/Family build these disparate parts into something explosive or holy or both, time and again on Sub Verses. There’s no mythic volcano to stamp the narrative; there’s only a radical harmony, divergent strands threading together.

Hushed and delicate portrayals of loveless lives, dissonant relationships and bleak futures

The London trio Daughter usually gets filed under folk or indie-folk, but their music bears no traces of strum-and-stomp barnstorming or campfire confessional. The band interprets folk the same way Jason Molina records do: dusky guitars, spare arrangements, sparse beats and anguished vocals thrust into the spotlight. Daughter’s full-length debut, If You Leave, softens this stark foundation with chilly atmospheric effects, lyrics haunted by romantic angst and rebirth, and Elena Tonra’s low-lit voice, which is as hazy and tortured as Chan Marshall sounded on early Cat Power records. The results are often hushed and delicate; “Smother” is lovely slow-core, both “Amsterdam” and “Winter” resemble Bat for Lashes, and the relatively upbeat “Human” echoes the whimsy of Sigur Ros’s folkier moments.

Yet Daughter isn’t easily pigeonholed; If You Leave‘s biting moments sting like an icy wind. “Youth” transforms from a somber lullaby into a galloping, battle-scarred treatise on failed relationships (“If you’re in love, then you are the lucky one/’Cause most of us are bitter over someone”), while electric guitar simmers underneath the surface of “Lifeforms” before crescendoing into distressed post-rock howls. The record is desolate and desperate in equal measures. Little by little, If You Leave‘s portrayals of loveless lives, dissonant relationships and bleak futures burrow under the skin, lingering long after the album ends.

Direct and tuneful, replacing raw, loose rhythms with more economical song structures

Over the past two years, Louisville, Kentucky’s Coliseum have completed their evolution from a storming, metallic hardcore powerhouse to a more musically refined post-punk band. The group’s fourth full-length, Sister Faith is direct and tuneful, replacing raw, loose rhythms with more economical song structures. The album was produced by J Robbins, which explains the Jawbox influence, but there are also strains of Fugazi and Quicksand present in the barbed hooks.

As much as the music seems driven by the members’ collective record collections, Ryan Patterson’s lyrics seem to stem from an inability and unwillingness to fit into the mainstream and the toll it has taken. “All my life, failure, All I see, failure/ All my dreams, failure,” he barks in “Last/Lost” before concluding, “See clearly from failure, live freely from failure.” And on “Fuzzbang,” he rails, “Gotta get away, wish we could close our eyes and dream it all away.” Patterson’s resigned discontent shines through Coliseum’s tunes, which steamroll without obliterating and cut without leaving scars regardless of tempo or intensity.

A genuine rebirth of a sneering, vital band, defiant as ever

Few albums are so misleadingly titled as Ready to Die. The first release in 40 years under the “Iggy & the Stooges” banner sounds nothing like resignation; its taut 10 songs — clocking in at an old-school 34 minutes — constitute a genuine rebirth of a sneering, vital band, defiant as ever. Iggy Pop’s voice retains its feral power on searing opener “Burn” and lower-middle class anthem “Job,” while his deep croon conveys poignancy on the woebegone closer “The Departed.” Not-so-secret weapon James Williamson, retired from his job at Sony, is back in the fold, replacing the late Ron Asheton, and reminding listeners how integral his gracefully primal guitar playing and hooky songwriting were to seminal 1973 Stooges classic Raw Power. Bassist Mike Watt’s muscular, supple lines propel everything forward, even flirting with Motown-y funk on hilarious horndog anthem “DD,” while original Stooge drummer Scott “Rock Action” Asheton keeps it all earthbound, but just barely.

Agile and aggressive, like a ragtag version of the Raveonettes

If you adhere to the strict definition of the term, you really shouldn’t call it shoegaze if you can dance to it. This is a problem you run into when categorizing the most recent effort by No Joy. While the Montreal band formed by Jasamine White-Glutz and Laura Lloyd had its feet firmly plastered onto its reverb pedals on 2010 debut Ghost Blonde, new album Wait To Pleasure is far more agile and aggressive. Make no mistake: No Joy retains the bathyspheric vibe it established on Ghost Blonde, if only by virtue of its distant-sounding vocals, which rarely interrupt the mysterious vibe with an enunciated word. What’s different here is an avowed guitar crunch and blasts of white noise that at times make No Joy resemble a ragtag version of the Raveonettes. It’s just as easy to spot similarities to Lush’s shimmying pop (“Wrack Attack”), the Breeders’ bass-heavy rumbles (“E”), or the Kills mucking about with the Cure’s “A Forest” (“Blue Neck Riviera”). While these are somewhat expected influences and sounds, “Lunar Phobia” serves up a mid-album surprise, as a shaggy Madchester beat bubbles alongside some shamelessly catchy synth-pop tricks. It may be time to retire the band name as well as their shoegazer label.