Few jazz masters have seen their reputations yo-yo like Ahmad Jamal, now ascendant again, to judge by Saturday Morning, a French studio session recorded early in 2013 at age 82-and-a-half. There was a time when Jamal was considered disreputably dainty, a mere crowd-pleaser playing fussy, corseted arrangements of pretty tunes. The opening “Back to the Future” may serve as (re)introduction to the two-fisted Jamal — product of Pittsburgh, that font of piano talent: Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Billy Strayhorn, Dodo Marmarosa, Erroll Garner, Sonny Clark, Horace Parlan.

“Back to the Future” is kicked along by a delayed-second-beat Cuban syncopation via New Orleans’s Herlin Riley, who’d had an ’80s stint with the pianist, and favors a tight, in-the-pocket stance throughout — his cooking more about the hi-hat slapping shut than a ringing ride cymbal. There’s funk in Reginald Veal’s bass grooves too, not least when he doubles Jamal’s left hand for a fat reinforced foundation — as on the longer take of the title track, where after riding the groove a good while, the pianist takes some weird side trips. “The Line”‘s deep groove has more than a little dub reggae in it.

From early on, Jamal has been a great and witty quoter, studding solos with bits of odd songs from all over — quoting his own ’50s benchmark “Pavanne” on “Firefly,” the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” on “One,” and the Association’s 1967 hit “Windy” near the end of “Silver” (an homage to pianist Horace). On Duke Ellington’s “I Got It Bad,” Jamal keeps divvying in snatches of Duke’s “Just Squeeze Me” and Ellington’s piano intro to Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” in effect juggling three tunes at once.

Not that the album is perfect; a loose and discursive “I’m in the Mood for Love” makes me long for his old trio’s taut economy. Rounding out the quartet, percussionist Manolo Badrena abets the Latin polyrhythms on bongos and conga, but also employs gizmos that should have been moth-balled long ago: flexatones, chime racks and whistles.

Jamal has been making deep-groove records for awhile — the 2011 recording Blue Moon, for instance. His modern stuff is splashier than the pristinely clean and precise jazz he played at first, but he was already using Afro-Caribbean rhythms back then. By the early ’50s, many small jazz bands had caught a mild Latin bug, adding a conga or bongo player. Jamal’s first trio had no drummer at all, but his under-praised guitarist Ray Crawford often mimicked bongos, slapping strings against the neck or pickup screws — as he did on “Will You Still Be Mine” or the spry Jamal arrangement of the kids’ song “Billy Boy” that other pianists cribbed. Crawford’s mock-bongos echoed on even after Jamal replaced him with kit drummers — notably Vernel Fournier, another New Orleanean bringing those second-line beats. (The classic statement from that trio is 1958′s live At the Pershing, one of the records that kept Chess/Argo afloat.)

Jamal’s trio music was so strikingly designed and cleanly executed that some critics dismissed it as cocktail music, until Miles Davis spoke up, pointing to Jamal’s influence on his own music — the understatement, use of silence and open space, and melodic orientation as an improviser. The several tunes Jamal wrote or recorded that Miles covered made his admiration plain — including “Billy Boy” and “Ahmad’s Blues,” features for Davis’s admiring pianist Red Garland. (Even more than Miles, Jamal exploits contrasting dynamics, very soft versus grandly loud: “I still hear orchestras in my head,” he told drummer Kenny Washington in 2003.)

Less obviously influential on Davis’s conception was Jamal’s way of tweaking a song’s form: adding interludes or tags (extended endings), or improvising over a form that differs from the melody’s. For the trio, every tune was a fresh project, a specific object with distinctive features to draw out. Miles really capitalized on those ideas in his great 1960s quintet — though sideman Cannonball Adderley had noted that very particular Jamal influence by 1959.

That was the year of Miles’s Kind of Blue, and the rise of modal improvising on unrelated scales. That album figures in a little whirlwind of serial influences, with Jamal at its center. In 1955, his trio with Crawford and bassist Israel Crosby recorded “Pavanne,” a 1935 light classic from composer Morton Gould’s Symphonette No. 2. Per Gould (and the orchestra in Jamal’s head), at around 1:30 they go into a holding pattern on one chord, then move it up a half step. They didn’t improvise on that episode; Crawford played a slinky little melody that sounded like a spontaneous fill, lifted straight from the Symphonette. But Miles liked that modulating holding pattern enough to build his classic blowing tune “So What” on it. And Miles’s sideman John Coltrane so liked improvising on that same form, he recycled it into his own “Impressions” two years later, borrowing Crawford’s “Pavanne” guitar lick for the melody — probably not realizing it originated with Morton Gould.

With the 1960s, Jamal’s reputation began to wane again, as he made albums with choirs, strings and electric piano. One of the first jazz gigs I ever saw, in 1974, remains one of the oddest: For the first set Jamal played his current single, the theme from M*A*S*H, for 45 minutes. The second set, he did it again.

Miles Davis in his 1989 autobiography lamented that Jamal was (again) underrated. After that, the pianist gradually ascended to elder statesman status. The NEA declared him a Jazz Master in ’94, and he worked and recorded regularly. He became easy to take for granted. Then a record like Saturday Morning comes along to remind you he can still deliver.

First things first: as you’ve probably noticed, we invited Moby to take over eMusic this week. He selected the interviews, he talked to us about his new record, and he also picked his 10 favorite records from the eMusic catalog. You can read the full batch of content here. Of his new record, Innocents, Ian Gittins says:

Innocents, his 11th studio album, may be the one to reverse that trend. Recorded entirely in his home studio, it shows the reflective electro-auteur is back on sublimely sure-footed form, balancing the euphoric glow of headphones techno at its most acute with the melancholic ache that has undercut all of his finest work. Where Play famously utilized samples of long-lost Delta blues and gospel alumni and Alan Lomax’s field recordings, this time Moby turns to contemporary leftfield figures for his nap hand of evocative other voices.

HAIM, Days Are Gone: If you have not heard anything from this record yet, I need to first ask: how have you not heard anything from this record yet? Why haven’t you heard anything from this record yet? Three sisters from LA straight-up made one of the best pop records of the year. This one is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED Barry Walters thinks so, too. He says:

Nearly every cut exudes the confidence of a single: There have already been four of them, and that doesn’t even count “If I Could Change Your Mind,” a soft-rock plea punctuated by handclaps and hi-hat from the disco gods. And yet there’s plenty of weirdness too: “My Song 5″ features not just Tom Waits-goes-dubstep moves and a righteous double-tracked fuzz bass solo, but also super-distorted virtual trombones that essentially fart along with the vocal. Wilson Philips never thought of that.

Lorde, Pure Heroine: Speaking of the best pop records of the year, New Zealand teenager Lorde has made another one of them. Good God, do I love this record. Lithe dance beats, smart, acerbic lyrics and gently bobbing melodies make for a basically perfect final package. Case in point: lead single “Royals” sounds like it’s an ode to empty materialism, until you listen closely to the lyrics and realize it’s actually a takedown of empty materialism. This one is also HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Jayson Greene says:

The songs on Pure Heroine are funny and legible and shrewd, sketching out a sharp framework and shading it in expertly. If New Zealand teenager Ella Yelich-O’Connor weren’t a solo performer, she’d make a successful behind-the-scenes hit writer. Her songwriting is more subdued and low-key than the radio chart pop of the moment — “Royals” is mostly a fingersnap of percussion, and “Ribs” is a rainy-windshield blur of synth pads and muted drums — but it’s blessed with this same supernatural acuity. These songs are smarter than any 17-year-old I’ve ever known, and smarter than a lot of 40-year-olds I know now.

Oneohtrix Point Never, R Plus Seven: Honestly this is just a non-stop week of RECOMMENDED albums. I’ve loved the strange, moody music Daniel Lopatin has made as Oneohtrix Point Never. R Plus Seven is another fascinating chapter in the ongoing riddle that is his career. It’s a good ‘un. Michaelangelo Matos says:

R Plus Seven is ambitiously detailed, each tendril of sound — whatever its source, human voice or digital static — seemingly painted onto the aural canvas with a fine brush. Maybe he was inspired by his December 2012 participation, with visual artist Nate Boyce, in a multimedia evening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; there’s a fine-art quality to R Plus Seven‘s gradations. But there’s a public-spiritedness that it shares, along with a few compositional qualities, with the ’70s downtown New York minimalism in whose steps it proudly follows.

Those Darlins, Blur the Line: Alt-country cutups return with a record that is cleaner and more direct than previous efforts. The production is crisper, and the songs are less ragged and sloppy, making for pristine country-rock that goes down smooth.

Basia Bulat, Tall Tall Shadow: OK, look, I’m kind of a mark for Basia Bulat. Chalk it up to the fact that I was a huge 10,000 Maniacs fan when I was in my 20s, maybe? However you slice it: her third record is her strongest to date, and on its final triptych of songs she roams outside the folk-based instrumentation she’s become known for to areas that are darker and weirder and more unsettling. This one is RECOMMENDED Peter Blackstock says:

Bulat’s versatility with guitar, piano, autoharp and charango (a lute-like Andean instrument) allows her to compose on a broad canvas, allowing the tone of her material to range from haunting balladry reminiscent of classic English folk to moody explorations to the instantly engaging urgency of “It Can’t Be You” and the title track. Binding it all together is Bulat’s spectacular and singular voice: She draws you in as if you’re privy to an intimate conversation, then suddenly soars high with sweetness and grace, seeking a revelation somewhere in the astral plane.

Deltron 3030, Event II: Those of you out there wondering when David Cross, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, David Chang and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were going to be on a rap record: your day has come. Barry Walters says:

That kind of talent roster would be utterly top-heavy in lesser hands, but Nakamura’s finely finessed aesthetic specializes in off-the-wall excess: It’s everywhere on this retro-futurist opus. It’s unclear if the jazzy cop-show grooves that appear throughout out are sampled or freshly orchestrated; they sound like the former, but feel like the latter. All three brothers, despite the long hiatus, are right on time — even if it’s more than a little warped.

The Field, Cupid’s Head: The Field’s Axel Willner makes house music for the ears, not the body. It’s always rich and fascinating. Bill Brewster says:

Cupid’s Head continues Willner’s exploration of the fertile common ground between shoegaze and the wide-open spaces of Manuel Göttsching, or the post-acid house Wild Pitch mixes from Chicago’s DJ Pierre. Pierre, in a way, provides Willner’s template, with his layers of subtle keyboard sounds, treated vocals and percussion, the overall effect being an ever-ascending aural illusion of spiralling sounds. Willner’s samples, however, are microcosmic, sometimes less than a bar in length, and they stack up to provoke a sense of dizzying abandon and release.

Yuck, Glow & Behold: Poor Yuck, man. Just when that ship was leaving the dock, their lead vocalist leapt out and scurried into the arms of Neil Hagerty to make a solo album full of songs twice as long as they needed to be. Yuck soldiered on, though, god bless ‘em, and their second record is less Dino Jr and more MBV, full of big washes of sound tempered by guitarist Max Bloom’s gentle, cumulonimbus vocals.

“>Leverage Models, Leverage Models: Breezy, breathy electro-indie record from Shannon Fields, aka Leverage Models. Kind of a Lightning Seeds vibe in spots, kind of early Erasure vibe in spots. Fields’ parents were Pentecostal preachers, apparently, and there’s a definite sense of otherworldly euphoria to these songs. Sharon Van Etten sings on one of them. FYI.

The Four Mints, Gently Down Your Stream: Excellent sweet soul reissue from overlooked ’60s R&B group (via the always-excellent Numero Group), the songs on this record blend the gorgeous harmonies of doo-wop with the cotton-glove delivery of soul music. Also the title track has one of the best double-entendres I’ve ever heard in a pop song, and they get away with it by singing it like sweet nothings whispered in a lovers’ ear. This sucker is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Blind Boys of Alabama, I’ll Find a Way: Latest from legendary gospel group is jam-packed with guest spots, including Justin Vernon, tUnE-yArDs, My Brightest Diamond, Sam Amidon and more. And the extra bonus is that Blind Boys of Alabama on their own are awesome, so there’s that. This is grizzled, southern fried rock & roll, smoky and irresistible.

Dr. Dog, B-Room: More everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink rock songs from Philly group moseys around the corners of classic soul, ’60s rock, low-grade psychedelia and other dusty crate-digging styles. This one is as shaggy as previous outings, its songs having a loose, band-jamming-in-a-room feel.

Blitzen Trapper, VII: Portland roots-rockers roots-rock on back with another batch of batter-dipped choogle-core. Lots of Skynyrdy licks and Dylany vocals, as warm and worn as an old flannel shirt or as weathered as an old straw hat. That’s enough imagery right? No? As sturdy and slow-burning as the coals in a corncob pipe.

Elf Power, Sunlight on the Moon: Latest from long-running Elephant Sixers; where other bands in this collective took identifiable forbears (The Beatles, Beach Boys, etc) and turned them inside out, the Elves (as I call them in this writeup) forged their own weird path, dipping lo-fi indie rock in an acid bath, sounding at times like an ad-hoc Roxy Music.

The Fuzz, Fuzz: Ty Segall is at it again! Except, holy cow, this time it’s full-on Sabbath-sounding! I was not expecting this! The last time I saw Ty he covered “Paranoid,” but this is next level — a whole batch of sun-fried stoner jams, the kind of thing that would give Blue Cheer a run for their money or would sidle up nicely next to Masters of Reality. RECOMMENDED

Rapsody, The Idea of Beautiful: Rapsody was my favorite rapper in the group Kooley High, with a lightning-crack flow, gallons of attitude and a knack for incisive social commentary that didn’t feel like preaching. This is her full-length debut, and it’s a suitable showcase for her talent, situating her wry, young-Lauryn Hill flow amid smoky productions. RECOMMENDED

Melt-Banana, Fetch: Woo-hoo! More bonkers greatness from Japanese noiseniks is as scabrous and woozy as you might expect. Stabbing shards of guitars, panic-attack drums and desperate, yelping vocals make this one a spectacular blender of noise. Everythig is loud and moving at light speed, so fast it’s impossible to get your brain around it. This one is RECOMMENDED

Quasi, Mole City: In 1998, Quasi — Sam Coombes and Janet Weiss — made a record called Featuring “Birds”, and it was awesome. This is their new one. Douglas Wolk says:

Mole City is spilling over with crisp, witty rock songs, punctuated by bonus noise doodles. Weiss is a piledriving drummer most of the time (she tones it down when the songs call for it, but it’s really fun when she cuts loose), and Coomes favors super-fuzzed-out instrumental sounds and massive riffs to set off his weedy smart-alec voice. And they’re as locked into each other’s sense of rhythm as any two musicians can be.

Nelly, M.O: Is it getting hot in here, or is there a new Nelly record out today? Man, remember how Nelly was one of the biggest superstars on the planet, and then he released an individually packaged double-album Sweat and Suit, and then, mysteriously, he wasn’t anymore? Well, he’s back. The lead single from this kind of sounds like “The Whisper Song,” which doesn’t bode well for anyone. The rest is comprised of skittery beats topped with Nelly’s speak-sing delivery and a few naked bids for “Hot in Herrre 2: Electric Hot-aloo.”

Tired Pony, The Ghost of the Mountain: This band has a weird resume. It’s Peter Buck (naturally), the singer from Snow Patrol, Jacknife Lee (who produced recent R.E.M. and U2 records but will always and forever be known to me as the guitarist from Compulsion, the drummer from Belle & Sebastian and a bunch of other folks make a bunch of songs that sound more or less like what you’d guess a bunch of songs by those people would sound like.

If Namjoo must be compared to a musical resident of our hemisphere, that person would be Brazil’s Caetano Veloso, with whom the Iranian shares a mutual concern for love and society, a passion for both traditional and nontraditional music, a history of political banishment for their art and adoration by both the masses and intelligentsia. And just as Veloso has chronicled the history of Brazil’s ’60s-kindled Tropicália movement, Namjoo, whose own work dips into the era regularly, provides an insider’s analysis of Iran’s 21st-century “underground” music scene in essays and lectures.

Namjoo was in “unplugged” mode when he stepped onstage at Manhattan’s Asia Society recently. Dressed in sandals, flared jeans and a long-waisted shirt, he carried the setar, a three-stringed long-necked lute, he would play all evening. Drummer Yahya Alkhansa, who notably, perhaps symbolically, played traps rather than traditional Persian percussion, joined him. The duo performed pared-down versions of songs Namjoo had recorded originally with full bands, thereby shifting the emphasis to his remarkable classical and extended vocal techniques and a relatively rudimentary setar style.

ZZ Top met 14th-century Iranian poet Hafez in “Del Miravad” (The Heart Slips), a cross-cultural boogie that found Namjoo yelping and growling in registers high and low like Captain Beefheart singing John Lee Hooker. Just as blues singers reconfigure familiar stanzas for their own purposes, Namjoo samples and re-edits verses by Hafez, Rumi, Saadi and other Persian poets in his songs, sometimes adding his own words. In “Del Miravad” he choogled out to Persian lines like “O master most generous/ In gratitude to your health/ One day bestow your grace/ Upon this dervish of no wealth.” Namjoo, however, is rich in references, and a later song, “Morghe Shayda” (Lovesick Bird),” was based on an Arabian rather than Persian scale while borrowing its musical guts from the opening riff of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World.”

A week after his Asia Society show, Namjoo discussed underground music in Iran at the museum with the help of an interpreter. He spoke about his musical background, noting that his first exposure to Western rock was the Doors’ “Break on Through,” which he appropriates, along with “People Are Strange,” in the jazzy vocal trippiness of “Ro Sar Beneh” on both his remarkable 2007 studio album Toranj as well as in a longer, stranger live version on his audacious 2012 live album, 13/8, recorded in Berkeley with a jazz quartet.

If Islamic culture lacks a Dionysian carnival tradition, as Namjoo believes, his passion for the Doors is pretty easily understood. As a recording artist in Tehran, Namjoo was required to submit his songs to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for approval. Every album was obliged to include songs praising either Islam’s Messiah or Ibn Ali (the Prophet Muhammed’s cousin and son-in-law), and Namjoo paid his dues accordingly. In 2009, while touring in Italy, he learned that he’d been sentenced in absentia to five years in prison for an allegedly “contemptuous recitation” of Quranic verses in his song “Shams.” He denied the charge, apologized unsuccessfully and has resided in the United States since.

Thanks to the Internet, permission to produce music was no longer necessary, or even possible, and Namjoo found himself an involuntary “underground” musician when his first and unfinished album Jabr was leaked without his knowledge. (On stage, he insisted his new songs not be filmed.) He ended the show with the 14-minute title track of his 2011 live album Alaki. Reminiscent of Leonard Cohen in its epic accretion of detail and obliquely melancholy minor key, “Alaki” (meaning phony) is ultimately hilarious. Namjoo, who wrote the entire poem, delivers his verses in increasingly absurd voices. “O! The ’60s were very fun (phony nostalgia, phony nostalgia)/ There was manhood in the old days, (phony figures, phony physiques)/ When we were children, there was homemade bread (phony flavors, phony flavors)/ Now men only have mustaches (phony mustaches, phony mustaches)…”

Namjoo’s music speaks to an expatriate community that would prefer to still live in Iran but refuses to toe the fundamentalist line. His music is funny, deep, ironic and border-erasing in the best of ways. What he really needs is a proper introduction to the West, a righteous translation that could also serve as an introduction to Iran’s rich and vibrant musical culture past, present and future. Tehran’s loss, meanwhile, is Brooklyn’s gain.

Drake, Nothing Was The Same: Oh, Drake. Drake, Drake, Drake. Beloved and loathed in equal amounts. So sad! So conflicted! Drake is one man, but he contains multitudes. You can figure out where you stand in the Great Drake Debate (Note to self: “Drakegate”?) of 2013 today. I liked Take Care a whole lot. I’ll stop there. Instead, I turn you over to Nick Murray, who says:

Nothing is something like rap’s version of Jordan’s Hall of Fame induction speech, the point where our hero stands at the top of his profession but still checks the kids who dissed him in high school and girls who turned a shoulder shortly thereafter. Where on “Tuscan Leather,” he’s “rich enough that I don’t have to tell ‘em that I’m rich,” on lead single “Started From the Bottom” (my mom’s favorite rap song since “Day ‘N’ Nite,” incidentally), he brags that “just a reminder to myself/ I wear every single chain even when in the house.”

Nirvana, In Utero – 20th Anniversary Remaster: And now, one of the greatest records of the last 20 years. Seriously, how great is this record? How earsplitting and angry and acrid and confrontational, even to this day? There are like 100 versions of the riessue naturally, because that’s the way things go these days: a single disc remaster, a deluxe edition that has the remaster, the controversially scrapped Steve Albini mixes at the end of the first disc, and a “2013 mix” of the album that sweetens things up a little (inspired, Krist Novoselic said, by the recent Doors reissues, which at long last justifies the existence of the Doors). Then there’s a Super Deluxe edition that features all of the above plus more B-Sides and the audio of the MTV Live & Loud special that aired around its release. IN OTHER WORDS, FANATICS, YOU DON’T HAVE A REAL COMPLAINT. I’ll leave it to you to decide which one you want most. Maura Johnston, who wrote this excellent Six Degrees of the album, says:

“Teenage angst has paid off well; now I’m bored and old,” Cobain drawls as the record opens; he had turned 26 during the album’s recording sessions. This slyly-expressed weariness defines much of In Utero; Cobain’s screeched “Get awayyy!” as Dave Grohl bashes behind him on the grimacing “Scentless Apprentice” could have been directed at any number of people lusting after his newfound fame, while the defiantly downcast “Rape Me” is a wide-eyed challenge for people to do their worst to one another, from the repurposed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff on down.

Deer Tick, Negativity: Speaking of Nirvana! Rhode Island band Deer Tick has a pretty good on-again/off-again side gig playing as Deervana, a Nirvana cover band that is like 300,000 times better than you’re even thinking. I’ve seen them twice, the most recent time being a few weeks ago when they played In Utero from start to finish, and it was amazing. This is what I mean right here. On their own, though, Deer Tick are great, the kind of whiskey-pickled country music that kicks and bucks. Their latest finds them calming down a bit, polishing up their ambling sound without losing any of the grit.

Mazzy Star, Seasons Of Your Day: And, hey, while we’re at it, there’s a new Mazzy Star record out today that way more people than I expected are excited about. The thing about Mazzy Star is that they are secretly one of the most influential bands on indie rock of the last 15 or so years — way, way more than the usual roster of bands that gets cited. So that should cheer up Hope Sandoval for like 6 seconds, maybe. Aww, I’m just kidding, gloomy! We love ya! Andrew Perry says:

Time often seems to stand still. The magic of old lights up every track, but there’s plenty on Seasons Of Your Day that furthers the Mazzy brief. The album glides into “In the Kingdom” on near-church-y organ riff, Sandoval imagining taking “a train into the city,” drifting out on an easy rhythm exquisitely coloured by Roback’s sublime, reverb-heavy electric twang.

Elton John, The Diving Board: Let’s just keep right on rolling with the comebacks with the latest from Sir Elton, produced by T Bone Burnett, who is kind of the Rick Rubin for people who don’t want their records to sound like they were recorded in a pitch-black airlock after being force-read the complete works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. John’s voice is ragged but his classical piano work hasn’t been better. If you do nothing else with your day, you must read Barry Walters‘ stunning, no-note-left-unturned Icon piece on Sir Elton. It’s damn near perfect. Take that, Solzhenitsyn. Of the new record, Barry says:

As its artwork and song titles like “My Quicksand” suggest, this is Elton at his most serious, like the world-weary elements of Blue Moves without comic relief, or The Big Picture without synths. Continuing the T Bone Burnett alliance that began with 2010′s The Union, Elton generates beaucoup ballads here but few pop tunes: His keyboard melodies are consistently far more finessed than what he’s singing. His voice is at its most ragged, but his classical piano work has rarely been better, and there’s little to distract from those facts.

Kings of Leon, Mechanical Bull: Here’s a thing: I’m not overly mad at the Kings of Leon. In the course of my career as a rock critic, I’ve seen them live about 10 times, and those songs, little by little, won me over. The last time I saw them, they took the stage to Scott Walker’s “The Electrician.” Of the new one — their first after a long-ish hiatus — Ryan Reed says:

The make-or-break moment on Kings of Leon’s sixth LP is “Walk a Mile,” a grandiose, slow-burning arena-rock anthem built on lonely guitar twang, a ghostly choir, and pizzicato strings. Depending on what kind of fan you are, it’s either the band’s syrupy tipping point — or their maximalist masterpiece. Really, it’s both. They’re no longer the scrappy backwoods teens they started as, and their evolution has been subtle but substantive: They’ve embellished their sound with bits of fractured art-rock and honest-to-gosh country. But with Mechanical Bull, they’ve managed to synthesize all these elements in ways that feel fresh and vibrant.

CHVRCHES, The Bones of What You Believe: I am pretty on board with this band! Triumphant, starry-eyed electropop sweetened by Lauren Mayberry’s caramel vocals. If you caught the Knife on their way out of Anchorman 2 when they were still laughing about all the good parts and you asked them to write a song, this is how it might turn out. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Icona Pop, This Is Icona Pop: I am going to assume that you’ve already heard breakout hit “I Love It” on account of you have ears and this is the 21st Century. The rest of the record seeks to match that single’s cheeky exuberance; there’s lots of hot pink synth streaks, top-of-lungs choruses, four-on-the-floor fist-punk bass beats and an overall sense of exuberance and giddiness.

Jesu, Everyday I Get Closer to the Light from Which I Came: For a band known for their ominous drones and suffocating sounds, the latest from Justin Broadrick draws on unusual inspiration: his experiences as a first time parent. Then again, the last Sunn O))) record featured a guest spot by Teddy Ruxpin, so what do I know? This one is RECOMMENDED Jon Wiederhorn says:

The new album strikes a balance between the sprawling epics of old and the organic shoegazer rock of Jesu’s last couple of records. Motivated, perhaps, by a near-complete lack of sleep, Broadrick crafted, surreal, multi-layered songs that abound with ethereal sounds, yet hold together as concrete, multi-dimensional tracks. “Homesick” expresses the duality of being away from loved ones with a monochromatic drum machine beat, a droning down-tuned riff and a simple, celestial guitar line.

The Proctors, Everlasting Light: It’s possible that I haven’t been paying the closest attention, but it feels like it’s been a long, long time since there was a release by Shelflife Records. I was pretty obsessed with this label a while back — cotton candy C86-style twee pop, with a roster full of bands that emphasize pouty, vaguely Anglophilic melody lines. The Proctors are no different — heartsick choruses sit at the center of these spun-sugar jangle-pop songs. Sarah Records R.I.P.

Frankie Rose, Herein Wild: We love Frankie Rose, man. Her latest picks up, sonically, where the outstanding Interstellar left off, but it’s a little more earthy and moody and toothy where the former was drifting and ethereal. Annie Zaleski says:

Herein Wild feels like a logical progression from Rose’s past work. Like Interstellar, the record contains plenty of lush, keyboard-gilded indie-pop — highlighted by the lilting Sarah Records homages “Sorrow” and “Into Blue” and the burbling, Stereolab-like “Question Reason” — and textures influenced by the Cure’s bleakest early days (the frantic drums and deep-cutting bass line of “The Depths,” cyclone-like synth spirals on “Minor Times”). The difference is that Herein Wild‘s more deliberate approach adds gravitas to Rose’s longing and melancholy, and lightness to her more optimistic moments.

Fresh & Onlys, Soothsayer: It’s a testament to how prolific the Fresh & Onlys are that the fact that they haven’t released a record since last year makes it seem like they’ve been away forever. This is a short one — just six songs to tide us over until the next full batch of F&O jams. I could not find a track from this to embed basically anywhere. I tried. Lord knows I tried.

The Shondes, The Garden: The latest from Brooklyn band combines big, gleaming anthemic hooks with rushing violins and tense, nervy guitars. There’s a heft to these songs that commands attention — a confidence and a sense of purpose. Imagine a tougher take on the Pretenders or a less-melodramatic Amanda Palmer or Patti Smith at her best and you’re getting close. Huge hooks, delivered with gusto.

Tanya Morgan, Rubber Souls: AWESOME. First new Tanya Morgan record in a long, long time. I was in love with Brooklynati, but feels like a lifetime since that one came out. It’s been a long time, Tanya Morgan. You shouldn’t have left us. Nate Patrin says:

On Rubber Souls Tanya Morgan merge that spirit with a neo-soul vibe a decade ahead of their more direct lyrical influences. That live-band sound, provided by producer 6th Sense and a cast of sharp session players, switches things up ably — deep slow-ride bass murmurs and airy guitar strums on “The Day I,” mellow g-funk synth bounce on “Never Too Much,” funkadelic dark-alley foot-chase tension on “Pick It Up,” and snapping-tight snares throughout.

Ha Ha Tonka, Lessons: Big, booming, triumphant, kinda roots-rocky but honestly kinda just rocky outing from this four-piece would fit pretty comfortably alongside the aforementioned Kings of Leon outing (which, as we’ve covered already, I consider a compliment). The songs have drive and pulse and push and are richly-layered and rally around the kind of choruses that get stuck in your head before they’re even finished.

Oh Land, Wishbone: Eerie, fizzy synth-based pop music that’s bright and quirky. There’s a little bit of Ellie Goulding here, but it’s a shade darker and more forbidding than that; twitching guitars tiptoe through braille-book keyboards for smoky pop that’s strangely alluring.

Night Beats, Night Beats: I got way, way into the album this band made for Trouble in Mind back in 2011, and it doesn’t sound like they’ve lost a thing. What you’ve got here is some dark, doomy jangle-psych: bug-eyed acid-freakout vocals, booming tom-tom percussion and wavy, miragelike guitars. If you went to a party in the late ’60s at someone’s loft and there was a band playing at the front of the room while someone projected an educational movie about space over top of them, this is what that band would sound like. Probably someone would be idly banging a tambourine. This one is RECOMMENDED. Burger Records is putting out the cassette, because of course they are.

Golden Animals, Hear Eye Go: On that same label, the Reverberation Appreciation Society, come Golden Animals, who have the same kind of wall-of-echo approach as Night Beats, but they’re doomier and spookier. I’d compare them to the Doors, but how many times can one man mention the Doors in 2013? Besides, this is better: starker and spookier and with more translucence. RECOMMENDED

Georgia Anne Muldrow as Jyoti, Denderah: Georgia Anne Muldrow’s outer-space psych-jazz odysseys have been fascinating to me for a while now. Usually she sings, making the whole thing feel that much weirder and more psychedelic. This one is just instrumental, but that will suffice. This is more traditional than her usual left-field offerings, but still worth a listen.

TRAAMS, Grin: TRAAMS are a British band with a fondness for scuzz and snarl and tension. The songs on their debut are coiled knots, ragged guitars seething and hissing and vocalist Stu Hopkins wailing desperately above them. It’s a panicked, clawing record, one where the songs quake and tremble as if they’ve just witnessed something awful and violent. RECOMMENDED

National Wake, Walk in Africa: 1979-81: This is awesome. Here’s the deal: National Wake were formed in South Africa in 1978 and drew not only from the local polyrhythmic traditional music, but also from super spiky UK post-punk like Gang of Four and early Wire. The result is gloriously kinetic music, beats that ping-pong around like super bounce balls in a concrete shed, vocals that are snarling while still being defiantly melodic. Only 700 copies of this album were ever released before it was withdrawn under government pressure. It is a lost classic, ripe for rediscovery. It’s also HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Au Revoir Simone, Move in Spectrums: Alongside the Oh Land and the CHVRCHES, Au Revoir Simone are the OG’s of the wistful, synthy game. This one is less mysterious than their earlier outings, more rooted in confident pop melodies and forthright choruses — the sound of someone yanking back the black curtains and letting the sun pour in.

Girls Against Boys, The Ghost List EP: This is a new Girls Against Boys EP! You know what that means: lots of stomach-turning, grimy instrumentation (“Fade Out” knicks Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” like M.I.A. did before them) with a lot of dead-pan non-linear lyrics so that the end result is something like The Hold Steady reading every third word of a William Gibson novel while some infernal punk band grinds away behind them. If you have never heard a Girls Against Boys song, this might not be the place to start (also I do not recognize the world in which you live) but long time fans will be psyched.

Totally Slow, Totally Slow: Revved-up pop-punk from this North Carolina band that lands somewhere between Japandroids and Knapsack, with a healthy dash of early ’00s mall punk for good measure. That’s not a dis, even though it sounds like one. There’s just the tiniest bit of polish, but a whole lotta gruff. Which, coincidentally, is the tagline to the new series of romance/hardboiled detective novels I’m working on, The Adventures of Louie Casanova.

Touche Amore, Is Survived By: Freaked-out screamo with throat-ruining vocals and peak-and-collapse dynamic. Suddenly, all of the kids are discovering late ’90s emo at once, man. This is the next big revival. You heard it here first. And you heard it everywhere like 15 years ago.

Heaven’s Gate, Transmuting: Spike the fangs-bared fury of hard rock with the ether-huffing wooze of shoegaze and you get Heaven’s Gate, a band of fantastic ferocity and terrifying volume. There’s a kind of goth doominess to the proceedings, but what it has above all else is a kind of unshakable violence. It’s RECOMMENDED

Allen Toussaint, Songbook: Two gigs at New York’s Joe’s Pub are captured here. Britt Robson says:

Toussaint’s dignified yet unpretentious personal style extends to his music. Crooning, melisma and smooth shifts in rhythm are deployed sparingly but to maximum effect in his vocals, so that even the quasi-novelty tunes he turned into hits with Lee Dorsey nearly 50 years ago (“Holy Cow,” “Working In A Coal Mine”) don’t clash with his versions of poignant ballads he minted for Irma Thomas (“It’s Raining”), Etta James (“With You In Mind”) and Esther Phillips (“Sweet Touch of Love”). And his piano work — a silkier variation on Professor Longhair’s second-line style — epitomizes New Orleans funk-and-roll, especially on a glorious medley of “Certain Girl,” “Mother-in-Law,” “Fortune Teller” and “Working in a Coal Mine,” and his instrumental take on the classic “St. James Infirmary.”

Various Artists, Rough Guide to Voodoo: I repped for these Rough Guides here in last week’s installment, and I continue to do so this week. They’re really good! This one first and foremost dispels the notion of Voodoo as some weird cult thing as depicted in movies of yore; rather, it’s simply a Hatian tribal religion with its own songs and chants and music. This compilation concentrates on the influence of that music both in Africa and America (there’s a Dr. John song, for example). A fascinating study.

Sting, The Last Ship: Sting has, apparently, had a pretty severe case of writer’s block for the last few years. Alas, all good things must come to an end.

Playing the piano is a highly unnatural activity. Musicians torment their tendons and train their fingers to drum on thin slabs of wood, whitened and polished to resemble elephant tusk, which then trigger complicated hammers that thud against wires stretched so taut that they would splinter their casing of bent wood if they were not held in place by a powerful steel frame. The desired result of all this calibrated pressure and elaborate percussion is a fluid, songlike and spontaneous outpouring of the human soul. Anyone who planned such a cumbersome, inefficient process from scratch would seem like a crank. How could it compete with simpler ways of producing music, like humming, thumping an animal skin, or blowing into a tube?

But just listen to Paul Lewis playing Beethoven or Schubert, and suddenly the piano seems like the most direct of instruments. Beethoven’s penultimate sonata, No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110, opens with a tune so tender it could practically be a lullaby, and that is how he shapes it. Without preciousness or melodrama, and with a downy pianissimo, he beguiles the ear into thinking that this is the only way the passage could possibly go. It’s not: Daniel Barenboim, for instance, pauses theatrically after the first A flat major chord, and then goes on to cram so many tempo adjustments, emphases, and expressive hesitations into a few measures that the theme comes out sounding jittery and hung over.

Expression is a gnarled topic in music. Do performers channel their own feelings through their fingers or reenact the emotions of long-dead scribblers who encoded them on the five-line staff? Or do the best somehow manipulate listeners’ emotions by administering the right dose of rubato? How can a performance sound spontaneous when the player knows every millisecond from memory and plays the piece every other night over the course of a month-long tour? And yet somehow, all these shades of volatility, premeditation, decoding, and technique mingle to produce music of imponderable beauty. It’s a kind of alchemy that only a few musicians can execute, almost none as completely as Lewis.

Concert seasons are dominated by a generation of hyper-analytic pianists with diamond-cut technique and a fervent attention to detail. But Lewis doesn’t simulate passion or call attention to his intelligence; he makes the music sound as if it were as thoughtlessly beautiful as a stream flowing over a stone. There’s nothing thoughtless about it, of course. Lewis has studied with Alfred Brendel, but he reminds me more of Artur Schnabel in the straightforward and natural way that he utters a musical phrase. His career has grown at a measured pace, and his repertoire has expanded more slowly still. He rarely touches new music, has a cool relationship with Chopin, and hasn’t been spotted near a Russian score in years. But his complete set of Beethoven sonatas and his survey of Schubert’s late music have made him a specialist in profundity.

Schubert was only 32 when he died, and the last sonatas should by rights have been the opening to decades of unknown marvels, so there’s really no such thing as “late Schubert.” Yet Lewis plays the final sonatas as the observations of a man enriched by a long lifetime’s worth of memories. By turns regretful, vibrant, angry and serene, these pieces seem to speak of death by distilling life to a musical essence. Desperate melancholy is not in fashion these days, but Lewis doesn’t care. He listens to Schubert’s confession and then makes it so utterly his own that it’s hard to listen to the B-flat sonata, D/ 960 without experiencing a stupefying sense of loss. The emotions that Lewis finds in these scores are not always pretty. He gives the final movement of the C-minor sonata (No. 19, D. 958), for example, a snarling, diabolical lilt: It’s a tarantella of the doomed, a gorgeous gallop into the infinite.

The concert went very well — so well that a few days later, Swallow dropped out of school and showed up at the Bleys’ New York apartment. He quickly found a place of his own and began his apprenticeship. The bassist began working with Paul in trios that played a few of Carla’s tunes. Clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre’s calm and open trio did “Jesus Maria” (among others), a classic and typical Bley tune: morose and jocular at the same time, with a fetching but obsessively repetitive melody.

Swallow eventually began turning up on some of Paul Bley’s trio records. On Closer for ESP in 1965, they play seven of Carla’s early tunes, including the quasi-improvised ballad “Closer,” the blocky march “Batterie” and earworms “And Now the Queen” and “Ida Lupino” (that last inspired by Franky Valli and the Four Seasons, she said later). Like other Bley tunes, those two move in small steps, re-tracing the same ground over and over, like third-harmony parts with delusions of grandeur: pawn’s moves between shifting chords. That’s logic a bass player can relate to.

The 1960s was the age of Albert Ayler, and compositions with pithy motives that improvisers could run with. Carla’s tunes were ready-made for spontaneous variations. Swallow also started working with hardbop trumpet balladeer Art Farmer, who recorded Carla’s “Sing Me Softly of the Blues” and “Ad Infinitum.”

Then they all went their own ways. Paul and Carla Bley divorced, and she slowly came into her own as a composer and arranger who played in her own bands. Steve Swallow and Paul Bley wouldn’t record again until the 1980s and ’90s, usually with Jimmy Giuffre along.

Starting in the mid ’60s, Swallow spent more than a decade with vibist Gary Burton, plugging Carla’s tunes early on. An expanded Burton band quartet recorded Carla’s suite A Genuine Tong Funeral in 1967; Burton’s quintet waxed 1975′s all-Bley Dreams So Real, with newcomer Pat Metheny joining Mick Goodrick on guitar.

Swallow was still in the band, but he’d gone through a sea-change in the late ’60s. He’d swapped his acoustic bass for an electric, played with a pick no less. He heard bass guitar as foundational bass and singing guitar both: a voice that could cover the chord roots and melodic branches.

Which is how he came to play with Carla Bley at last, joining her nine- or 10-piece little big band in the late ’70s. (Their first electric bassist was Soft Machine’s Hugh Hopper.) If some of her tunes can sound like clever third-trombone lines, she also wrote full-blown melodies for bass, and no one sounded better playing them than Swallow. Then as now, he gets an extraordinarily woody sound from the electric, even as it sings in its baritone/guitar voice. Hear her “Reactionary Tango” from 1979′s excellent Social Studies. Much of the time, the bassline is the melody, graceful and tuneful, in tango rhythm, even as it dutifully outlines the roaming harmony.

Carla played various keyboards in her own units, and she and Swallow began recording together in all sorts of settings, in her Very Big Band, and in octet and sextet and quintet and quartet and trio and duo — usually hers, sometimes his. They got on so well they became a couple, and have stuck together ever since, these drily funny white-haired stick figures who even look like they go together.

Summer of 2013, each put out an ECM album on which the other plays. Carla Bley’s Trios recorded in April reunites them with a frequent ally, saxophonist Andy Sheppard, who puts her gorgeous melodies in the key light. Now in her mid 70s, Bley is not composing so much, and on she Trios revisits five older tunes, including her lovely ballad “Utviklingssang” from Social Studies, and “Vashkar,” which Swallow first recorded with Paul’s trio a half-century earlier. These are subdued, late career readings, warm and polished.

Bley plays piano on Trios and in their duo. Swallow has said one reason he assembled the quintet heard on Into the Woodwork (a drummerless foursome until Jorge Rossy talked his way in) was to hear Carla on organ, where she gets a lean, clean and purposeful sound far from pull-out-the-stops B3 virtuosi like Shirley Scott. The dour sense of humor glimpsed in some of her composed melodies comes out; quotes from “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “Taps” in her “Still There” solo say it all about her drollery, and how seriously she takes herself.

She approaches organ less like a chooglin’ expressionist than an arranger asking what serves the tune best. Often, as with her own music, it’s enough to showcase the melody. Carla may not write much for herself anymore, but Swallow’s pen keeps moving. His “Back in Action” and “Unnatural Causes” are readymade for rowdy jamming, and show off the quintet (with Steve Cardenas on electric guitar and the under-heralded Chris Cheek on tenor) as one big groove machine.

Swallow had started composing in the 1960s (with “Eiderdown,” which became a minor standard) when he and Carla were first hanging out, so no surprise that his tunes sometimes resemble hers. “Exit Stage Left” could be one of Carla’s, with its infectious backbeat groove and push-pull bass rhythm, the slinky chordal movement and goofily circular blank-expression melody — and plenty of holes to let organ poke through. Why have a band if you can’t listen to your favorite person play, and play along?

When Dona Marivalda Maria dos Santos took the stage at Lincoln Center in Manhattan recently, she flickered like a psychedelic Snow White.

The glittery queen, priestess and president of Maracatu Naçao Estrela Brilhante wore an elaborately spangled, mostly red and white hoop-skirted gown she had sewn herself and would wear for but a single year. She was flanked by a pair of equally dazzling “ladies of the palace,” who carried the calunga dolls said to contain the ancestral spirits who guide this 96-year-old maracatu drumming “nation” (or nação) from the city of Recife in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil. Her king, holding both scepter and sword, danced beside her while a large androgynous “slave” had the wearying task of holding an oversized parasol above the royal couple. Behind the court, seven Estrela Brilhante (“Bright Star”) drummers created a titanic wall of rhythm. Like master of ceremonies Mestro Walter de França, who led the call-and-response songs that characterized their set, they wore Estrela’s blue and white garb adorned with namesake stars that lent an interstellar vibe to the affair.

Maracatu is both a percussion style and a culture in Brazil. Played on a variety of drums, cowbells and shakers, the music starts, stops and shifts gears at the leader’s whistling direction. During Carnival, maracatu groups of some 150 drummers and as many flamboyantly attired dancers fill the streets of Recife amid millions of spectators. Founded in 1906, Estrela Brilhante is a renowned and respected example of a 400-year-old tradition that bears a large and somewhat uncanny resemblance to that of New Orleans’s Mardi Gras Indians — as demonstrated by opening act Big Chief Monk Boudreaux & the Golden Eagles.

Two days before the show, ringleader Scott Kettner, who performed with both his Brooklyn-based Nation Beat and Maracatu New York groups, explained to me that both the Indians and maracatu nação were created by African slaves and flourish during Carnival in unique costumery created new every year. They blend African roots with indigenous influences to deliver loud, raucous call-and-response parade music. Maracatu nations, however, are aligned with Brazil’s syncretic Candomblé and Jurema religions. Dona Marivalda is both the group’s spiritual and secular leader. And maracatu drumming in Recife, where city-sponsored competitions have goosed the drummer body count upward, is both more rhythmically complex and simply more overwhelmingly populist than its New Orleans equivalent. Some, however, feel that competition has been a negative influence on maracatu groups, whose popularity increased through its association with the funky, fusion-y Mangue Beat movement of the early ’90s spearheaded by Chico Science’s Nação Zumbi.

Nation Beat drummer-bandleader Kettner’s first learned of maracatu from drumming teacher Billy Hart. Invited to play a Paraguay jazz festival in 1999, Kettner subsequently flew to Recife, where American ethnomusicologist Larry Crook hooked him up with Jorge Martin, the longtime Estrela Brilhante member who became the 22-year-old’s mentor. Communicating solely through the language of rhythm, Martin taught Kettner both how teach maracatu, as well as how to play it, by taking him into the favelas (shanty towns) where he taught drumming to children. Since opening his own maracatu school in Brooklyn in 2002, Kettner has brought Martin north several times as well as taken groups of students to study in Recife and to parade with Estela Brilhante.

In 2005, Kettner took his Brazil-New Orleans–jazz-Celtic fusion band Nation Beat south to record their debut album Maracatuniversal with Estrela Brilhante. These “bumpkins from Brooklyn,” as he describes his posse of young jazzers, became the first contemporary band to record with a traditional maracatu group. The experience “changed our lives,” he says simply. “We ended up throwing away all our notions about what music could or should be.” Nation Beat returned home a new attitude, a striking homage to the thunderous and beautiful world of Estrela Brilhante, and a new singer in Brazilian native Liliana Araújo.

Teaching maracatu drumming to gringos allowed Kettner to educate his potential audience, avoid flipping burgers for rent money, and spin off Maracatu New York the band from his school of the same name. Consisting of a half-dozen professional and semiprofessional percussionists filled out by students who’ve risen to the top, Maracatu New York released its own debut, Baque do Brooklyn (Brooklyn Beat), in July 2013. Nation Beat’s musical “cousin” adds horns and jazzy solos to traditional maracatu percussion arrangements that pay tribute to its sources without mimicking them overtly. “It’s a challenge,” Kettner admits. “I’ve been very careful artistically to not try to recreate what the traditional maracatu groups do. That’s a battle you’ll never win. I want listeners to say, ‘What is that?’ when they hear it. I want my music to lead people to the traditional groups.”

Elvis Costello & The Roots, Wise Up Ghost: I was lucky enough to attend last night’s show at Brooklyn Bowl where Costello & Company premiered these songs alongside with a host of EC classics. I can say first and foremost — as I have in this space many, many times — that the Roots are one of my favorite bands, and that I genuinely think they rival Radiohead in terms of their fascination with the possibilities of sound, and their dogged determination to experiment each time out. To spend any length of time with their studio albums — giving them real, concentrated listens — is to marvel at the master craftsmanship. Their pairing with Costello is a natural one. Both EC and ?uestlove are walking music encyclopedias, and Costello over the last few years is one of the few veteran performers who still displays a remarkable willingness to push himself. Even when he fails, you can’t accuse him of being complacent. Fortunately, the pairing is a win/win — Wise Up Ghost is the nerviest and edgiest Costello has sounded in years. It gets a hearty RECOMMENDED. It’s also an album with layers. Douglas Wolk dug deep into its catalog of hat-tips and references for us in this head-spinning piece that you should make some time to read. Of the record, he says:

The new Costello/Roots collaboration Wise Up Ghost — mostly recorded in the Roots’ dressing room for their regular gig on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon — sounds like the product of a couple of intense music nerds cheerfully impressing each other, and it’s drenched in musical history. Costello’s always been a habitual quoter of and alluder to other people’s songs, but the curious thing about Wise Up Ghost is that the catalog Costello spends most of his time revisiting is his own. It’s a remarkable record, the most surprising and challenging album Costello has made in many years.

Sebadoh, Defend Yourself: This is the first new Sebadoh record in 14 years! Holy shit! And it’s pretty good. God, remember The Sebadoh? That record was absolutely not good. But Barlow is back, the music is toothy and he’s as ornery as ever (as his biting, 100% accurate takedown of Don Henley for the AV Club proves, though he loses points for defending the Eagles because come on.) Defend Yourself is RECOMMENDED Michaelangelo Matos says:

What can it mean when a band whose defining trait was angst comes back after 14 years and sounds exactly the same? That’s Sebadoh’s Defend Yourself, their first full album since 1999′s The Sebadoh, whose ballad-heaviness made it among the lesser-loved items in the band’s catalog. The folks who missed the gnarlier guitars and faster tempos of classics like 1994′s Bakesale have their wish granted here. Defend Yourself is outright sprightly in places, whatever the lyrical temper. The album carries its makers’ age gracefully — the craft makes even the crabbier moments sing.

The Dirtbombs, Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-Blooey!: Detroit garage punkers successfully dive headfirst into the world of bubblegum on this HIGHLY RECOMMENDED new album. Evan Minsker says:

They studied the cheerful hooks from Saturday morning cartoons and the Archies’ discography, and then, they turned that research into an album filled with sunshine, lollipops, sugar and spice, etc. Ooey Gooey is packed with idealistic notions, schoolyard elation, phrases like “eenie meenie miney mo” and words like “groovy.” It’s happy, but the menace in their fuzz pedal stops it from ever nearing schmaltz. It’s 2013; who knew that a “punks meet the Banana Splits” record would be so compelling?

MGMT, MGMT: I might be more-or-less alone in thinking this band has gotten more fascinating as they’ve gotten more obstinate, but that’s the life I choose to live, so don’t try to talk me out of it. I repped pretty hard for their last album as a bold change-in-direction. This one seems even more obtuse, ladling on the heavy psychedelia. Good weird, or weird for its own sake? Only you can decide.

Islands, Ski Mask: Controversially, I never really liked The Unicorns. Which is pretty irrelevant to be bringing up at this point, since that band existed for one album like 68 years ago. Nick Thorburn has gotten a little more stately with his songwriting, putting those quirks to actual use. Ski Mask retains all of his trademark idiosyncracies, but puts them in service of meticulously-constructed pop songs. “Becoming the Gunship,” with its yearning chorus, is the closest to a power ballad he’s ever written, and “Nil” sounds like a revisionist take on German beer bar polka.

Windhand, Soma: Incredible, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED second LP from Virginia doom metal band Windhand is like chasing 10 bottles of NyQuil with a long session at the Ouija Board. It is phenomenal. In my review, I say:

To be overly flip about the album’s spectacularly suffocating lethargy is to short-sell its incredible power. Punishingly slow without every feeling airlocked or plodding. Far from it: Instead, there’s a gravity and severity to Soma that’s utterly skin-crawling. The closest sonic touchstone is Electric Wizard’s towering obelisk of horror Dopethrone, but where that record often had fangs bared and knives drawn, Soma‘s power feels more insidious and spectral and otherworldly. That grim grey shack on the album cover may as well be the haunted cabin where the witch from the first Black Sabbath record lives.

AVICII, True: This guy. So the thing to know about AVICII is that he’s a Swedish DJ considered one of the leading lights in the alarmingly-popular EDM movement — the slicked-up mainstream version of electronic music that’s kind of everywhere. But so then when he played the Ultra Music Festival in March, he unveiled a bunch of songs that apparently had some kind of crazy artisan small batch suspender-folk angle? Well, apparently it made it to the record, because the first song is straight-up barrel-booting tobacky-core. The rest of the album mixes that approach with the dancier stuff he’s become known for. You can decide what you make of this, but I’m pretty sure this is the first electronic-to-country crossover record ever. I guess look for Burial’s all John Denver covers record next.

Crystal Stilts, Nature Noir: Latest from onetime eMusic Selects alum is somewhat sunnier than they’ve been in the past. I was a huge fan of their last album, Alight in Night, which felt like the full culmination of the doom-core blueprint they’d been refining for some time. This one expands even further. Ian Cohen says:

Now ten years into their career, Crystal Stilts have about five decades worth of ironclad credibility giving them reason to stay the course on their third LP Nature Noire. There are certain, incremental tuneups that sound colossal within Crystal Stilts’ fully-formed aesthetic: real-deal strings illuminate “Memory Room” and “Future Folklore” integrates blue-collar classic rock of the 60s into their 70s-based, all-black art-rock. But the quintet aren’t going to fundamentally alter what got them here in the first place – rhythmic interplay that never advances beyond “perpetually hungover” and Brad Hargett’s baritone drawl going for “Most Dour Man in Brooklyn,” something like The National’s Matt Berninger for the non-showered, non-blue-blazered.

Keep Shelly in Athens, At Home: The Greek outfit has hints of Robert Smith and Cocteau twins on their second album. We talked to this band over a year ago. I liked them then, and I like them now:

Its opening track — titled, naturally, “Time Exists Only to Betray Us” — thunders into existence: a big boom of bass, a rain of glass-shard synths and Sarah’s Stevie-Nicks-as-Lady-Macbeth wail arriving in one shattering cataclysm of sound and light. From there, the album maintains its ether-clawing aerialism, stirring Sarah’s liquid sugar voice into milky-blue synths and serving it in a frosted champagne flute. It’s called At Home, but that’s only if you’ve got a sweet deal on a lake view somewhere in the mesosphere.

The Naked & Famous, In Rolling Waves: Pretty tremendous amount of buzz behind this New Zealand group. Bright, blinking synths and defiant vocals make for a batch of late-night, yearn-heavy dance-pop jammers. A subtler Icona Pop?

HSY, HSY: Grinding, scuzzy, pigfuck-by-way-of-shoegaze (I’ll let you come up with your own name for that one) this record is a beast. The guitars are as jagged as rusty hunting knives, and they saw up the center of these songs with genuine malice and ill-will. Pair that with howling, menacing vocals and you’ve got the perfect soundtrack to a back-alley brawl. RECOMMENDED

Various Artists, The Rough Guide to Bollywood Disco: I’ve said this before, but these Rough Guide albums are great, and I feel like they don’t get nearly the attention of, like, Analog Africa or Soundway (who are also great!) because their packaging is so naff, and it looks like Starbucks World Music for Bored Suburbanites or something. Don’t make that mistake! The people who put these comps together know what they’re doing. This one is full of great, loopy, intoxicating Bollywood Disco songs that have all the pulse & rush of their American counterparts but with intoxicating Indian melodies. RECOMMENDED

Cult of Luna, Vertikal II: Spooky Swedish group returns with four imposing songs that total one terrifying half-hour of music. I’m pretty into this: creeping and claustrophobic, the band builds songs slowly, ramping up the tension moment by moment until it explodes.

Blouse, Imperium: I really like this band. Captured Tracks group writes songs that are filmy and hazy, but are always rooted in solid melodies. Some of this stuff can float away in the ether, but Blouse feel more assured than most, walling in the mist with thick lines
of guitar.

Lake, The World is Real: Forthrightly-titled album from quirk-tastic Olympia band has moments tha kind of remind me of a more playful Sea & Cake. Can you imagine! Other times it sounds like a super-slowed down version of Apples in Stereo’s Tone Soul Evolution. So, somewhere on that spectrum you will find your answer.

Lucy Rose, Like I Used To: British singer/songwriter with as serious Dido vibe delivers delicately-skipping acoustic guitars and cappucino-smooth vocals for your early-fall front-porch chilling-out soundtrack.

Dog Bite, LA EP: Drifting, dreamy batch of songs that puts a premium on mood and texture. Vocals drift by on milky rivers of synth, songs are languid and bob like kites in a light breeze.

Pinkish Black, Razed to the Ground: Grinding, driving and doomy. There are some metallic overtones, to be sure, but there’s also a fair amount of hostile post-punk — like Joy Division blasting in the middle of a steel-pressing plant — and sinister drone.

Sub Rosa, More Constant Than the Gods: This band’s last record was a jaw-dropper, a stomach-thumping blast of demonic doom metal set alight by the menacing vocals of frontwoman Rebecca Vernon. This one is somehow even better, moodier, more controlled, more potent. Fans of, say, early Swans or Junius are going to love this. It’s melodic, but suffocating and imposing; electric violins lend the songs a gothic edge, but in a way that feels truly eerie. This record is phenomenal, and is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Sun Araw, On Patrol:I really, really like this dude. His work is eeire and intoxicating and spooky without being overbearing. He creates whole dark worlds to live inside. On Patrol first came out in 2010; it’s been reissued, and it’s RECOMMENDED. Abby Garnett says:

These nine compositions, which lean heavily on improvisation, take well-crafted textures and then subtly warp them through repetition. Earlier works, like 2009′s Heavy Deeds, exploited immediately recognizable elements of psychedelia — Theremin-like wailing, reverberating vocal swashes, the modal drone of Indian ragas — but On Patrol finds Stallones plucking through his influences’ gutted frames and re-evaluating the usefulness of their parts. As a result, the sound is leaner, more pointed, and moves closer to the mantric ideal of drone.

Billy Currington, We Are Tonight: Long-running country singer returns with his fifth record in 10 years. 10 years! The second song has a pretty cool “Where It’s At”-style organ and some kind of dodgy lyrics about picking up girls at bars. Country music! Currington’s got a rich voice, though, and a knack for kick-back, boots-on-the-table melodies. Sorry that it looks like you have to watch a commercial for that bullshit Fox show Dads before you can see the above video.

Sisu, Blood Tears: Ex-Dum Dum Girl Sandy Vu delivers an album that swings from twitchy, ’80s-style pastel-guitar pop to lush, swirling shoegaze. There’s an air of menace, as you might guess.

Arp, More: Arp never fall too far from the ’70s on their latest. Andy Beta says:

Opener “High-Heeled Clouds,” with its buoyant upright piano line, could come right out of John Cale’s Paris 1919, while the gentle “Daphne & Chloe” with its “bah-bah”s serve as an elegant update of The Velvet’s “I Found a Reason.” Cribbing from the VU playbook is nothing new, but Arp also investigates those who did the same, like Bowie and Eno. “A Tiger in the Hall at Versailles” mixes wordless vocals, puttering drum machine and harpsichord like some strange “Heroes” outtake. And the catchy “Judy Nylon” namechecks Eno’s girlfriend and emulates the buzzing siren guitars and snare thwacks of “Camel in the Needle’s Eye.”

Carcass, Surgical Steel: Grindcore pioneers return with another blast of blinding fury. The guitars dart around like weaponized hummingbirds, zipping and zig-zagging above full-arrhythmia percussion. It is a skull-crushing blast of fury.

Clear Soul Forces, Gold PP7s: Detroit group that was mentored by Royce da 5’9″, the group blends old-school style rapping with production that’s at once nostalgic and future-facing. The backdrop on “Freq Freq” recalls the early days of neo soul, but it’s shot though with plenty of neo-soul flange. “Sparring Session” is backward-looking beatbox banger that serves as a showcase for the group’s toothy rhyme style

A Storm of Light, Nations to Flames: A more aggressive and (gasp!) straightforward album from the cinematic post-metal band. This record is rad, and is RECOMMENDED Jon Wiederhorn says:

The songs are more structured and compact, the riffs more rigid, and there’s a distinct industrial element to the distorted vocals and abundant samples. There’s also a new diversity to the tempos. “All the Shining Lies” trudges and tumbles like Godflesh; “Apostles of Hatred” and “Omen” are considerably faster and more torrential, bringing to mind High on Fire. And the largely muted main guitar part on “Disintegrate” is surprisingly reminiscent of Metallica’s “Whiplash.”

Chris Forsyth, Solar Motel: Dreamy, vaguely droney outing from this guitarist imagines what might have happened if John Fahey had been on Siltbreeze. There are lots of lovely, finger-picked passages, but also plenty of tension and blank-eyed pattern-creating. It’s riveting stuff. RECOMMENDED

CCR Headcleaner, Lace the Earth With Arms Wide Open: 2013: Trasheriffic! Pretty awesome gSan Francisco arbagecore band sneer above gunk-covered guitars, trading off between putrefied sludge-rockers and scotch-taped sad boy ballads. Also this was put out by a label called Pizza Burglar, which is awesome.

Berlin, Animal: When I was 16 my dad took me to see Top Gun and in the middle of this whole overblown, over-loud, vaguely homoerotic coin-op movie comes a really long sex scene between Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis to pretty much the entirety of the Berlin song “Take My Breath Away” and I remember sitting there next to my dad with my face on fire thinking, “GOOD GOD WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER HOW LONG IS THIS SONG.” That band has a new record out today.

The new Costello/Roots collaboration Wise Up Ghost — mostly recorded in the Roots’ dressing room for their regular gig on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon — sounds like the product of a couple of intense music nerds cheerfully impressing each other, and it’s drenched in musical history. Costello’s always been a habitual quoter of and alluder to other people’s songs: From his very earliest recordings onward, his discography is strewn with small and large echoes of his favorite records. (How many of the punks of 1977 who listened to his first album, My Aim Is True, noticed that “Blame It on Cain” borrowed the groove of Sam Cooke’s “That’s It – I Quit – I’m Movin’ On”?) The most extensive homage in his discography, 1980′s Get Happy!!, is pretty much a tribute to the sound of ’60s-era Stax Records — compare “Temptation” to Booker T. and the M.G.’s’ “Time is Tight.”

The curious thing about Wise Up Ghost is that the catalog Costello spends most of his time revisiting is his own. Several songs set nearly entire lyrics from old Costello compositions to new music: “Wake Me Up” is “Bedlam” from 2004′s The Delivery Man, and “(She Might Be a) Grenade” is the same record’s bonus track “She’s Pulling Out the Pin”; “Stick Out Your Tongue” is “Pills and Soap” from 1983′s Punch the Clock, with a verse from “Hurry Down Doomsday” stuck into the middle; “Refuse to be Saved” is “Invasion Hit Parade” from 1991′s Mighty Like a Rose (Ross MacManus, in fact, played trumpet on the original version). And the “Invasion Hit Parade” lyric was pretty allusive to begin with: “no pool, no pets, no cigarettes,” a half-quote from Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” gets rhymed with “just non-stop Disco Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes,” a reference to the early disco act who recorded “Get Dancin’.” (Has Costello’s dismissive attitude toward the latter softened in the past 22 years? Who knows?)

Even in his new lyrics, Costello can’t stop alluding to the rattle bag of songs in his head. Wise Up Ghost‘s opening track “Walk Us Uptown” drops offhanded references to Jimmy Reed’s “Take Out Some Insurance On Me Baby” and the Mojos’ “Everything’s Alright,” and finally detours into a couple of lines from the 19th-century socialist anthem “The Red Flag”: “As cowards flee and traitors sneer/ Keep a red flag flying.” Of course, Costello can’t sing the word “coward” without bringing to mind the Coward Brothers, his collaboration with T-Bone Burnett — and when he mentions a white flag a few seconds later, it can’t help but recall his much-bootlegged early song “Wave a White Flag.” If you record as much as he has, everything’s an allusion to something.

In an interview with Electronic Musician, Costello noted that one unusual thing about Wise Up Ghost was that he didn’t play any tremolo guitar — the low-end leads that have been a hallmark of his performances since “Watching the Detectives.” But what’s that guitar sound that holds together “Sugar Won’t Work”? It might be Costello playing it, and it might be the Roots’ Captain Kirk Douglas — but the riff is very, very close to the one from “Watching the Detectives”… backwards. Likewise, the central musical motif of the album’s loveliest song, “Tripwire,” is another small Questlove nod to the Costello fanatics in the room: It’s lifted from the introduction to Elvis’s 1989 song “Satellite.”

At times, Wise Up Ghost matches Robert Christgau’s description of an early Magnetic Fields album — “more songs about songs and songs” — to the point where it’s sometimes not clear how much it has to do with the world beyond the record shelf. (The title of “Sugar Won’t Work” is surprising in that it’s a quote not from a song, but from the film version of “The Big Sleep.”)

The open question, though, is how many of its meta-songs will stay in Costello’s repertoire. It’s been Elvis’s pattern for a few decades now that he treats his albums with his main rock band — the Attractions, originally, and more recently the Confederates — as his “real” repertoire, the source of most of the material he plays live. His work with other artists is more often collaborator-specific; it’ll be surprising if many of the songs from Wise Up Ghost appear in his stage show when he’s not playing with the Roots (although “Tripwire” turned up at a solo gig he played the week before its release). Still, it’s a remarkable record, the most surprising and challenging album Costello has made in many years. If he has to set up his throne in a hall of mirrors, this one would be a fine choice.

Janelle Monae, The Electric Lady: FINALLY. It feels like a small eternity since the last Janelle Monae record, but the years have only heightened and deepened her bonkers, otherworldly outlook. Her new record is here at last and — guess what? — it’s HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Barry Walters says:

The Electric Lady is much more than a monument to maximalism, though. It’s a testimony to the power of particularly female and African-American dreams well-honed and not afraid to freak. Interspersed with radio DJ breaks that only lightly allude to the Cindi Mayweather cyborg narrative of her previous releases, The Electric Lady is nothing less than concept album about black female empowerment via love, otherness and heaps of Hendrix-kissed guitar solos courtesy of Kellindo Parker, who, together with Monáe, Nate “Rocket” Wonder, Chuck Lightning and Roman GianArthur comprise the extraordinary Wondaland posse that write, play and produce this deliciously effusive stuff.

The Clash, Sound System, 5 Studio Album Set and Hits Back: THESE ARE A LOT OF DIFFERENT WAYS INTO THE CLASH CATALOG. Let’s go in reverse order. Hits Back is, as it sounds, a double-disc Greatest Hits comp, sequenced to follow the setlist of a show the group played at Brixton Fair Deal in July of 1982. Insert your own crowd noise, I guess? 5 Studio Albums you can probably figure out (I like to think of this as another elaborate effort to officially erase Cut the Crap from the band’s discography) and finally Sound System, which has all of the albums (except, once again, Cut the Crap), plus 3 discs of rarities, B-Sides, demos & otherwise. A CORNUCOPIA OF CLASH. A CLASHUCOPIA. I mean, come on. If you somehow don’t have at least the studio albums already, this is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Arctic Monkeys, AM: This band occupies a curious place — almost-superstars that are massive in the UK but never-quite-happened over here, the Monks (as they are known to me and basically no one else) have instead produced a steady string of durable, well-construced rock records of which this is the latest. Oh those Monks. Always up to something. Maura Johnston says:

Hangovers happen. The Arctic Monkeys — the brash British band led by the acid-voiced, silver-tongued Alex Turner — know this all too well. Their inaugural single hinged on a dancefloor fantasy; the lead single from their last album was hatched at a bar. The title of their fifth album, AM, could be seen as an attempt to get back to basics by going the acronymic route; but the bleary-eyed, moving-through-swamp feel makes it seem like a direction to play the album in the morning, preferably while you’re trying to figure out the coming hours through the headachy haze of what happened the night before.

The Weeknd, Kiss Land: The Weeknd’s latest is a testament to how touring and excess can take over the mind, body and soul. Probably he should have a paper, rock, scissors with the indie band The Weekend because I’m getting pretty tired of having to explain which one I’m talking about all the time. Barry Walters says:

Kiss Land is a regressive worldview where women are represented either by prostitutes/strippers/groupies or long-suffering hometown girlfriends; drugs are ever-present, and Nix is as necessary as toothpaste. Such excess ordinarily lends itself to comical clichés. Yet singer/lyricist Abel Tesfaye avoids the Spinal Tap effect by emphasizing the physical and emotional brutality of his vagabond existence.

2 Chainz, B.O.A.T.S. II #MeTime: This is basically my favorite album title of the year. Come to think of it, what you think of that album title will probably clue you in to what you’re gonna think about 2 Chainz. He isn’t known for rhymes so much as posture, and there’s plenty of that here — chest-swelled stunting, brand-name name-drops and attitude, attitude, attitude. The production is high-gloss club-style twinkle-and-bounce. Somehow this is being released at the end of the summer instead of the beginning of it, which seems like a colossal miscalculation to me.

Goldfrapp: Annabel on Nowness.com

Goldfrapp, Tales of Us: More high drama and higher costumes from Alison Goldfrapp & Co. eMusic’s Barry Walters — who’s on a real roll this week — says:

This time around, Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory focus mostly on acoustic instrumentation — primarily guitar, strings and piano — while maintaining their exacting control over their instrumentation’s sonic impact. There’s far too much studio processing and thickly arranged orchestration on their sixth album to deem the results folky or unfinished. And all the billowing softness on display doesn’t make for straightforward easy listening; the harmonies are constructed in such a way that tension rarely dissipates.

Madonna, MDNA World Tour: And speaking of Goldfrapp, here’s a new Madonna record. This is a live recording from her last world tour. The version of “Like a Virgin” on here is really good. Seriously! I don’t know, man. People still give Madonna grief, but I think her live sets are always cannily constructed, with an eye toward using the songs to construct a narrative. But what do I know?

Holy Ghost!, Dynamics: The New York duo’s sophomore album can be taken seriously even off the dancefloor (though it certainly belongs there too). Annie Zaleski says:

On their second full-length, Dynamics, the duo — comprised of two life-long friends and musical collaborators, Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser — amplify their pop tendencies and diversify their sound. Dynamics expands to encompass sugary new, chugging synthpop, New Order-style electropop and ’80s R&B slow jams. Holy Ghost! has always created dance music with aspirations to be taken seriously outside of clubs or parties. Thanks to finely sculpted hooks, straightforward melodies and Frankel’s increasingly confident vocals, Dynamics reaches — and exceeds—this goal.

Forest Fire, Screens: Beautiful, ethereal post-rocky outing from this Brooklyn band combines the best elements of the Silver Apples and Can into a bright, brilliant, ethereal package. I want you to know how much I resisted saying that they “put the Silver Apples in a Can” right there. You can thank me later. I’m overselling the krautiness of this. But, you know, I really tend to relish writing about kraut, so. (OK. I’m done.) This one is RECOMMENDED

Heathered Pearls, Loyal Reworks: Heathered Pearls, aka Jakub Alexander, released the lush and moody Loyal last year. Those who loved that record will likely love this: a full-album remix featuring contributions by Foxes in Fiction, Teen Daze and more. It’s moody and soothing and gentle.

J. Roddy Walston & the Business, Essential Tremors: J. Roddy & His Business have been around for a hot minute now, dishing out their grit-under-the-nails take on classic rock & roll. There’s some of the bash ‘n’ shamble of Exile on Main Street here, but its kinda filthier and sleazier. Like, sleazier than Deer Tick, even, if you can imagine. That’s some serious sleaze. Sleaziness is his business, and business is…

Drive-By Truckers, Alabama Ass Whuppin’ (Reissue): Reissue of a rollicking 1999 DC live show by the Truckers, captured just before their Southern Rock Opera breakthrough, at their wound-up, unhinged, outta-control best.

Jimmy Webb, Still Within The Sound Of My Voice: Here is the thing about Jimmy Webb: “Wichita Lineman” is one of the 10 or 15 greatest songs of all time. Period. If you hear that and are not moved, you are some kind of cyborg monster, and you should re-evaluate your life choices. Webb’s latest album shines a light on some of the via duets with the likes of Lyle Lovett, Amy Grant, Keith Urban and Brian Wilson. Peter Blackstock says:

“Sleeping in the Daytime,” from his 1970 debut, never charted for anyone, but Lyle Lovett pushes him to a dynamic remake of the tune here. On “Where’s The Playground Susie,” a minor Glen Campbell hit in 1969, Webb finds another country singer who gets the power of a great melody in Keith Urban. The graceful ballad “Adios,” a late-’80s album highlight for Ronstadt, is a perfect fit for the rich warmth of Amy Grant’s voice. And when Webb does turn to one of his major songs — the pop-classical juggernaut “MacArthur Park” — he taps no less than Brian Wilson to fill in the multilayered harmonies.

Jacuzzi Boys, Jacuzzi Boys: I love these dudes. Power garage trio from Miami — Miami! — blends serrated riffing with snarl & posture and primping, like a bargain basement version of The Sweet. Plenty o’ attitude, even more hooks. RECOMMENDED

Bestial Mouths “White Eyes” from Bestial Mouths on Vimeo.

Bestial Mouths, Bestial Mouths: Apocalyptic synth-rock is the cold sound of distilled horror. Doomy vocals and icicle streaks of synths make this one a magnificent fright show. RECOMMENDED, especially if you ever wondered what Grace Jones fronting Front 242 might sound like.

Tal National, Kaani: Highlife 2013: Tal National delivers bright, skipping songs that draw on the legacy of his nation’s musical heritage while updating it with a decidedly jagged, indie slant. eMusic’s Richard Gehr says of this RECOMMENDED record:

West Africa’s largest nation, Niger, has one of the region’s smallest musical profiles. But that should change once the world gets wind of Kaani, the thrilling third album (and first export) by Tal National, a Niamey-based group that emits as much jubilant energy as any on at least a couple of continents. Formed in 2000 by guitarist (and current municipal judge) Hamadal “Almeida” Moumine, Tal National combines high-speed contrapuntal guitar lines, hard chikita-chikita beats, and chattering mbalax-flavored talking drums into a breakneck polyrhythmic skein.

Frightened Rabbit, Late March, Death March: The latest single from the Frabbits’ excellent last record gets augmented with three excellent unreleased songs, making this more like an EP than a one-off single. The songs maintain the sheen of Pedestrian Verse, but have the kind of nervous tension for which FR have become famous.

Terry Malts, Nobody Realizes This is Nowhere: Clever title, jokers! What’s next, Moss Sometimes Naps? San Fran punk wiseasses deliver another batch of surly, burly ramrodders that sound like what the Ramones might have sounded like if they were fronted by Barney from New Order. In other words: big, grimy hooks, delicate vocals and reckless energy galore.

The Orwells, Who Needs You: I am pretty into this! Scrappy, poppy garage ‘n’ roll group; half of this is produced by Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio, but you’ll get none of the dense, layered arty stuff here — this is good, greasy, bouncy, hooky rock & roll with throat-shredding vocals and riotous riffs.

Man Man, On Oni Pond: The Philly group has matured without becoming boring, which is more than I can say for myself. Austin L. Ray says:

This kinder, gentler Man Man — which, all things considered, will shock no fans of the group — hits plenty of excellent notes throughout On Oni Pond. “Pink Wonton” is an organ-and-horns rollicker; “Head On” a gorgeous ode to love (“Hold on to your heart!” Honus proclaims in the chorus. “Never let nobody drag it under.”); “Deep Cover” is a plaintive, ukulele-led lullaby. The chaos, when it rears its head as it does briefly during a noisy bridge on “Born Tight,” is reined in, subdued.

Ane Brun, Songs 2003 – 2013: Retrospective of perpetually-underrated Norwegian songwriter; her style is forthright and fluttering, some delicate acoustic guitars and yearning vocals make for good early-morning, coffee-drinking music.

Katatonia, Dethroned & Uncrowned: An acoustic interpretation of the band’s 2012 release Dead End Kings, which makes this band’s direction even more baffling to me than it was before. Jon Wiederhorn, who is more qualified to discuss these things than I am, says:

Dethroned isn’t merely an unplugged version of its predecessor. For each song, Katatonia have retained only the guide vocal and completely rewritten everything else, creating a melancholy, beautiful album that proves how poignant the band remains even without the heaviness that helped define the album. It probably won’t appeal to listeners who require heavy with their metal, but for those who value strong progressive songwriting and emotional expression over sheer volume may end up preferring these versions to the originals.

Balance and Composure, The Things We Think We’re Missing: B&C bite emo, but late-game emo, long after Knapsack had packed up and night fell on Sunny Day Real Estate. Fear & Loathing in the Food Court. People seem to like this. Andrew Parks says:

The Things We Think We’re Missing delivers its heart-on-sleeve hooks in the spirit of Sunny Day Real Estate and their pre-Fugazi forebears Rites of Spring, only not quite as raw or rough around the edges — the poison-tipped melodies of “Parachutes” and the door-clawing climax of “Notice Me” are offset by contemplative choruses and riffs that shimmer and shudder. So while the minor-keyed malaise of frontman Jon Simmons may sound a little too familiar on paper — lots of lines about crying, falling and letting go — it’s actually quite endearing on record, capable of waking the confused teenager in all of us.

Nine Inch Nails, Hesitation Marks: Trent Reznor’s Indian Summer, complete with Grammys and Oscars, continues with the major-label backed return to form record, the strongest effort to bear the NIN name in years. Andrew Parks says:

The Second Coming of Trent Reznor shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. And yet, Hesitation Marks exceeds even the loftiest expectations by signaling Reznor’s sober sally years with some of his most subtle but satisfying work to date. It’s as if he was sharpening his sample banks and synth lines with How to Destroy Angels, only to emerge with material that alludes to everything from death-disco (the groove-locked guitars of “All Time Low”) to acid-techno (the snake-like leads of “Copy of A”) to Reznor’s own impressive oeuvre (the rubber-bullet beats that hammer “Came Back Haunted” home).

Neko Case, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You: Neko Case can do no wrong. She’s back with a Fiona Apple-length album title and a fine LP. Stephen Deusner says:

Neko Case has spent the last 15 years perfecting both a dark strain of alt-country and a lyrical style that rejects songwriting conventions in order to build up wholly new personal mythologies. As her songs have grown moodier and more cinematic, Case has become less willing to state anything outright, instead finding ever more circuitous routes around her subjects. Hers is a defiantly impressionistic style, both withholding and revealing, and it reaches a peak on her latest album.

Okkervil River, The Silver Gymnasium: Will Sheff and Co.’s latest is a master class on pop writing as narrative. eMusic editor-in-chief Joe Keyes says:

A dog-eared novelization of Will Sheff’s teenage years in Meridian, New Hampshire (the lyrics are even written out in paragraphs instead of verses), Gymnasium is full of the classic literary symbols of lost innocence: falling autumn leaves, broken bones, crashed cars too big for their drivers. In a way, the album’s subject matter mirrors the group’s own musical evolution. They began as gangly, fumbling youth, prizing emotional immediacy over lyrical precision, but Sheff has steadily transformed the group into a well read, nattily-attired adjunct professor with a fondness for sidecars and a deep, fanatic knowledge of Richard Brautigan.

Chelsea Wolfe, Pain is Beauty: Chelsea Wolfe goes beyond creepy on her second studio album. Ashley Melzer says:

Building her sound from layers of droning synths, crisp percussion and hypnotic strings, Wolfe harnesses a dark glamour, not too far removed from the sort of misty, doom-laden orchestral power rock of ’80s fantasy films like Ladyhawke or Labyrinth. The Warden” threads an ethereal melody over the industrial drive of programmed beats, juxtaposing expansive beauty with violence and gloom.

Volcano Choir, Repave: The second effort from Volcano Choir is sturdier and something more like Justin Vernon’s other project. Brian Howe says:

The music, alternately pastoral and explosive, cosmic and martial, shapes itself into sturdy structures from delicately trembling parts. Hints of digital manipulation stand out with detailed clarity. After a Straussian overture, “Tiderays” embarks on a winding guitar odyssey in the manner of Broken Social Scene, while “Acetate” and other tracks recall the majestic gloom of Grizzly Bear. Usually singing in his underutilized natural voice, which is low and gruff and sounds, especially on “Dancepack,” like Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner, Justin Vernon sparingly breaks into the vaporous falsetto on which he made his name.

Forest Swords, Engravings: The latest from English electronic producer Matthew Barnes. Andy Battaglia says:

Forest Swords suggests a series of answers to a riddle that may have never been posed but proves worth pondering nonetheless: What would reggae sound like if, in terms of overall vibe and tone, it sounded nothing like reggae at all? Forest Swords is aligned with dub, in all its ethereal, abstracted, echo-effected glory, but on Engravings, the first Forest Swords album after an auspicious EP in 2010, the genre’s tenets are treated with a different ear and a different sort of hand on the controls.

The 1975, The 1975 - I have been waiting curiously for this record to come out ever since this band was called The Slowdown in 2010 and only had one song, the incredible, Jimmy Eat World-worthy anthem “Sex.” This album has been in long, painful, major-label gestation, and they’ve arrived on the other hand a hugely keyboard-sweetened, starched-stiff 80s dance-rock outfit, about as Top 40-ready as you can sound and still be a rock band these days. I’m not mad. I AM furious at the slower, re-recorded version of “Sex” on here, which is vastly inferior to the original.

Califone, Stitches: Staying close to their concept-album format on their first LP in four years. Hilary Saunders says:

A number of religious themes pervade Stitches, marked by titles like, “Magdalene,” “moonbath.brainsalt.a.holy.fool” and “Moses.” Stitches alternates between acoustic and electronic — sometimes within songs — and Rutili moves past nontraditional instrumentation (like the recurring use of tablas), toward almost an anthropological soundtrack.

Jonathan Rado, Law and Order: One of the dudes from Foxygen already has a solo record, which Matthew Fritch says is more challenging than his band’s output:

The reductive assessment of Law and Order is that it’s simply louder and less baroque than Foxygen, but at the album’s corners — the punishing, bratty distortion of “I Wanna Feel It Now!!!,” the final track “Pot of Gold” and its ridiculous aping of Human League — it’s more challenging, too, and way more fun than Foxygen’s occasionally predictable ’60s/’70s rock groove.

Holograms, Forever: The Swedish quartet builds on their influences on their second LP. Annie Zaleski says:

Keyboards are more prevalent in the mix, from the corrugated synths humming through “Luminous” to the frantic chords dominating “Rush,” while frontman Andreas Lagerström’s reverb-coated vocals are fraught with desperation. And although Lagerström isn’t always easy to understand as he howls his way through the straightforward punk throttle “Meditations” and early Cure-influenced strum “Flesh and Bone,” the urgency in his voice is unmistakable.

Gorguts, Colored Sands: The Canadian technical death metal band returns with their first album in a dozen years. Catherine P. Lewis says:

Colored Sands is a fierce addition to Gorguts’ dissonant sound. Instead of just unleashing an unholy terror of disjointed technical riffs, the quartet builds songs that meld riffs together, with space to breathe in between. The album’s longest track, the nine-minute “Absconders,” tweaks tempos as the group shifts from one heavy groove to the next, while the title track grows to a howl from an atmospheric groan.

John Wizards, John Wizards: African and Western, traditional and modern, mashed together in a way that defies separation.

As the music project of John Withers — in conjunction with Rwandan vocalist Emmanuel Nzaramba — John Wizards dials back the cacophonous density, aggressive BPMs and neon-bright synths of their contemporaries. On their debut, they instead meld together the languid, leisurely sounds of everything from reggae to R&B slow jams.

Dave Holland & Prism, Prism: A collaboration between Dave Holland, Kevin Eubanks, Eric Harland and Craig Taborn. Britt Robson says:

All four musicians individuate and coalesce in bold, dramatic, prismatic fashion. Each member contributes at least two songs, and the composer sets the tone. Drummer Eric Harland provides a gospel-soul drum-and-organ groove on “Choir,” and the gorgeous closing ballad, “Breathe,” which is a vehicle for pianist Craig Taborn. But Harland also excels at the sort brittle-beat carpet-bombing that catapulted Billy Cobham to fame.

TV Ghost, Disconnect - Vapor trails of post-punk guitar, quietly chanted  and a generally sepuchral tone to this In The Red release by TV Ghost, who have toned down their earlier freneticism into something spooky and coolly remote.

Vasaeleth, All Uproarious Darkness – Sulfurous-evil belching vocals, thudding drums, and a series of death-metal gas-bursts that never quite go past four minutes. A heaving, visceral, straight-up gross death metal experience, which is the classical kind.

Vattnet Viskar, Sky Swallower - Brutally beautiful, windswept blackened doom metal from an exciting new band from New Hampshire. Like watching time-lapse footage of a flower blooming superimposed over that scene from Carrie.

Grooms, Infinity Caller - Grooms are a solid-to-excellent indie guitar-rock band, and their best and most satisfying stuff usually has that chalk-dust whiff of amateur guitar heroism that you could find in such abundance in the Pacific Northwest in the ’90s. Infinity Caller finds them sounding like them, which is good.

M.I.A., “Come Walk With Me” - This new M.I.A. single sounds horrible to me, guys. Horrible. Lord knows Maya knows her crafty way around some trolling, but this single sounds like getting sprayed in your mouth with Aquanet.

Paul McCartney, “New” - Paul McCartney’s solo career is doomed to never receive its full measure of respect. McCartney fans have made peace with this. And, one assumes, so has McCartney. It seems to be the price he has paid for being in the Beatles. Which, you know, fair enough. But he has written a lot of piercingly wonderful McCartney music, especially in the last fifteen or so years, that has almost no reputation at all. This new song feels like something he tossed off in about half an hour, a happy little paean to his “Penny Lane”-era  dancehall bounce.

Chet Faker, “Melt” ft. Kilo Kish - Part of me wishes no one had ever released music commercially under the moniker “Chet Faker”; that same part of me wishes even less that it was stumbling, blunted, and harmonically interesting enough to make me type about them. But here we are in, and this song is good.

Bob Dylan, Another Self Portrait: I think we can all agree that “Wigwam” is one of Bob Dylan’s best songs, right? The album from which it comes is, shall we say, “contentious.” (We had a Weekend Discussion about it this past Friday in case you missed it.) Now today comes the latest installment in Dylan’s Bootleg series, which consists of outtakes from that very record, Self-Portrait, along with outtakes from it’s companion piece, New Morning. Winston Cook-Wilson likes both of ‘em, as well as this new compilation, about which he says:

The original Self Portrait eschews embracing anything anyone could perceive as a persona (country singer, folk/protest singer, countercultural rock star) by trying out as many personas as possible. It’s Dylan’s ultimate presentation of himself at a time when he was still miffed by what everyone thought of him, and it remains deconstructive and baffling. The outtakes included on this new release, however, make a convincing argument against the accusations of the album’s fundamental disingenuousness. Even the messiest or most baffling performances sound sincere and inspired here.

The Dodos & Magik*Magik Orchestra “The Ocean” from Yours Truly on Vimeo.

The Dodos, Carrier: The Dodos’ latest is heavy but graceful. Ryan Reed says:

Carrier, the duo’s fifth LP, is more obvious in its grandeur. Meric Long layers his guitars in lush harmonies and counter-lines, moving through precise time-signature shifts with Kroeber’s intricate percussion and the subtle moans of the Magik Magik Orchestra. But instead of sounding celebratory, the album’s sprawl is tinted by a melancholy glow: Carrier was recorded following the 2012 death of touring guitarist Chris Reimer, and that mournful spirit looms large.

Sly and the Family Stone, Higher!: Obviously, Sly & the Family Stone are one of the greatest rock bands of all time — period. Their initial six-album run (Because I am definitely including Fresh in there) are as vibrant and revolutionary today as they were when they were first released. And so now there’s a new compilation, with outtakes and alternate mixes and a whole bunch of other things, which Britt Robson explains in his review, which we’re excerpting here, as we usually do:

Now comes Higher!, a 77-song compilation that includes mono masters of all Sly’s major hit singles, 17 previously unissued tracks that range from incendiary live performances to earnest formative studio sessions, a host of deep-in-the-album gems, and more obscure releases on either side of the band’s prime. Aside from the first half-dozen or so songs — amateur, now-anachronistic attempts by then-producer/DJ Sly to capitalize on the regional hit, “C’mon Let’s Swim” that he helmed for Bobby Freeman — nearly all the obscurities are much better than typical completist-baiting compilation-filler.

Goodie Mob, Age Against the Machine: Hands-down the best album title of all of today’s new releases, this is also the first Goodie Mob album with all four members in 14 years. Controversially: I haven’t loved Cee-Lo‘s steady edging toward pop music, but on the other hand, if anyone deserves late-career success, it’s Cee-Lo. I haven’t gotten to listen to this one yet, but I’m looking forward to doing so soon. In the meantime, Nate Patrin says:

Age Against the Machine reintroduces their Dirty Southern sociopolitical edge over a string of beats that are just glossy enough to dupe the unwary into thinking it’s a crossover record. The production slate includes contributions by neo-funk oddball Jack Splash and executive production by Cee-Lo himself. But the only real underlying factor tying it all together is a sense of scale: blasts of fog-machine arena rock, spaceship-takeoff club-rap futurism, and manic chase-scene orchestration run through a record that conflates commercial potential with over-the-top bombast.

Big Maybelle, The Best of Blues, Candy & Big Maybelle: I think this may have actually been released a while ago — maybe as far back as 2006, but it showed up here today and I’m calling it out because it is Big Maybelle and because she is the greatest. A big, tough voice that barrels along clanging piano and big, bloozy saxophone. 17 tracks, all of them great. RECOMMENDED

Matt Cameron, Janet Weiss and Zach Hill, Drumgasm: Points to the title for being both tacky and kind of accurate. Matt Cameron of Pearl Jam, Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag and Zach Hill from about a million other things (lately, Death Grips, when they feel like showing up) deliver a single 39-minute track that is, as you might guess, full of drumming. Pretty much entirely drumming. A weird world where free jazz and indie overlap? Your rate of satisfaction with this will depend on how much you like to listen to 39 minutes of drumming.

14KT, Nickled & Dimed: New from our pals at Mello Music is the latest from Michigan producer 14KT. The album hews toward the classic sound of hip-hop, which is fine by us, but spikes it with spaced-out synths and cannily inverted samples, and is rounded out by guest appearances from folks like Black Milk, MED, Blu and more. The result is a kind of psych-hop — the hip-hop equivalent of, say, Psychedelic Shack-era Temps. It’s adventurous and consistent and RECOMMENDED

Bad Sports, Bras: It will come as no surprise to anyone who regularly reads these roundups that I love this band. As you might guess, they’re trashy and punky and lovably greasy — nasty, beery licks, sneering vocals and breathless choruses make for a winning combo.

Big Sean, Hall of Fame: Big Sean is a Michigan rapper who rose to prominence after signing a deal with Kanye West‘s G.O.O.D. Music imprint, as people are wont to do. Musically, he splits the difference between old-style soul bangers (“Fire) and doomy, synth driven ice-cold new-style songs (“10210″). He’s divisive to be sure — commercially successful but has met with varying critical opinions, so maybe do your own math on this one.

Franz Ferdinand, Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action: The first time they’ve tried to make a “Franz Ferdinand album.” Michaelangelo Matos says:

Thirty-five minutes short and largely shorn of the frills that marked 2009′s Tonight, Right Thoughts may be the band’s most curious album: The first time they’ve sounded like they were trying to make a “Franz Ferdinand album.” They’re still good at it, even when they slow down, as on “The Universe Expanded.” “Goodbye Lovers & Friends” closes it out with singer Alex Kapranos avowing, “I don’t play pop music/ You know I hate pop music…This really is the end.” If it is indeed the band’s last gasp, it’s a sharp one.

Flaamingos, Flaamingos: Continuing the strain of moody, dark goth-pop for which Felte is quickly becoming known, Flaamingos lace spiderwebs of guitar through eerie, ghostlike synthesizers. It’s as spooky as a phantom’s howl at 3am, full of sorrow and longing.

Black Joe Lewis, Electric Slave: Existing in some unlikely middle ground between the Black Keys and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion is Black Joe Lewis. This is roaring, blues-based rock & roll that’s kept admirably sloppy and scuzzy. Even the horn players sound wasted, which is a plus in my book. The grime in the gears is almost tangible, and Lewis’s unhinged howl is the perfect complement to the music’s ragged, bracing charm.

Helado Negro, Island Universe Story Two: The second in an ongoing series of EPs from Roberto Lange, this installment is tripped-out and delirious, ranging from woozy mood pieces to the frenetic sonic panic attack of “Enters.” There are as many moods and sounds here as there are colors on the album cover, and though it’s only a half-hour long, it feels like a full, considered journey.

Lumerians, The High Frontier: The latest from great space-age weirdos Lumerians, this is more sci-fi psych (psych-fi?) crammed with woozy organs and lockstep motorik drumming and phased-out keys, so the whole thing feels like the soundtrack to a lost grindhouse outer space movie.

Various Artists, CT5: Five Years of caputred Tracks: Man oh man do we love Captured Tracks. We did a label profile on them waaayyy back in 2010, when they were first starting to gain some momentum. They turn five this year, and are celebrating with parties in their home town of Brooklyn, NY, and this outstanding sampler. If you have yet to discover one of indie rock’s best and most satisfying labels a) Why? and b) Why wait any longer? RECOMMENDED

Boom Said Thunder, Exist: The cover for this one is striking — a punk-and-black tiger’s head with the title in its mouth — and the music is just as aggressive. Nasty, gnawing guitars and belted vocals that recall a more-feral Karen O. A refreshing discovery that’s RECOMMENDED

Ghost Wave, Ages: THIS ALBUM IS OUT ON FLYING NUN. REPEAT: THIS ALBUM IS OUT ON FLYING NUN. Holy shit! This is, like, the first bona fide brand-new Flying Nun release in like 15 years! Get psyched, people! Matt LeMay is! This is what he has to say:

Listening to Ages, you can imagine Matthew L. Paul driving an open-air Jeep to the beach with his bandmates playing along in the back seat. His unflinchingly cool vocals are set off by the bouncy bass lines, exuberant keyboards and simple, distorted guitar riffs that distinguished Flying Nun flagship artists like The Clean and The Bats. Add in some shimmering keyboards and strategic reverb-soaked tambourine hits, and you’ve got a perfect warm-weather record, capturing the laid-back excitement of a summer day trip without slouching into slackerdom.

Dent May, Warm Blanket: Dent May ditches his ukulele but continues with his guileless summer-pop tunes. Ian Cohen says:

May gives you exactly what you expect from the album title, and Warm Blanket goes even further into the guileless summer-pop that’s become his trade. He self-recorded the majority of Warm Blanket on the gulf coast of Florida and this is all snuggly comfort sounds — acoustic guitars, stacked harmonies, analog synths, chintzy drum machines.

In truth, Dylan, Danko, Robertson and Co. paraphrased everything from Curtis Mayfield to “One for My Baby” during those 1967 get-togethers. All songs were fair game, as they were during the Self Portrait sessions. Despite the inclusion of several live performances with The Band on the album, critics and Dylanologists rarely connect the two, and Self Portrait continues to be regarded as snarky and anomalous.

The folksong-centric album would no doubt be more widely understood as a serious effort if it wasn’t so distinctly un-”folky” in its presentation. Albert Frank Beddoe’s ’40s ballad “Copper Kettle” comes bearing a Lawrence Welk-like, shlock-pop overlay, and Scottish folk song “Belle Isle” is borderline easy listening of the Pat Boone variety, mostly due to its use of a soupy string section. Devices like these sometimes make the traditional tunes nearly indistinguishable from the pop covers. Because Dylan didn’t adhere to any kind of “authentic” performance style or M.O. for Self Portrait, he was castigated, and worse, suspected of blatantly mocking his source material.

But if Dylan was mocking anything, it was Bob Dylan, or at least the construct of “Bob Dylan” he’d been forced to live with. The original Self Portrait eschews embracing anything anyone could perceive as a persona (country singer, folk/protest singer, countercultural rock star) by trying out as many personas as possible. It’s Dylan’s ultimate presentation of himself at a time when he was still miffed by what everyone thought of him, and it remains deconstructive and baffling.

The recording history is part of this mythos; since the material is culled from many different sessions, demos and a concert bootleg, the fidelity is as disparate as the music itself. There’s nothing confessional on the album; the most expansive and emotional moments of the record are cryptic, like the wordless “Wigwam” or “All the Tired Horses,” which is not sung by Dylan at all. He picks some live versions of career-defining statements from the Isle of Wight festival (“Like a Rolling Stone,” most obviously) that do not add another discernible dimension to the songs; they leave one cold and puzzled. Self Portrait takes every opportunity to shatter any cumulative feeling or response one could have to it.

The outtakes included on this new release, however, make a convincing argument against the accusations of the album’s fundamental disingenuousness. Even the messiest or most baffling performances sound sincere and inspired here; take, for instance, the assorted versions of “Little Sadie,” the raucous, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music-style “Bring a Little Water, Sylvie” or the piano-driven, Warren Zevon-esque “Spanish is the Loving Tongue.” In addition to this new material, some of Self Portrait‘s best performances reappear with overdubs removed. “Copper Kettle,” notably, is stripped of its accoutrements, throwing one of the best-recorded examples of Dylan’s post-Nashville Skyline croon into relief.

After listening to Another Self Portrait several times through, I returned to “The Boxer,” perhaps Self Portrait‘s most hated song, and listened past the sloppy harmony overdub to Dylan’s lead vocal. He’s belting out the song underneath it; when you listen in, you cease to hear any potential sarcasm. It’s entirely possible that this set — especially its first half — will help listeners to understand the original album in a new way.

The second disc focuses largely on outtakes from its follow-up, New Morning, a compelling record of Dylan originals which took shape during the same sessions. The fact that Self Portrait and New Morning were recorded at essentially the same time, and came out within four months of each other, was, and is, one of the most perplexing facts about Dylan’s career. The confusion and frustration was only made worse because Dylan insisted on discussing both nonchalantly, as if they were two parts of the same coin. But New Morning features some of Dylan’s best work of the ’70s, and creates a sense of warm invitation, like sitting in a stranger’s living room and having him play a handful of his favorite songs.

On Another Self Portrait, we get fascinating glimpses of the different albums New Morning could have been: for one, a heavily produced pop/rock record. There’s “Sign on the Window” done as a power ballad, rife with dramatic string swells and harp glissandi from the notorious pit orchestra of Self Portrait (ultimately, entirely absent from the final draft of New Morning), and a jaunty revamp of the title track with a dense, Chicago-esque horn section.

At one point, George Harrison stopped by the studio; if anything from that session had been used, the dominant instrumental force on New Morning might well have been his distinctive guitar leads. The take of “Time Passes Slowly” (complete with a jolly, “la la la”-based refrain) and canned original “Working on a Guru” showcase Dylan at the center of a well-oiled, live rock band. There are also near-solo acoustic performances, including “Time Passes Slowly” on a Fender Rhodes in free tempo, and an “If Not for You” during which the gaps between vocal phrases are filled with fiddle improvisations.

Outside of the historically interesting material, there are also, as on all of the Bootleg Series issues, some recordings that are important only because they capture such exceptional performances. A solo piano and vocal rendition of The Basement Tapes‘ “When I Paint My Masterpiece” from 1971 ends the second disc, and it is probably the single finest moment of the compilation. This kind of recording (of the same caliber as the hushed “Idiot Wind” outtake from the second volume — my favorite B.D. recording) is what makes the Bootleg Series an indispensable part of his catalog, and what makes Another Self Portrait recommended listening even for fair-weather Dylan fans.

The mixture of humble tribute and hubristic theft has a fine pedigree in music. Most composers start out by imitating their elders, and some make a fetish of recycling. Stravinsky, whose spirit animates Home Stretch, took apart and recomposed 18th century Italian dances, ragtime pieces, Russian folk songs, and the dazzling orchestration of his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. Andres disassembles Stravinsky. The album’s title track, a 20-minute concerto written for the pianist David Kaplan and the Metropolis Ensemble, opens with a Rite-like haze of high winds and moves towards an orgy of broken ostinatos. Rhythmic motives get blasted into crystalline shards, rearranged around irregular rests. A steady tic-tock hiccups and picks up a different pulse. The dancing piano suddenly changes course. Andres is a fine pianist, and the part has the fluid agility of a composer who writes with all 10 fingers.

The album’s keystone is an even more Stravinskian project: an idiosyncratic rewrite of Mozart’s “Coronation” Concerto. Mozart barely sketched in the piano’s left hand, figuring he could fill it in on the spot; Andres has used the blank areas as an opening for his imagination. The original is always recognizable, but the piano leads it through a series of fun-house distortions, so that at times it sounds as if it were gurgling underwater, at others it goes rampaging wildly through keys and zones of dissonance, reappearing a few minutes later in deadpan sync with the original. Andres has one talent that eludes most high-minded composers: a sense of humor. There are passages in the concerto that remind me of the mirror scene in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, where Chico plays the role of Groucho’s not-always-obedient reflection. But Andres is offering more than a gag. During the cadenzas, especially in the final movement, his music drifts into new terrain, a contemplative essay in big, gonging chords. At that moment, I wish that Andres had kicked away the scaffolding of Mozart and just kept pulling at the thread of his own invention.

Conrad Tao constructs his self-portrait of the artist as a young man by making the once-obvious point that the relationship between playing and composing is indissoluble. The emerging virtuoso makes his entrance with an anti-virtuosic piece, Meredith Monk’s serenely minimalistic “Railroad (Travel Song),” which pistons along unhurriedly like a local train through countryside. Then comes a pensive selection of Rachmaninoff preludes, each a magical daub of color. The playing induces shivers. The C minor prelude (Op. 23, No. 7) gushes out in quiet cataracts, lyrical and shimmering, a tour de force of delicacy and power. The fast and fiendish “Scarbo” movement from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit is a more obvious way for a prodigy to plant his banner, but Tao spins it into gossamer, all nocturnal flutterings and murmurs.

What Tao the composer inherits from his musical forebears is both a stylistic toolkit and the desire to translate dreams into vivid miniatures. Each of his four Vestiges expands some fleeting impression into momentary musical obsession. “Upon ripping perforated pages” translates the controlled tearing sound into a spasm of elegant violence, which in turn evolves into a high-speed etude. The more ambitious “Iridescence,” for piano and iPad, combines Monk-ish repeated patterns with aquatic electronic burbles. The piece deliberately treads water, hovering amid beautiful sonorities with nowhere special to go.

Julia Holter, Loud City Song: One of the most ambitious and innovative pop releases of the year. Surprise — it’s HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Winston Cook-Wilson says:

Julia Holter’s sound constantly shifts reference points, so it would be hard to claim that it is “distinctive”; this implies a certain level of predictability. However, it is, at any given moment, nearly impossible to liken to anyone else’s. The singer/composer’s work combines an erudite singer-songwriter sensibility with elements of 20th-century classical/electroacoustic music and millennial “bedroom pop,” and her latest, Loud City Song, demonstrates a significant change in the scope of her arrangements, featuring the densest tracks she has released to date.

No Age, An Object: The punk duo gets gloomy on their fourth LP. Andrew Parks says:

Listening to the latest No Age album usually makes my recessive punk genes want to grab the world by its left one, so it’s disconcerting — worrying, even — to hear the duo teetering on the verge of tears halfway through their fourth LP, An Object. As Randy Randall drags his distortion boxes over Dean Allen Spunt’s knuckle-dragging beats, we’re treated to a lonesome tale of day-long drives, truck stops that pour watery coffee pots, and a seemingly endless stream of “bullshit on the stereo.”

Zola Jesus and JG Thirlwell featuring Mivos Quartet, Versions: These orchestral reworkings of Zola Jesus’s songs by Jim Thirwell of proto-industrial act Foetus were debuted at the Guggenheim last year, and it was one of the most stunning live shows I’ve been to in ages. The recorded versions are just as good, and are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED Andy Battaglia says:

With arrangements written by JG Thirlwell, a veteran polymath with roots in the industrial band Foetus who has recently done pan-stylistic work for TV’s Adult Swim, Jesus bellows and swoons through material (five songs from Conatus, three from 2010′s Stridulum II, and one new song, “Fall Back”) made especially dramatic and grand by this backing. For the most part, Versions tacks toward the stately and the restrained.

Laura Veirs, Warp and Weft: Veirs gets some help from Neko Case, My Morning Jacket and others on her excellent ninth LP. RECOMMENDED Hilary Saunders says:

Veirs recorded Warp and Weft while she was eight months pregnant with her second child, and her husband and longtime collaborator Tucker Martine later produced the 12-track release. As such, themes of love and loss, protection and ultimate surrender weave their way throughout Warp and Weft, with Veirs’s own motherhood experiences serving as the connecting thread on her ninth LP.

Ski Lodge, Big Heart: THIS ALBUM IS SUPER GOOD. If you are a fan of The Smiths or the Housemartins or the Harvest Ministers, this is the record for you. Big, bounding, jangling guitars, dour, sad-romantic vocals and hooks for days. Days! RECOMMENDED

Julianna Barwick, Nepenthe: The one ambient album indie-rock fans should make room for this year, from an eMusic Selects alum. Ian Cohen says:

The format of Barwick’s music hasn’t changed; she’s still transmogrifying herself into waves of pure gauze five or so minutes at a time. But here, she avails herself of Iceland’s amenities — string ensemble Amiina, members of múm, a teenaged choir and reverb that makes Nepenthe sound vast enough to fill any space it’s put into. It’s not pop music, but it’s not difficult; you couldn’t call it “easy listening either.” In its own way, the category-dodging Nepenthe follows the rules of a typical rock follow-up: It’s a deeper, darker and more accomplished version of its predecessor.

A$AP Ferg, Trap Lord: A$AP Ferg’s first commercial release goes more for comprehensiveness than cohesion. Ian Cohen says:

Although Ferg is a fringe figure at heart, Trap Lord presents him as a middleman, or at least a central hub, where the darker strains of ’90s pop-rap mingle with their current analogues. It’s a weird one for sure, pitch-black in both sound and spirit at times. But even in its rushed, slapdash state, it’s a labor of love. The dank production and misanthropic lyricism can’t hide its creator nerding out over the past two decades of amoral hip-hop.

Army Navy, Crushed EP: Only Army Navy can make total emotional devastation sound like romantic bliss. On this EP – a teaser for their forthcoming full-length – the group apply their winning combo of honeyed hooks and clear-eyed melodies to the topics of desperation and disappointment, making gorgeous songs from snapping heartstrings. RECOMMENDED

His Electro Blue Voice, Ruthless Sperm: Italian combo HEBV have been around for a minute now, slowly perfecting their ruthless, grinding trash-rock. They’ve cleaned up nicely for their Sub Pop debut — the hooks are bigger, the riffs toothier and the vocals more panicked and urgent. This is one big chaotic barrel of sound.

The Horse’s Ha, Waterdrawn: Lovely-sounding folk music from Janet from Freakwater and James Elkington; this one channels early English folk in places — mystic, sparkling acoustic guitars — and early Americana in others. The whole thing is spit-shined and super cheery.

BRAIDS, Flourish // Perish: The Montreal band goes digital on their second effort. Annie Zaleski says:

At its core, Flourish // Perish is built around icy keyboard drones, clipped digital splotches, cut-and-paste vocal manipulation and Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s acrobatic enunciation. Guitars are practically nonexistent; only the album-closing “In Kind” features the instrument, and even then, these corrugated sweeps blend into the electronic textures and Standell-Preston’s Elizabeth Fraser-like trilling.

Larry Gus, Years Not Living: Whoah! This is really weird and pretty awesome! Grecian jack-of-all-trades Panagiotis Melidis delivers a head-spinning collection of art-pop not too far off from the late-night lounge lizard vibe of the last Matthew Dear record. This one is more outre tho — where Dear conjured a creepier Roxy Music, this one is artier and more obtuse. RECOMMENDED

Destruction Unit, Deep Trip: New one from these mean-eyed marauders — and one of the best live rock bands going — whallops full force, lots of squealing feedback and motorcross riffs and everything so drowning in distortion it almost sounds like a solid wall of static at times. This is the angriest record you’ll hear this year, and it’s RECOMMENDED.

White Hills, So You Are, So You’ll Be: Pretty awesome sturm und drang from New York stoner/acid/psych metal band. Sneering vocals and gallons of greasy guitars, offset by weird, glitchy broke-computer interludes.

Porcelain Raft, Permanent Signal: Mauro Remiddi’s sophomore LP thrives on intimacy. Puja Patel says:

The album features contributions from the Antlers and Yuck, but Remiddi mostly thrives on intimacy, balancing crackling, lovelorn moans with glassy-eyed reverb and barely-there melodies on “Echo” that push to the surface but never quite break through. The result is an enveloping, quicksand-like quality that makes Permanent Signal easy to get sucked in by even when there are no hooks to grab on to.

JJ DOOM, Keys to the Kuffs (Butter Edition): For a new MF Doom record, the original iteration of Keys to the Kuffs kind of snuck out without much fanfare. Here’s your chance to catch up on what you missed. The expanded edition appends 9 remixes and B-Sides to the original’s cockeyed, Kool Keith-conjuring hip-hop.

Shigeto, No Better Time Than Now: Drifty tracks that are no more techno than they are jazz. Michaelangelo Matos says:

No Better Time Than Now has a much heavier early-’70s astral-jazz feel than producer Zack Shigeto Saginaw’s prior work — if the title of the opener, “First Saturn Return,” isn’t enough of a clue to Shigeto’s orientation, the crinkly percussion and slow-rippling Fender Rhodes line and chimes ought to do it.

DIANA, Perpetual Surrender: The Toronto band’s debut is a mix of chillwave blur and ’70s art-rock chops. Barry Walters says:

Like all recent acts still working the chillwave formula, DIANA brings the blur. The quartet’s vocalist, Carmen Elle, sings softly, often smothered by wooly keyboard blankets; the sustain settings are often high, and there’s little here that’s fast or jarring. But significant variations on the familiar formula flow throughout this Toronto band’s debut album.

Diarrhea Planet, We’re Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams: It’s hard to get an exact read on one of the year’s best live bands, but they’re still captivating on their debut. Evan Minsker says:

Diarrhea Planet have been lauded as one of the best live bands going, and We’re Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams offers a stack of evidence for why that might be. They can deliver a melody that’s as catchy as any Cars hit and land an electric guitar solo that’s indebted to the hair metal gods. But for an album with cock-rock guitars and a Raymond Pettibon-reminiscent album cover, I’m Rich also has a sizable pile of quieter, simmering moments.

Crocodiles, Crimes of Passion: Big, blissful, noisy pop songs that flash back a bit to the noisier end of Britpop. Jesus & Mary Chain are the obvious reference point, but the melodies here are mostly sweeter and sunnier and more unabashedly pop.

Watain, The Wild Hunt: Watain take black metal into new places on their HIGHLY RECOMMENDED fifth record. Jon Wiederhorn says:

Watain haven’t yet figured out a way to express their malodorous aesthetic on record, but they keep finding new methods of shocking listeners. The Wild Hunt is just as dark and sinister, or as the band puts it in “De Profundis,” it’s “the defiant chords of dissonance, to rape the symphony of God.” Yet the album is far more eclectic than 2010′s Lawless Darkness, blending together a multitude of musical elements ranging from the blastbeat fury of “Outlaw” to the dark acoustic folk dirge “They Rode On,” which includes clean vocals by Erik Danielsen that resemble Nick Cave or Death in June.

Ptahil, For His Satanic Majesty’s Glory: For some slightly less-refined Stanism, there’s the latest from this Indiana death metal band, with incredible cover art, panic-attack guitars and shredded-voicebox singing.

Lycia, Quiet Moments: I can’t even front, I was way into this dude back when he was on Projekt. This is more chilling dark ambient perfect for those lonesome, sinister summer nights — weird layers of synth and an overall melancholy vibe.

The Kissaway Trail, Breach The Danish band’s sophomore effort is more focused, even without a couple founding members. Annie Zaleski says:

The album’s hazy indie rock draws from diverse influences, including Britpop (the shimmering “Nørrebro”), psych-pop (the Flaming Lips dead ringer “Cuts Of Youth (Razor Love)”) and ’80s alt-pop (“Sarah Jevo”). Stylistically, the Kissaway Trail aren’t reinventing the wheel, but their songwriting is taut and dynamic; as a result, Breach sounds effortless and irresistible.

Mark Kozelek & Desertshore, Mark Kozelek & Desertshore: It is a real bummer that Mark Kozelek has fallen so far below the radar, because after he got that bad Modest Mouse covers record out of his system years ago, his work has actually been really consistent. He’s establishing the same kind of career arc as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, putting out a rewarding record every few years for them that have ears to here. This one is a collaboration with Desertshore, the band helmed by Phil Carney, who also used to be in Red House Painters. Wheels within wheels! RECOMMENDED

Mountains, Mountains Mountains Mountains: New one from delightful droners features all measure of moody, meditative compositions that grow and swell and gain weight and scope and depth as they go on.

Still Life Still, Mourning Trance: The Toronto group comes out from Broken Social Scene’s shadow on their second album. Ryan Reed says:

Still Life Still’s sophomore LP, Mourning Trance, resonates on a deeper level — mostly because it doesn’t try as hard to impress. Alex Bonefant offers lush, synth-heavy production, and Saarinen has turned toward a more nuanced, imagistic lyrical style (“What does the world want?” he wonders on the slow-jam “Thinking About Our Plans,” elongating each syllable in a pained croon).

John Mayer, Paradise Valley: This guy. Ryan Reed says:

Paradise Valley finds Mayer at his most laid-back, embellishing the open-prairie folk of his previous album, Born and Raised, with breezy vocal harmonies and jazzy electric guitar nectar. Whether he’s in wistful-daydreamer mode (the shuffling country-folk of “Dear Marie”) or channeling his inner Slowhand (the impeccable, guitar-drenched kiss-off “Paper Doll”), Mayer’s hooks and grooves have an effortless glide to them — so much so that it’s easy to ignore that Paradise Valley is the most random, eclectic he’s ever made.

A.M.S.G., Anti-Cosmic Tyranny: No-fi people-hating black(ish) metal is weird as hell — it kind of reminds me of a less-well-adjust Xasthur, so do with that what you will. Profound Lore’s official site claims the album was, “formulated and constructed behind prison walls by mastermind and notorious black metal crime lord Angelfukk Witchhammer,” so take that at face value or don’t. What you can be assured of is that you won’t hear another metal record like this this year. Midway through the first track, a saxophone delivers a Coltrane-style solo behind some of the filthiest, most unrefined metal riffing this side of Mantas. I mean, I don’t even know where to start with this. RECOMMENDED for sheer weirdness’s sake.

Here are the collection’s 10 best tracks to get you started.

1. “I Got a Feelin’ in My Body (Take 1)” [disc 1, track 1]

Elvis struggled with stage fright, and his dwindling output over the final years of his life attests to his growing insecurity in the studio. Here, on the first take of the first night of the December sessions, that nervous energy spills out, but he gains confidence as the track moves along, practically rediscovering his prowess as a singer. Nowhere else in these sessions does he sound quite as raw and unguarded.

2. “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” [disc 3, track 10]

If Elvis weren’t Elvis he could have been a soft-rock king, Gordon Lightfoot with life below the waist. This bad-boy ballad is perfect for a tender soul who reportedly went to pieces if a woman he liked wasn’t ready to move into Graceland on the first date.

3. “Promised Land (Take 4)” [disc 1, track 3]

Why didn’t Elvis sing more rock ‘n’ roll in the ’70s? He’s so relaxed inside Chuck Berry’s double-time rhythm, he’s practically picking his teeth. Berry wrote this one from prison in the early ’60s, mapping his imaginary way back out.

4. “Take Good Care of Her (Takes 1, 2, 3) [disc 2, track 4]

Real country gentlemen hold their heads up when a lady dumps them. Sonny James, Porter Wagoner and Dean Martin took cracks at this one first, but they can’t touch Elvis’s chivalrous yearning.

5. “It’s Diff’rent Now (Unfinished Recording)”

This curio betrays the erratic nature of the July sessions, with Elvis drifting in and out of focus as the song goes along. Ultimately the July sessions fell apart with far less in the can that RCA had hoped. Elvis stormed out on the fourth night because his personal microphones were missing.

6. “Mr. Songman” [disc 3, track 7]

This C-list country ditty is the essence of disposability, but the piano lick and smidgen of vocal naivete turn it into an unexpected charmer.

7. “If You Talk in Your Sleep” [disc 3, track 3]

Mixed with the Stax sessions’ old-fashioned pledges of eternal love are a few decidedly contemporary cheating songs — this one, in which the singer instructs his mistress not to blab about their affair while she’s out cold, takes the caddish cake.

8. “Find out What’s Happening (Takes 7-8)” [disc 1, track 2]

Elvis never quite summons the sass this kiss-off demands, but its combination of twang and funk still pushes it over the top. He gets testy with the background singers in the studio chatter at the beginning.

9. “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby” [disc 2, track 13]

Tony Joe White, who wrote the concert fave “Polk Salad Annie,” was one of Elvis’s favorite songwriters, and legend has it he perked up when his handlers brought this cheerful paean to new love to the July sessions. The lyrics are pure come-on, but the lack of confidence in Elvis’s delivery makes it surprisingly poignant.

10. “There’s a Honky Tonk Angel (Who Will Take Me Back In)”

What country star doesn’t wring his hands over the choice between a long-suffering, fed-up wife and the trashy good-time gal waiting outside the dressing room? Elvis brings a depth of feeling the dried-up romance part of the song, leaving you rooting for the Priscillas of the world.

Elvis at Stax is the box set for people who thought they didn’t need box sets anymore, a return to the sensibility that music doesn’t just float around the internet any old way it pleases — that there’s inherent value in having it organized and annotated by industry wonks and historians who know their subject inside and out. Leading off with a disc-and-a-half of outtakes then laying out every track from sessions recorded in July and December of ’73, the collection brings together material that was initially spread over multiple releases during Elvis’s lifetime, allowing nerds to newbies alike to ponder the emotional and vocal state of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest singer just four years before his death in 1977.

Not that there isn’t a little Colonel Parker-style hype involved. Those who are hoping for a meeting between Memphis’s original groovy white boy and the studio and label responsible for civil-rights-era hits by Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MG’s and Isaac Hayes should cool their jets; with the exception of a couple of throwaway tracks featuring members of Stax’s house band, Elvis employed his regular musicians and producer. He got so fed up with Stax’s outdated console that he brought in RCA’s mobile recording unit for the December sessions; all he used were the walls. The collection bills itself as Elvis’s last major studio work, but that’s misleading. Though his output was clearly sputtering, he continued to record, albeit in ever-shorter bursts, through 1977. [For a quick guide to the set's highlights, check out this list — Ed.]

Still, Elvis at Stax is wildly special. From the front-loading of souped-up funk tracks on disc one, through the sequestering of outtakes into “R&B and Country Sessions” and “Pop Sessions,” this collection is the opposite of a slapped-together cash-in; it’s thoughtful, provocative and steeped in love and lore, asking listeners to do no less than stitch together the monumental variety of Elvis’s influences, from choir rafter-raisers to good-time road songs to honky-tonk teardrop shedders. By 1973, his drug problem was already out of hand — he was hospitalized for two weeks between the July and December sessions, covered with bruises from shots of Demerol — but the guy still sang with a beauty and devotion that could boggle the coldest skeptic. Besides “I’ve Got a Feelin’ in My Body,” my favorite moment comes in disc two with “Take Good Care of Her (Takes 1, 2, 3).” The song itself is a middle-of-the-road weeper, with the singer ruefully acknowledging that he blew it with a gal who really mattered. Elvis had finalized his divorce with Priscilla Presley just two months before, and he gets this one by the throat. In this outtake, as the band tinkers around with the beat and a pedal steel guitarist drapes a few notes, Elvis sings the opening lines quietly to himself: “I suppose I ought to say congratulations/ For you’ve won the only girl I ever loved.” For all the grotesquerie of Vegas showmanship that defines his ’70s period, here’s a moment of introspection where the only audience is himself. Regret and transcendence mingle in a masterful, complimentary balance.

Elvis at Stax awakened something in me I hadn’t felt in a long time: a feeling of music as event, as something mind-opening and cherishable. I’ve always been a late-Elvis gal: Back in ’92, when the post office staged a contest over competing stamp designs, youthful rocker versus jumpsuited Las Vegan, I was among the 25 percent minority who voted for the latter. The music here, from the mellow singer-songwriter lament “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” to a vaguely kitschy reboot of Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land,” retains that weirdly overdone gloss of ’70s Elvis; some tracks feature no fewer than 11 backup singers. You can hear him aping something that used to come naturally, practically boxing his own shadow. I’ve always believed these complexities make his late work more mesmerizing than the uncomplicated innovations of the ’50s. Elvis at Stax brings out the superfan in me, pouring over liner notes, gazing at photos, winding and rewinding illuminating moments.

Still, I think the potential audience goes beyond diehards. As an experiment, I tried it out on my 13-year-old, Tumblr-obsessed, Fall Out Boy-adoring daughter and her best friend. I flashed the cover image at them, a sienna-tinted photo of Elvis in 1970, tie loosened, eyes droopy behind aviator shades, mutton chops disappearing into his tall white collar. At first, the two of them squealed in horror.

Then my daughter’s friend quieted down and studied the late King for a few discriminating moments. “That,” she concluded, “is the coolest thing ever.”

Amanda Shires, Down Fell the Doves: The Texas singer/songwriter lets her eccentricities run wild on her latest LP. Stephen Deusner says:

When Amanda Shires sings about the devil on “Deep Dark Below,” a standout on her latest album, he “plays a mean fiddle and his bow’s made of bone.” The Texas native plays a mean bow herself: She joined the Texas Playboys at 15 and has backed an array of musicians, including Justin Townes Earle, Todd Snider and her husband Jason Isbell. Members of his band the 400 Unit back her on Down Fell the Doves, creating a strange and spry country sound that fits her fantastical lyrics about emotional risk and unfathomable doubt. Musically and lyrically, Shires lets her eccentricities run wild.

The Polyphonic Spree, Yes, It’s True.: The massive Polyphonic Spree’s first album in quite a while. Barry Walters says:

This time, rainbow-hued tunes dictate the arrangements’ scope, rather than the other way around. The chugging opening title cut strikes a feisty defense against detractors with a sticky self-empowerment slogan — “There’s always more to you than there are of them” — and ringing guitar riffs that skew more U2 than Up With People. What follows certainly has its share of monolithic moments, but now they’re effectively scaled to some of Tim DeLaughter’s most substantial and finessed compositions. He’s still rewriting one of the many pages from the Flaming Lips’ songbook, but when the results are as delicate and thoughtful as “You’re Golden,” his imitation mutually flatters.

Eric Copeland, Joke in the Hole: Black Dice’s Eric Copeland releases his sixth solo album. Andy Battaglia says:

Joke in the Hole shows Copeland as an exploratory electronic artist increasingly in control of his gear. Parts of the album are danceable in a would-be techno fashion (“Kashi Donation”; “Babes in the Woods,” after an extremely weird opening minute or so), and it hides lots of surprises as tracks zig and zag between passages that sound barely related to each other but are conjoined in ways that make sense. There’s a fascinating suggestion of logic to these pieces, even if that logic won’t do anything so logical as to give itself up.

Pond, Hobo Rocket: Tame Impala offshoot tries to capture the band’s live show. Andrew Perry says:

Pond, like Tame Impala, swipe influences from across rock ‘n’ roll’s more cosmically-aligned history, scrub them up with fresh shine and color, and present them as new. Opener “Whatever Happened to the Million Head Collide” — a Flaming Lips title, if ever there was one — opens like a lysergic take on Bo Diddley, with ethereal, reedy vocals reminiscent of MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden, but soon erupts into the most twisted Black Sabbath groove since Butthole Surfers’ “Sweat Loaf.”

Dumb Numbers, Dumb Numbers: This record has a pretty weird backstory! Dumb Numbers is just one man, Adam Harding, who happens to have a lot of excellent connections. Consequently, bold-faced indie types like Lou Barlow, Dale Crover, Best Coast’s Bobb Bruno and Dinosaur Jr.’s Murph. All show up here. And the artwork is by David Lynch to boot. Soncially, this is doomy and sludgy, sub basement trudge-core for your rainiest days.

Chris Thile, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 1: The mandolin virtuoso takes on Bach. Hilary Saunders says:

The shrill timbre of the mandolin, an unlikely choice for unaccompanied Bach, brings a certain brightness (sonically and metaphorically) to Thile’s interpretations, which honor the disparate dynamics, stretching arpeggios and seamless harmonic transitions of their original texts. His chordal playing is especially apparent in the Tempo Di Borea movement of the first partita and his stunningly speedy precision marks the Presto movements of both the first sonata and partita. However, Thile’s creative liberties conjure the most excitement, as he constantly adapts and improvises fills for his instrument when the original sounds can’t be recreated.

Moderat, II: Modeselektor + Apparat make surprisingly accessible 21st-century pop music. Andrew Harrison says:

Sascha Ring, Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary remain in restless magpie mode for this second album, adding abrasive electronic R&B textures, soulful, post-Frank Ocean human voices and especially the midnight clatter and throb of dubstep to their ever-changing scheme of things. The album’s signature track “Bad Kingdom” transplants the snap and bounce of a daytime radio pop-soul hit into the echoing no-space inhabited by Burial or Shackleton; the epic 10-minuter “Milk” is minimal house with a glittering dubstep sheen; “Let In The Light” is a slow jam so thoroughly zonked on shoegazing energies that it dissolves into bleary bliss. Most striking of all is the scale — everything here is big.

Various Artists, Mutazione: Italian Electronic & New Wave Underground 1980 – 1988: WHOAH HOLY COW. Weirdo electro — think of the stuff that comes out on Wierd Records and Minimal Wave — but with Italian vocals. Fascinating and unpredictable and RECOMMENDED

Explosions in the Sky & David Wingo, Prince Avalanche: An Original Motion Picture Soundtrack: EITS and Ola Podrida frontman David Wingo team up to create the soundtrack for the new movie by mumblecore master David Gordon Green. EITS are usually known for their sweep and pounce, but the songs here are tender and meditative and graceful — not too far off from labelmate Eluvium, in a way.

Medicine, To the Happy Few: I like to think that Medicine were getting jealous of all the attention Codeine was getting and decided to get back in the game. The first new Medicine record in almost 20 years (!) retains all of the quirk as their earlier work. The songs here are similar to early His Name is Alive, full of oddly-assembled sounds, drifting, dreamlike vocals and milky sonics.

Pop 1280, Imps of Perversion: Pop 1280′s last record was a straight masterpiece, a smoking slab of horror-goth that brought to mind the best qualities of The Birthday Party and The Jesus Lizard (we loved it so much that we profiled them when it came out). Their new record is different — it’s not as claustrophobic, there’s a greater emphasis on the keyboards over guitars, and the vocals are dry and shoved to the fore. A new look all around.

Bare Mutants, The Affliction: An all-star cast — Jared from Ponys, Seth Bohn of Mannequin Men and Jeanine O’Toole who did some time in the 1900s — along with Matt Holland and Leslie Deckard, produce an album of gloom-pop for eMusic faves In the Red that is full-on weep-psych at is finest. Fans of Crystal Stilts will especially enjoy.

Summer Cannibals, No Makeup: Great, bratty and power-poppy, like Joan Jett if she recorded for Matador instead of a major. Sneering vocals, gritty guitars and motorcycle melody lines make for a great late-summer ride.

The Human Beast, Venus Ejaculates into the Banquet: How’s that for a title? Super creepy minimalist electrogoth with doomy female vocals floating ghostlike throughout.

Eli Mardock, Everything Happens for the First Time: Lovely, weird-sounding orch-pop not too far off from that Kid Silver record that came out ages ago. Lots of dreamy, slack-key guitars, whispery vocals and weird, dreamlike sounds that appear outta nowhere. RECOMMENDED

Eldest Son, I Was Fire: Speaking of psych! I don’t know what the deal with this band is, but the music is pretty dizzying — crazy layers of guitar, corkscrewing time signatures and heavy-lidded vocals. A perfect complement to the Eli Mardock, and also RECOMMENDED

Hugh Mundell & Lacksley Castell, Jah Fire: Gorgeous 1980 record from two great reggae singers. Topically, this is strictly roots — musically, too, actually: low-rolling bass, chicken-scratch guitars and the gorgeous vocals of Castell and Mundell singing praises to the most high over top of it.

The Blind Hole, Dead in the Dirt: Atlanta grindcore powerhouse returns with a record that is just as brutal but far more inventive than your typical fare. Drums explode, guitars speed up and suddenly slam to a stop, and the vocals whiplash from growl to bloodcurdling scream.

Minks, Tide’s End: Plinky synthpop! Monophonic keyboards twitch and twinkle beneath New Romantic-style sad-man vocals. It’s aching in the way all good retropop is.

RocketNumberNine, MeYouWeYou: RocketNumberNine piece together an approximation of dance music. Philip Sherburne says:

Like Lightning Bolt, they manage it all with just four hands, with Tom Page’s live percussion providing the rhythmic muscle and Ben Page’s synthesizers taking care of all the rest. And “live” is the operative word here: Rather than editing and overdubbing, they roll out their lumpen shapes in real time, lending a rough-around-the-edges quality that’s rare for the kind of corkscrewing, groove-focused electronic music that they emulate.

The Who cared. Their version of another Cochran song, the iconic “Summertime Blues,” is a centerpiece of Live at Leeds, a high-powered version contemporaneous with Blue Cheer’s amps-on-amphetamine rendition that became an unlikely hit single in 1968, when the influence of Cochran’s insistent guitar was beginning to make itself felt a generation beyond his compressed lifespan. Of all his contemporaries in the golden era of rock ‘n’ roll, Eddie Cochran was the master of the guitar riff. For me, playing that too-young-to-vote anthem each night this summer while on tour in Europe, where Cochran’s reputation has always exceeded his recognition in the States, raising a fuss and a holler and seeing first-hand how unmistakably recognizable and rousing that two-bar hook is, is to return to his work with renewed respect and admiration at how much he accomplished in a short time.

Eddie was perfectly positioned age-wise to turn his guitar prowess to rock ‘n’ roll. Born October 3, 1938, in Albert Lea, Minnesota, he took to the instrument early on. His family was originally from Oklahoma, but he only began thinking about a career in music after the Cochrans moved to Bell Gardens, California, where he hardly lasted a year in high school. The country and western influence might have been uppermost when he began performing with Hank Cochran (later a Nashville songwriter whose credits would include “Little Bitty Tear”) as the Cochran Brothers in 1955, even if they were no relation. But they were soon swept up in the whirlwind that would become rock and roll. The duo’s first records, which can be found on The Many Sides of Eddie Cochran, were tinged with western swinging (“Mr. Fiddle”) or hillbilly harmonies (“Two Blue Singing Stars” referencing Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams). Their last disc together was an unabashed bopper, “Tired and Sleepy,” leading to their divergence and Eddie becoming a solo artist.

Through his session work, backing such country boogies as Skeets MacDonald, Cochran came in contact with Jerry Capeheart, an aspiring songwriter looking for someone to sing his demos. The two hit it off, and soon produced Eddie’s first record under his own name: “Skinny Jim,” recorded in July 1956, a month after Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula” was released. Was Eddie aware of Gene’s recording when he inserted the catchphrase into his roughened and heavily echoed vocal? The song, not a hit at the time, shows how much Cochran had absorbed the new style. It led to a cameo in one of the first rock ‘n’ roll movies, The Girl Can’t Help It, starring Jayne Mansfield. Someone turns on a television and there’s Eddie doing the hip-shake with his Gretsch 6120 to “Twenty Flight Rock,” his shoulders hunched over his guitar, his face radiant in the Technicolor, as promissory a performance in its own modest way as Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show.

The renown led to a contract with Liberty Records, and a minor hit with “Sittin’ In The Balcony,” written by John Loudermilk, our hero nuzzling his date in the “very last row.” Its teen romance softened Eddie’s appeal in Liberty’s eyes, and the album that followed — Singin’ To My Baby (tracks of which can be found on the Undying Love compilation) — seemed to position him in the pretty boy mode that the Philadelphia Italians — Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell — would soon claim as their own. “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” and “(Baby Let’s Go) To A Drive-In Show” might have been pleasantly sultry, but Eddie was made of sterner stuff, as when he suddenly lets out a growl in “Mean When I’m Mad,” a song that otherwise hardly sounds miffed. Though 1957 was highlighted by a package tour of Australia with Little Richard and Gene Vincent (opening the door to the latter’s friendship and their consequent touring together), Cochran’s records weren’t earning him wider acclaim.

Recognizing this, Eddie visited Jerry’s Sunset Parks apartment in Hollywood in March of 1958 to toss around song ideas. “I knew there had been a lot of songs about summer,” Capeheart would recall, “but none about the hardships of summer. And of all the seasons there had never been a blues about summer. They had ‘em for winter, fall spring…” Eddie had the classic riff, and Connie “Guybo” Smith, his bass player since high school, strummed underneath the vocal like another rhythm guitar, part of the growing upsurge of the Fender electric bass as it began to transform rock ‘n’ roll’s bottom end (both Buddy Holly and Elvis had started with “doghouse” stand-up bass players), helping to create the template of the modern rock ‘n’ roll band. Cochran double-tracked his guitars, a relatively new technique. The surprising thing about the texture of “Summertime Blues” is that it’s driven by an acoustic guitar, punctuated by a clattering, hand-clapping drum pattern. A sense of humor helped. Eddie liked to answer his phone with the Kingfish’s distinctive “Hello dere!” and used the voice to deliver his sonorous taglines of adult authority.

His were specifically teenage blues, their subject matter all too youthful. But he was a teen idol in a game that many thought wouldn’t last much past a fad. He wasn’t alone in this mindset: Buddy Holly was recording with strings; Elvis had starred in films and was preparing to go into the army; Bobby Darin followed “Splish Splash” with Brecht’s “Mack the Knife” backed by a full big band. Eddie began to think of a future in production, session work, going home. But in early 1960, he went to England to join a package show with Gene Vincent headlining. Considered the “first full tour of England by an American rocker” according to Nik Cohn in Rock From The Beginning, the ensuing furor was so great, and Eddie’s stage presence so forceful, that soon they were equally billed, as the tour became a sensation, especially for those waiting in the wings, including a young George Harrison, who followed the tour from stop to stop. Where in America he was just another teenage singer pushing 22, in England Eddie Cochran was becoming a superstar.

Even with Sharon joining him on the tour, the long weeks at the Odeons and the Hippodromes were exhausting, following on a series of one-nighters in the Midwest before he’d left America. He was due to go home for 10 days on Easter Sunday, then return to Britain for another 10 weeks, after which, he told his family, he hoped to be off the road. He planned on working with Capeheart on a new singer they’d found, Glen Campbell, and other studio projects. He was mindful of his friend Buddy Holly, whom he’d attempted to pay tribute to with “Three Stars In Heaven,” recorded the summer before, and the toll the road exacted.

Cherished Memories, a 2001 documentary, tells the story of that fateful drive on the night of April 17 to Heathrow airport along the A4 near Chippenham. Gene, Sharon and Eddie are sitting in the back. The taxi is going too fast. There is a missed turn, a frantic swerve to get back in the right direction. Gene and Sharon survive; Eddie doesn’t. In May, 1960, “Three Steps to Heaven” is rush-released in the UK, hitting No. 1. In America it doesn’t chart. But Eddie is already a Legendary Master, or at least that’s what his record company (now absorbed within United Artists) calls the series in which he is given a double-album greatest hits collection in 1971, and for which I was asked to write liner notes.

It was summer when I started gathering anecdote and b-side, talking to Capeheart and Sheeley and even, I believe, his mother. It was to be a long-form essay, and I’d reserved all of August to make sure it was worthy of the songs Eddie has placed in my heart all these years. But then my own summertime blues began when I get a call from S., with whom I was in the same college class, and the object of a long abiding post-teenage crush. She invited me to drive to Canada with her, all the way to the West Coast, and who knows where after that. It was tempting, but I couldn’t go, even as I imagined nights camped under the stars, somewhere between Winnipeg and Vancouver. “You can’t have the car/ ’cause you didn’t work a lick.”

Eddie knew how to work a lick, that’s for sure.

Slow Focus is the first time Benjamin John Power and Andrew Hung attacked their maximalist bangers sans help at their own aptly-named Space Mountain studio…They expand their sonic vocabulary considerably with no one around to rein it in. If you felt like their trance-inducing tracks could go on forever in the past, wait until you hear songs like “The Red Wing,” a mid-tempo mix of buzz-sawed synths, liquified drum loops and nutty disco nods. It’s groove-locked to the point where it could be performed live for an extra 10 minutes without anyone noticing. Or complaining, for that matter.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, S/T – Third full-length from communal psych-folk outfit. Ryan Reed writes:

Their third album is their messiest and most sprawling effort, blending their trademark psych-rock goofiness with warped gospel balladry and vivid Age-of-Aquarius soul. An army-sized ten-piece, The Magnetic Zeros still give off the whiff of a cult. It’s often transportive, as if the pit band from Jesus Christ Superstar started up a psych-rock outfit. “Come celebrate, life is hard!” the voices cry on “Life Is Hard,” swirling higher in the mix, battling violins and tambourines and what sound like bouncing basketballs. Sharpe and his Zeros have a gift with this sort of gentle absurdity, as over-the-top and obvious as it is impossible to resist.

Grant Hart, The Argument – Latest solo record from the former Husker Du member, and a 20-song concept record based on Paradise Lost. I’ve been hearing some pretty great things about this, to be honest; some places are calling it his best-ever solo work and the first ever to touch his Husker Du work.

Van Dyke Parks, Songs Cycled – The waggish, reclusive singer/songwriter and arranger returns with his first solo record since 1989, and the way he saunters onstage, a flourish of tangled Disney strings sprouting up around him, it’s like he never left. When you barely acknowledge the last half-century’s worth of pop music’s existence, it’s easy to come and go as you please. Winston Cook-Wilson has more:

In many ways, Van Dyke Parks’s first solo studio album in 25 years feels directly connected to his 1968 debut Song Cycle; the near-identical titles, of course, encourage this comparison. There are collage-style song forms and fast-picked balalaikas. Parks even includes a revamp of “The All Golden.” It’s easy to see Songs Cycled as a “comeback” outing: Parks embracing the daredevil spirit of his early output at a time when critics and fans appreciate it more than ever. After a few listens, however, it becomes clear that the precedents for these songs actually come from throughout his career. “Black Gold,” a comment on the Prestige oil spill, is a South Pacific-esque exercise in exoticism that recalls Tokyo Rose. “Sassafrass” (more Oklahoma!) would sound at home on Jump! The album’s instrumental compositions vacillate between Americana-infused neo-modernism and high kitsch, evoking his idiosyncratic soundtrack and arranging work.

True Widow, Circumambulation – Bleakly alluring stoner metal, tinged with shoegaze drone. Jon Wiederhorn writes:

The members of Dallas trio True Widow have called their music “stonergaze,” for the way they mix elements of stoner metal with shoegazer rock. It’s a somewhat misleading tag for the band’s third album Circumambulation. These are songs rooted to the earth, not created for the cosmos. The music is heavy and repetitive, yes, but it’s too bleak to be mind-altering. The whole album seems to have been composed out of weariness and danger, not bliss; the droning guitars, phlegmatic vocals and down-tempo beats echo with bad vibes.

Mean Lady, S/T – A lovely, old-fashioned guitar pop record. Annie Zaleski says:

Mean Lady is a versatile duo made up of vocalist Katie Dill — who also contributes guitar, ukulele and omnichord — and bassist/keyboardist/sampler-wrangler/producer Sean Nobles. On Love Now, their breezy debut full-length, they mix up murky electronics with hardy, time-tested folk elements. Hard rhythmic tracks — clipped grooves, strident beats, rollicking piano, the occasional funky freakout — serve as a backbone for gauzier tones (misty production, found sound effects, hazy keyboards, Smiths-echoing guitar tones). Dill’s dusty alto and carnival-esque omnichord burbles lend a longing but playful vibe to the record.

Bombadil, Metrics of Affection – A pastoral indie-folk record with a hint of Hobbit. Annie Zaleski, again, has the review:

Rich, warm production enhances the record’s amalgam of stately folk, ’60s pop, alt-country, orchestral indie and even classical (the lovely piano instrumental “Patience Is Expensive”). While there’s a decidedly Southern bent throughout — mainly due to the easygoing vocal style of Michalak, guitarist Bryan Rahija and pianist/ukulele player Stuart Robinson, who take turns singing lead — British artists are Metrics of Affection‘s biggest underlying influence, from XTC (“When We Are Both Cats”) and Elvis Costello (“Have Me,” the piano-driven “What Does It Mean”) to the Beatles (the White Album-like “Whaling Vessel”).

Gogol Bordello, Pure Vida Conspiracy – Another entry into a catalog that, as Andrew Mueller notes, is fast becoming a genre unto itself:

From the first notes of the surging opening fanfare “We Rise Again,” Pure Vida Conspiracy fulfills every expectation that one might harbor of a Gogol Bordello album, which is to say that it would not be altogether surprising for any given track to be abruptly interrupted by a visit from the riot police. “We Rise Again” is a delirious, joyful cacophony even by the group’s standards, and the pace it sets rarely drops. The distinguishing aspect of this album is Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz’s determination to bring the influences of his adopted homeland of Brazil to bear upon the Ukrainian folk that animated the group in the first place.

Shelby Earl, Swift Arrows – This is an absolutely lovely record, a singer/songwriter album by a woman with a dusky, slightly Dusty Springfield voice and a tart, wry way with kiss offs. One of my favorite new surprises in a minute. Laura Studarus reviewed it for us, saying:

Earl is a singer/songwriter unafraid of dirty riffs and dark lyrics—all delivered with a wicked grin. With Damien Jurado in the producer’s chair, Earl strays from the winsomeness of her debut, Burn the Boats.  Swift Arrows is the work of an artist who has discovered her tart, wry voice, which infuses her songs no matter what shape they take: “I love you/You love you too,” goes the mocking singsong of the Phil Spector-leaning “The Artist.” “I’ll make the bed while you are off to shoot the moon,” she sings, tongue firmly planted in cheek. Yeah right. Earl may be adroit shapeshifter, but she’s no one’s woman but her own.

Guy Clark, My Favorite Picture of You – Latest record from Texas singer/songwriter legend is a heartbreaker as usual, in his devastatingly plainspoken way. Here’s Britt Robson with more:

On My Favorite Picture of You, Guy Clark’s first studio album in four years, the reigning sage of Texas singer/songwriters remains allergic to pretense and vigilant against pathos, lest it siphon away the dignity and essential truth of his music.  The worn leather of Clark’s 71-year old voice powerfully parses the understated lyrics, and one can’t help but marvel at the alliteration, assonance and seemingly effortless rhythm balled up in lines like, “Standing in the rain in Durango/Right side of wrong/Wrong side of gone.”

Weekend, Jinx – New one from the Slumberland indie-pop band that has absolutely nothing to do with The Weeknd. Marc Hogan writes:

Weekend moved to Brooklyn in time for their sophomore album, and Jinxoffers their make-it-anywhere take on the ’03 New York of Interpol or A Place to Bury Strangers. Guitar squall and percussive thunder once again help Weekend hit harder than most other bleakly romantic noise rockers, while Durkan’s voice, circles around sparse, repetitive lyrics lodge ambivalent feelings in your head.

By the 1970s, Miles and other American jazzers had gone electric, and English art rockers (sometimes vaguely) associated with the Canterbury school favored extended improvising over vamping backdrops. These musicians coming from different directions might sound uncannily alike. Slip Return to Forever’s “Beyond the Seventh Galaxy” into The Rotter’s Club by Hatfield and the North and it wouldn’t sound out of place, Lenny White’s funky drumming possibly excepted. RTF’s Chick Corea and Hatfield’s Dave Stewart were digging into the same twisty riffs and new keyboard sounds.

Two new albums recall that very strain of ’70s jazz-rock fusion, one unconsciously, the other very deliberately. The former is Life in the Sugar Candle Mines by drummer Gerald Cleaver’s Black Host; the latter, Dutch trio eBraam’s 3, is an extended shoutout to 1970′s Third by trend-setting jazzy rockers Soft Machine.

Black Host’s lineup wouldn’t ordinarily prompt a fusion connection, save for new-star speed picker Brandon Seabrook on skronky electric. Like Cleaver, the other players mostly play smart, gnarly acoustic jazz: altoist Darius Jones, bassist Pascal Niggenkemper and the quintet’s Cecil Taylor-esque wild card, pianist Cooper-Moore. Still, the blowing here is very focused on the material. There’s plenty of sustained textural play: long-tone melodies and fused timbres from alto and guitar, off-center grooves from drums and bass (and sometimes piano). All that’s plain on the opening “Hover,” but the pithy, anthemic theme that arrives at around 4:40 could have been lifted from Soft Machine’s Third.

Cleaver is an eclectic listener; was that part of his mix? The Detroit-reared drummer kindly fielded a query. “I know what you mean with the Soft Machine connection. I was aware of the music but didn’t listen to it. To be honest, Elton John, Captain & Tennille and Neil Diamond are more of an influence. My mom hipped me to great pop music, our kitchen radio fixed to CKLW, from Windsor across the river. My older sister was listening to everything soulful: Motown, Stax, Crusaders, Deodato, etc. My older brother loved Hendrix. Everyone loving Sly. My dad was and is the jazz guy, playing late Coltrane and [Detroit/New York bop pianist] Barry Harris. Growing up with a jazz-drumming father, an open-minded bebop baby, is one reason I could synthesize the same sources as the Soft Machine guys.”

Rock for melody, then, and jazz for the improvising. “Test-Sunday” has another good hook, set off by Beefhearty ashcan-school dissonances. Seabrook’s spiky Fender jittering is closer to the suburban garage than Allan Holdsworth; I’ve never heard him play two notes of bebop. Seabrook’s noise and Cooper-Moore’s free jazz outbursts frame and buoy up the melody statements, instead of pushing them aside. That’s very Soft Machine.

Cleaver’s tunes can take their time: Wavering alto and guitar long tones on “Gromek” sound like ambulances Dopplering in the distance and reverberating in an urban maze. Cleaver manipulated some of the recorded sound in post-production, too, lightly glitched and treated it to deepen the sheen. He takes the treatments a little farther on “Wrestling,” which lands somewhere between Song X‘s electrodensity and an After Bathing at Baxter’s sound collage. Compared to that, “May Be Home” is an Elton John ballad — Sir Elton named for Soft Machine Third saxophonist Elton Dean, come to think of it.

The trio eBraam used to be known as pianist Michiel Braam’s Wurli Trio — one of his several diverse bands. On 3 they declare their intention to honor Soft Machine’s Third by playing triads, thirds and triple meters — such basic building blocks of Western music, you suspect a hoax. In fairness, they do cover a Soft’s vocal tune, “A Certain Kind” from their rockish second album (sweetened by angelic harp), and the sleek melodies and pumped-up rhythms suggest kinship. Safe to say eBraam play music steeped in the same era (when electronic keyboards were a-burgeoning) and the same sensibility, working the crevasses between musical genres.

Third had four jams stretched across 2 LPs; eBraam’s nine tunes in 46 minutes force more variety. Not that I’m knocking Soft Machine’s minimalist-inspired keyboard repetitions, which echo in 3‘s “Augmented Seconds,” a track that also plays tricky games with rubbery timing. (Another declared inspiration: Pythagorean triangles.) In truth, sometimes it all sounds like an excuse to trot out goofy vintage keyboard sounds, and I’m not knocking that, either. (They’re largely replicated on modern equipment; see reviewer Beppe Colli’s awesome breakdown of numerous specfic keyboards invoked). Braam has a Sun Ra-like gift for mining each quirky timbre’s most useful/expressive qualities. Like England’s ’70s art fusioneers (did we mention Brand X?) eBraam improvise and play rockish beats without getting too ponderous with either: one tendency dares and tempers the other.

The album’s highlights include “Cold Wind Blowin” and “The Line That Fits,” ballads that imagine Lynch singing at the Twin Peaks roadhouse instead of Julee Cruise, and “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” a grunge-y take on Dylan’s 1964 murder ballad. On “Sun Can’t Be Seen No More,” Lynch poses as the singer of a Southern bar band; his pseudo-C&W recitations are suffocated by flange effects which transform them into otherworldly howls. Though The Big Dream sometimes wanders into maudlin, adult-contemporary sound-worlds, it is generally an enjoyable listen, and will please Lynch fans that enjoy hearing his cinematic ethos translated into musical terms.

Mayer Hawthorne, Where Does This Door Go: The cheeky guy gets a little more serious on his third record. Barry Walters says:

Teaming with Pharrell Williams, Anthony Hamilton/Cee-Lo Green producer Jack Splash, Mika/Katy Perry collaborator Greg Wells and other hit-makers, he broadens his palate beyond the blueprints of the past, mixing, matching and updating styles rather than the straightforward Motown and Philly soul mimicry of his initial records. Now he alludes to Steely Dan, Frank Ocean, Hall & Oates and Pharrell himself, particularly on the Williams-produced cuts “Wine Glass Woman” “Reach Out Richard,” and “The Stars Are Ours.”

Pet Shop Boys, Electric: One of the world’s most self-aware acts puts out a record that is very quintessentially them. Says Barry Walters:

The sounds similarly reference the duo’s various stylistic stages: “Thursday” evokes the pair’s earliest bells and electro-funk beats; “Shouting in the Evening” suggests their more aggressive, Chris Lowe-lead techno B-sides. The most remarkable cut, “The Last to Die,” continues their tradition of borrowing material from unlikely sources. Here they tackle a Bruce Springsteen anthem most likely written about the Vietnam War. Packed with references to blood, folly and heartbreak all retrofitted here with dark disco drama, it now feels like the latest in the duo’s tradition of elegies mourning those lost to AIDS. Of all the very PSB-sy songs here, this is the PSB-sy-est.

Houndstooth, Ride Out the Dark: A rootsy debut from this Portland group. Mike Wolf says:

Houndstooth have the kind of vibrant group-mind that could take them far; every twanged guitar lead, heart-prodding chord change and Wurlitzer part feels effortlessly orchestrated into a gentle sweep of twilit melody and lasting affect. Still, it’s no slight to the band (lead guitarist John Gnorski deserves special mention) to focus on vocalist Katie Bernstein, who mostly sounds compassionate but mixes a little graceful danger into her emotional well.

Robert Randolph & the Family Band, Lickety Split: Robert Randolph steals every scene on his band’s latest. Ryan Reed says:

On 2010′s We Walk this Road, Randolph worked with T-Bone Burnett and an army of veteran studio aces, tracing the evolution of African American music — from slave chants to Hendrix to Prince, from Pentecostal gospel to hip-hop. Lickety Split is less academic and more visceral, reuniting the full Family Band (drummer Marcus Randolph, bassist Danyel Morgan, vocalist Lenesha Randolph, multi-instrumentalist Bret Haas) for 40 free-spirited minutes.

Soft Metals, Lenses: This couple’s record is best suited for midnight drives and 4 a.m. foreplay, says eMusic’s Andrew Parks. More on that:

If Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks ever split up, the inevitable debate over who gets what isn’t going to involve custody battles or cheap-but-functional IKEA furniture. It’ll clearly be over the couple’s synth collection, which is as crucial to their chemistry as whatever made the Soft Metals members fall for each other in the first place. That bond is so strong, in fact, that two of the eight tracks on their second album are strictly instrumental, beaming their very own vision of melancholic body music and crystalline Klaus Schulze chords. Everything else is just as evocative in the Roland, Korg and Moog department, too, alluding to acid techno (the title track), woozy coldwave and prismatic electro-pop with Hall’s vaporized vocal melodies weaving through every last loop.

Gauntlet Hair, Stills: Gauntlet Hair offer a more accessible sound on their second LP. Ian Cohen says:

On their earliest singles, Gauntlet Hair couldn’t decide if they were a noise band playing pop music or vice versa. The Denver duo attempted to find common ground between the platinum kick of INXS and early Animal Collective’s feral caterwaul. While the results weren’t always coherent, you could hear potential in the chaos. Having excised their most abrasive impulses on their 2011 self-titled debut, Stills continues toward a more accessible sound by emphasizing the grooves and dialing down the reverb.

Chance, In Search: A great collection from a Nashville musician with a fascinating history. Stephen Deusner says:

A Nashville jack-of-all-trades during the 1970s, Chance Martin was Johnny Cash’s right-hand man and stage manager for two world tours; a songwriter and musician; a would-be outlaw called the Stoned Ranger; a professional man-about-town; and is currently a co-host of a country show on Sirius XM. In the late 1970s, he and some ex-cop buddies recorded a crazy-ass solo album, which Martin released in a limited run on his own Macho Records. For 30 years, In Search has been a footnote to a footnote, one of approximately infinite albums lost to the dustbin of Music Row history. Thanks to the North Carolina-based label Paradise of Bachelors, however, Martin’s sole full-length is now getting a larger release. Thirty years have done nothing to dull this oddity.

Chris Morrissey, North Hero: A record that combines equal parts jazz adventurousness and pop assimilation. Ken Micallef says:

Bassist Chris Morrissey’s sophomore effort is approachably left-of-center jazz, the sort of thing you might play at a party where the guests enjoy Ornette Coleman’s Tomorrow Is the Question! as much as Fleet Foxes. The Minneapolis-to-New York transplant Morrissey enlists a crack crew, including drummer Mark Guiliana, pianist Aaron Parks and Bon Iver tenor saxophonist Michael Lewis; The Bad Plus and Happy Apple tub-thumper Dave King is producer.

Steve Swallow Quintet, Into The Woodwork: The latest from this “joyously puckish” electric bassist. Britt Robson says:

Swallow rarely solos, coming closest on an extended duet with Cardenas on “Suitable For Framing” — another inspired title, since nary a note seems out of place. These evocative, winsome songs are his chief contribution. The best one, in which all five members graze against each other’s unpretentious goodwill in a seemingly effortless flow, is called “Still There.” After more than 50 years of strumming and plucking, the same can be said for Steve Swallow.

Merry Clayton, The Best of Merry Clayton – The long under-appreciated singer (That’s her on “Gimme Shelter”) receives her due. Barry Walters writes:

Known primarily as background singer for everyone from Ray Charles to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Clayton released four solo albums in the ’70s, but the closest she ever got to a hit was “Yes,” a 1988 Pointer Sisters-styled single from the phenomenally popular Dirty Dancing soundtrack. Nearly every cut on this collection is a cover, but Clayton possesses virtuoso interpretive skills that nearly rewrite the melodies of familiar songs while deepening their lyrical impact.

The Icarus Line, Slave Vows – The post-hardcore band The Icarus Line has been around forever, and their latest is a streamlined blast of everything they’ve ever offered. If more “modern rock” bands were this strong, modern rock radio would be a better place.

Darren Hayman and the Short Parliament, Bugbears – The ex-Hefner leader offers an album full of updated takes on 17th-century drinking songs.

Justin Timberlake, Take Back The Night – New JT single. This one’s got a dubious title, just on a cliché level alone, and it has the added distinction of sharing the name with a venerated and long-running organization that works to end violence against women. The organization, perhaps understandably, has registered that they’re less than thrilled by the namecheck, which JT says was unintentional. It’s a pretty stock pop-song phrase, so I’m sure that’s true. The song itself is supper-club MJ.

Eraas, Reworks – Spare, menacing, moody post-punk Brooklyn group, remixed.

Army Navy, Crushed Like A Car – New one from eMusic Selects alums! A great, midtempo tune from this always-spot-on power pop outfit.

I Am Legion, Make Those Move – Skull-hammering single off of Skrillex’s label.

While the sample-driven sonics of Gibson’s early material remain on his second record, they’re grafted onto actual guitars — delivered in bluesy brush strokes by John Baizley (Baroness) and Jim Elkington (Brokeback) — and layers of live drums, strings, horns, organs and what appears to be a bagpipe. Or a melodica stolen from Clinic. Who knows, honestly. It’s nearly impossible to tell what’s real and what was lifted from rural Pennsylvania’s finest record stores; the aim here is to distort reality, not emulate it.

Speedy Ortiz, Major Arcana: Writing them off as ’90s-nostalgia-obsessed is an insult to this rising Massachusetts band — highly recommended. Annie Zaleski says:

The band has an ear for texture: Plumes of distortion shroud the grungy “Tiger Tank”; unsettled strums shimmer and murmur beneath the surface of “Pioneer Spine” and “Casper (1995)”; needling melodies slice through “Plough”; and the taut “Fun” has sinewy post-punk velocity. On the raucous, Liz Phair-reminiscent “Cash Cab,” Sadie Dupuis’s vocals are cracked and disfigured, drowned out by slow-churning riffs, while Darl Ferm’s hulking bass emerges occasionally to add heft.

Preservation Hall Jazz Band, That’s It!: The legendary group’s first full collection of original compositions. Stephen Deusner says:

Nothing here sounds obviously new: These 11 rousing tracks are so steeped in local technique that they could believably pre-date the band. Tinges of gospel (“Dear Lord (Give Me Strength)”), vaudeville (“Rattlin’ Bones”) and speakeasy jazz (“I Think I Love You”) suggest the form’s infinite malleability. The piano ballad “Emmalena’s Lullaby” exudes an easy sentimentalism, as though it had been played at the end of the night at French Quarter pubs for a hundred years.

Hebronix, Unreal: Daniel Blumberg, the former Yuck frontman, goes solo. Ian Gittins says:

On Unreal, cannily produced by Royal Trux man Neil Hegarty, Blumberg is devoutly pursuing truth and beauty at the heart of a squall of guitar reverb. The blissed-out title track sounds narcoleptic, love-dazed, like Sonic Youth heard through a morphine haze. Blumberg is clearly in thrall to first-generation UK shoe-gazers such as Slowdive, Swervedriver and Pale Saints, while the blanched guitar haze of the lovely “Viral” recalls ravished 1980s New York romantics Ultra Vivid Scene. Yet there is little that is retro about this immaculate, exquisite music; it is of the moment, and of itself.

Maps, Vicissitude:Maps’ latest is “grandiose innerzone pop for the discreetly blissed-out listener.” Andrew Harrison says:

Vicissitude is a lot lither than its predecessor, 2009′s Turning The Mind. Underneath the baroque electronic stylings on “Built to Last” there’s a “Planet Rock” rhythm, although Chapman clearly likes the song’s nagging synth melody so much he allows it to run on for a good two minutes after the song proper has ended, decaying into a spangly reverie. Elsewhere there’s an imperious boom to the single “A.M.A.” with jittering synths gathering in the distance — imagine Ladytron rearranged for a papal funeral. But the lyric is minor-key neuroticism, a plea for love or at least attention.

Ciara, Ciara - The R&B/pop singer Ciara made some of the best, slinkiest club hits of the last ten years – “Googies,” “Oh,” “Promise.” Her voice has always been airy and tiny, and she floated it over enormous, snarling beats. She fell out of style for a few years, as everyone in pop does, but this album brings her to the fore again with the singles “I’m Out” and “Body Party.” Her voice is a little tougher and louder, but the production is still the same state-of-the-art mix of club-pop and deep-South rap.

Araabmusik, The Remixes, Vol. 1 – Araabmusik takes his all-systems-go, hit-everything-at-once style to a bunch of other tracks he likes, reshuffling and stripping them all down until there is no doubt that You Are Listening To Araabmusik. This stuff plays incredibly well at huge outdoor festivals; I’ve seen Araab flatten hundreds of people with just his MPC. I don’t like his albums much, generally, but I like this one a bit more than usual: The source material smuggles some different moods into Araabmusik’s world. A lot of this is surprisingly moody and muted. At least until the beat drops.

A Grave With No Name, Whirlpool – This London duo makes pretty, yawning dream-pop, and Whirlpool is their richest and fullest-sounding effort. This is a beautiful-sounding record, a strong effort.

Coffins, The Fleshland - This long-running Japanese death metal outfit does its gurgling-tar-pit, horrible-production, melody-free dentist-drill thing, and it’s as awesomely satisfying as ever. Sometimes, you just want unrepentant, warty filth. Go to Coffins.

Whirr, Around - Talked-about new indie rock band, heavy gurgling guitars with light, feathery coed vocals floating on top. The songs stretch out for nice six-to-eight-minute lengths, and build to slow, crashing crescendos. Heavy MBV vibes, in other words; lots to get lost in here.

Skylar Grey, Don’t Look Down - Skylar Grey was almost a thing in 2009 or so, when she wrote “Love the Way You Lie,” Eminem and Rihanna’s dark, queasy domestic-abuse duet. She’s a talented singer/songwriter, but on Don’t Look Down she also suffers from a small case of “what do you want me to be, music industry?” There are some capable pop-folk songs, some weepy piano balladry, some raunchy strutting songs, some fake Drake songs, some ersatz Amy Winehouse. There’s a lot of skill and not much in the center of all of it; Grey has a nice dark, full voice, but a lot of this album feels like a shuffled row of demos for other pop singers. Which it might have been, but you should be able to hear the singer the song was “meant for.”

Dark Furs, Dark Furs EP – Self-released, sounded lo-fi but interesting, a strong sound: a good lead female voice, smoky and mournful, with just some watery electric guitar and some synth streaks behind it. Appealing.

Plankton, Humble Colossus - Blues-rock jam band, with lots of dueling leads, FM-rock riffs, and an oddly persistent bongo player.

Pillar Point, Diamond Mine - Grooving, brainy, gawky synth-pop, touched with some Hot Chip wistfulness.

The So So Glos, Blowout – Twelve tracks of relentlessly fun and ingratiating punk rock, some real King Tuff charm here. Splices some Buzzcocks energy and songcraft into sunny beach-pop.

Shintaro Sakamoto, Don’t Know What’s Normal - This is a great moment to point to Hua Hsu’s excellent piece for us on the Japanese underground-rock phenom Shintaro Sakamoto; these two songs perfectly encapsulate his skewed, Ariel Pink-ish charm.

No Age, “C’mon, Stimmung” – First gritty blast from the L.A. punk duo’s upcoming new record. Sounds promising.

Mariah Carey, “#Beautiful” – Mariah Carey’s excellent new single prominently features R&B savant of the moment Miguel – it’s basically a Miguel song with Mariah on it, and it is infectious and wonderful. Here, A$AP jump on it, adds a few smears of his cartoon graffiti to it.

Kate Nash, “OHMYGOD” – Kate Nash’s upbeat single, plus EIGHT remixes and an extra track.

Hurray for the Riff Raff, My Dearest Darkest Neighbor: eMusic Selects alum, and longtime favorite, Hurray for the Riff Raff return with this covers collection. The approach is pretty straightforward — bare-bones, country-style instrumentation, with most of the focus put on Alynda’s warm, rich voice. Her version of “People Talkin’” crushes me absolutely every time.

Owen, L’Ami du Peuple: The latest from Mike Kinsella, beloved by some of us lapsed emo acolytes for his work in Cap’n Jazz and American Football, is richer and more multi-layered than previous releases — the roiling “Blues to Black” recalls early Death Cab for Cutie, “Bad Blood” lurches and stomps, and “Where Do I Begin” swirls slowly, like dry leaves in an autumn breeze.

The Penetrators, Kings of Basement Rock: Our pals at Slovenly have dug up another winner. With a ragged, rough-n-ready punk sound that recalls the primitive howl of Rocket From the Tombs, Syracuse group The Penetrators deliver deliberately unpretty rock that coughs and sputters and oozes like the carburetor on an old Pinto. This comp collects tracks they recorded between 1976 and 1984, just the shot of grim grime you need to make your July 4th a winner. RECOMMENDED

Pretty Lights, A Color Map of the Sun: Restless, thumping electronic music from Derek Vincent Smith, the songs on A Color Map swing from deep boom and grind to hazy, expansive sountrack-like work. In spirit, it recalls the early days of trip-hop, full of eerie, mysterious vocal snatches and distorted, detuned takes on classic genres. Talib Kweli and Eligh show up for vocal cameos on two songs. If you were real into Roni Size and Goldie back in the day, the aesthetic here will seem familiar.

The Chills, “Molten Gold”: It is impossible for me to adequately express how happy this makes me. The New Zealand group the Chills are one of my all-time favorites, but they seemed destined to be filed under Flying Nun also-rans — a cruel fate considering the effortless pop chops of frontman Martin Phillips. Their story is too long and too turbulent to be succinctly blurbed, but in broad strokes: after a string of beautiful and fetching singles for the legendary NZ label Flying Nun (including the stone classic “Pink Frost” which, if you somehow have not ever heard, you should remedy right now), the group signed to Elektra and released the incredible Submarine Bells. You can read more about that album — and what happened after it — in this excellent piece Douglas Wolk wrote for us back in 2010. While you’re doing that, enjoy the excellent new single, which makes an effortless case for the Chills as the sonic godfathers for folks like Belle & Sebastian and Camera Obscura.

About Group, Between the Walls: Latest from the group comprised of John Coxon, Charles Hayward, Pat Thomas and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor is all-over-the-map fascinating. Some moments have the skronk and clatter of free jazz, others the lock-step groove of dead-eyed motorik, still others the clean glide of silky R&B. The songs feel collaborative — they emerged from practice sessions, and you can hear that live, loose energy and that sense of improvisation in the final recorded versions.

Emika, DVA: Twinkling nighttime electronic music from the British musician Emika (and Executive Produced by Hank Shocklee of The Bomb Squad!) DVA is one long, slow, haunting pulse. Emika favors low bass throbs, whcih she drapes in gauzy layers of synths and tops with her mournful alto. The results are rich and hypnotic.

Beautiful Swimmers, Son: Really engaging throwback-style electronic music — think synthetic handclaps, firefly-like synths, four-on-the-floor percussion and a sense of summery abandon.