Eric Church: Chief (EMI)

I know the idea is that the studly barfly who kicks the album off grows up as it progresses, but that doesn't help me feel the big dog who wants to beat up my buddy in "Keep On," or convince me that the morning-after sex of the last verse isn't a literary lie. Still, grow up he does. Church has always known how to write, and he's blowing here‑-check how the reworked title of "Homeboy" obliterates one's faint reservations about its moralism, or for that matter how the reworked title of "Keep On" mans up that sex scene. Jack Daniels (apostrophe omitted) and Springsteen (teen-sex soundtrack) are also title-cited, as is Jesus, twice‑-as a woman he doesn't deserve and a Johnny Cash imitator country music could use. Be nice if this bright, basically decent guy was him. A MINUS

 

The Dirt Drifters: This Is My Blood (Warner Bros.)

Five red-bloodeds from Greater Nashville‑-which here encompasses Oklahoma, where the Fleener brothers did what their mechanic dad loved and not what he did, and New Jersey, where Garth Brooks showed Jeff Middleton where he could stick his knack for words‑-escape the working-class rut they'd be lucky to be grinding down right now with capitalism running amok. The strong songs about labor breaking your back are outnumbered by the sharp ones that prescribe alcohol for the pain. But these dudes know honky-tonk hoo-hah for the doomed escape it is‑-a real-life option they understand better than they do the women they drink with. Just as well that their protest song‑-"All the good politicians are dead," "Radio plays the same 10 songs," etc.‑-is called "I'll Shut Up Now." But they won't and they shouldn't, because whenever they just look around a little they have the skills to tell us what they see. B PLUS

 

 

Our Dreams Are Our Weapons: From the Kasbah/Tunis to Tahrir Square/Cairo and Back (Network)
At first this bifurcated selection of eight liberation songs from Tunisia and six from Egypt sounds noble and no more. Although the 14 tracks vary considerably, all are on the respectable side except for one Tunisian rap, which was recorded well before the revolt got the rapper imprisoned. But soon the Tunisian sequence hits home: uplifting neotrad opener to songpoem with crowd chatter to haunting rap to marchlike hymn right through a rock anthem that swept all the way to Tahrir Square. Unfortunately, after a Nubian opener the Egyptians' contributions don't connect as deep. The two oud-and-percussion features by two Coptic brothers are too many, and the saved-for-last "The Challenge," by Tunisian oud-and-zither brothers with their own album on this very label, strives a little too solemnly to, as the notes put it, "build a bridge between Orient and Occident." A matter of taste, of course‑-tragic sacrifices and momentous changes merit some solemnity. But I'd love to hear just one beat from the rappers I know damn well were taking their A game to the Cairo streets. B PLUS

 

The Plastic People of the Universe: Magical Nights (Munster)

Half of Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned, that crucial early salvo in the former Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, is scattered through these two discs. That one still sounds glorious on its own. But it's no more likely to be reissued separately than Take a Look at Those Cakes. The long-gone live reunion album 1997, so guitar-heavy you can hear it dreaming of arena-rock glory, has only nine of these 31 selections. And although I miss the Leading Horses finale "Osip," this captures the band more persuasively than either of the six post-Bondy albums I've heard. The mood is eerie and sardonic, and the unchronological song order tracks like a Tarantino movie. Unobliged now to penetrate their considerable political significance, which got too Catholic anyway, I'm free to immerse in the bearlike vocals, jazzlike saxophone, unstinting drive, and gloomy harmonic devices of my favorite prog band. Can and Faust are noodling wimps by comparison. A

 

 

Emperor X: Western Teleport (Bar/None)

Lapsed science teacher Chad Matheny specialized in electro-noise until he figured out how chords and beats work, enabling him to put together a futuristic folk music in which nerdy melodies rise out of a shambolic clatter that's the best anyone can expect with the power going out all the time. The opening "Erica Western Teleport" and the closing "Erica Western Geiger Counter" celebrate his crush on a rebel hero who scopes corporatist disaster areas where dystopian sci-fi is indistinguishable from democratic-socialist​ realism. In "Compressor Repair" he wishes he could fix the ecologically incorrect air conditioner of a girl who deserves to be cool. "Allahu Akbar" establishes his material solidarity with the strugglers of Tahrir Square. A MINUS

 

Merle Haggard: Working in Tennessee (Vanguard)

Now 74 and short half a lung, he's not making the best music of his life, just the best albums. The playing keeps getting savvier, he hasn't lost as much voice as God intended, his homegrown anarchism is feistier than ever, and with help from his fifth wife he's still writing keepers. Not even the anti-Nashville "Too Much Boogie Woogie" feels like filler. Try a title track that crests with "Well the water came in, the water went out/Saw the Hall of Fame floatin' about," or the equally insouciant "Laugh It Off," or the love songs for seniors "Down on the Houseboat" (they've got money) and "Under the Bridge" (they don't), or a "What I Hate" where he blames the resurgent Civil War on the Rebels. Or if all that sounds too darn modern, start with the three oldies: "Cocaine Blues" on his lonesome, "Jackson" with his fifth wife, and "Working Man Blues" with Shotgun Willie and his own 17-year-old son. Man's learned how to live, and he has no intention of stopping. A MINUS

 

 

Radioclit Presents: The Sound of Club Secousse Vol. 1 (Crammed Discs)

Dancefloor-tested by a London DJ partnership comprising one Frenchman and one Swede, these 17 tracks from contemporary Africa are high and speedy instrumentally, with male voices to bring them down to pavement. West Africa with its muscle and beseeching gravity is absent, and not enough of the songs stick as songs. But there are so many major exceptions in the second half‑-the shouted "Zuata Zuata" by Angola's Puta Prata, the nutty "African Air Horn Dance" by Zimbabwe's Jusa Dementor, the airy "On Est Ensemble" by Congo's Kaysha, the very high and speedy old "Xipereta" by South African falsetto Dr. Thomas Chauke‑-that the hyper beats and nonstop electrosounds of the first half start sorting out into minor exceptions themselves. B PLUS

 

BLNRB: Welcome to the Madhouse (Out Here)

In which minor German electronic music duo Gebrüder Teichmann, major Berlin techno-populists Modeselektor, and sexy Euro-multiculturalis​ts Jahcoozi take up residence in Kenya via Goethe-Institut Nairobi and spend a month working out a fusion with local rappers. Miraculously, they avoid paternalism and other mismatches until an emotive singer-guitarist initiates a downshift. Until then it's an excited Afro-minimalist blast, with "first lady of Kenyan rap" Nazizi and aspiring electropoppers Just a Band bringing extra spritz and tune to a delighted mesh that's at its best when a sinuous synth buzz snakes like a digital didgeridoo through four tracks that begin with one called "Ma Bhoom Bhoom Bhoom." Even the dubby stuff at the end gathers contemplative charm. It's like a crew album where the crew has real mojo. A MINUS

 

 

Ry Cooder: Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (Nonesuch)

Folksingers are pretty mad these days, at times to the point of pushing back at the ravening rich people who are sitting on their heads. Some even refer to class or (can it be?) speak up for unions. But not one has topped a sardonic satire like "No Banker Left Behind" with a murderous ballad about Jesse James and his illicitly retrieved .44 taking every bonus-hogging fat cat in heaven to hell with him, or despoiled a Christmas corrido for GIs on leave with anything as gruesome as "I'd like a mouth so I can kiss my honey on the lips." A few tracks drag and one or two misfire. But from John Lee Hooker's campaign song to the earned nostalgia of a lonely old Chicano who'll forgive you for driving a Japanese car, Cooder has brought his longstanding obsession with the Great Depression into the present, where it unfortunately, tragically, enragingly belongs. Kudos too to drummer Joachim Cooder. This doesn't rock, and it shouldn't. But it rollicks, skanks, and two-steps just fine. A MINUS

 

Note of Hope (429)

Bragg & Wilco? The folk-rock of dreams. Jonatha Brooke? Singer-songwriter. The Klezmatics? Er, his wife was Jewish. But assigning a Woody Guthrie "celebration" to bassist extraordinaire Rob Wasserman? Trailing the likes of Kurt Elling, Madeleine Peyroux, Tom Morello, Studs Terkel, Ani DiFranco, and Jackson Browne behind him? Reads like a jazzbo recipe for leftwing piety. And proves instead yet another winning realization of an idea I had doubts about from the first Mermaid Avenue rumors. Wasserman is all over a record that's less sung than spoken, providing a musical identity as distinct as any other in this motley series. Once again Guthrie's words are set to music, although sometimes these words were prose and sometimes they're rapped or sprechgesanged. They're sly, sexy, down-and-out, up-and-at-'em. Terkel and DiFranco deliver diary jottings of breathtaking acuity, and the Pete Seeger recitation ends: "There never was a sound that was not music. There's no trick of creating words to set to music once you realize that the word is the music and the people are the song." Then Jackson Browne sings a formally static 15-minute ballad about the night Woody met Marjorie and all the dreams he had. I said Jackson Browne. It's magnificent. A MINUS

 

 

Jens Lekman: An Argument With Myself (Secretly Canadian)

I really like this choirboy manque, which part of me says isn't the point and another says is too. I like how gentle he is, how decent he is, how observant he is, how funny he is. The first three songs on this EP are strong, the fourth misty, the fifth sweet and slight, but all know melody and all fill out a portrait of a young man your daughter should only bring home to mother. He's so talented and caring that when he spends the entirety of the title cut berating himself‑-laughingly,​ to an adapted Congolese beat, as he obsesses on a romance gone awry while walking the streets because he doesn't have enough cab money to go cry in bed‑-it's clearly a temporary setback. Most likable is "A Promise," to a Chilean friend trapped in the toils of Sweden's deteriorating healthcare system. Gothenburg’s gotten meaner and he knows it. A

 

Fruit Bats: Tripper (Sub Pop)

Less dynamic and more ruminative than The Ruminant Band, here are 10 songs and a poky instrumental for country hippies manque and other shaggy folk down on the little luck they ever had. All are lost, some more than others, but each is observed and distinct. Eric Johnson's falsetto cuts extreme empathy with moderate unction until he starts ruminating for real with the instrumental, which lasts two minutes and goes on forever. Then he seeks purity for four. There's another song too. A MINUS

 

 

 Das Racist: Relax (Greedhead)

Setting aside their dreams of biz advances and street glory, they form their own label to showcase a bunch of mostly alt-rock beats‑-meaning Chairlift and Yeasayer as opposed to MGMT‑-that reflect their actually existing cultural orientation and almost add up to a sound. Then they construct an album-not-mixtape around the theme of money, including the capital they accrued as they pursued their dreams. "Come to our shows and they're clapping again/Thank you my friends" isn't sarcastic, which doesn't mean it's devoid of irony or should be. "There's a brand new dance/Give us all your money/Everybody love everybody" is sarcastic. "Michael Jackson/A million dollars" is meta. "I ain't backing out till I own a bank to brag about" is protest. "I'm at the White Castle"/"I don't see you here dog" is follow-up. "Your booty is a lifeline" is a religious interlude. A

 

Ice Cube: The Essentials (Priority '08)

The card-carrying O.G. and ultimate fake gangsta dares you to distinguish among the very intelligent guy, the writer of talent, the committed role player, the cuddly comedy star, and the flat-out liar. Brazenly sharing just three 1992-1993 tracks with the same label's 2001 Greatest Hits‑-the swaggering "Check Yo Self," the peaceable "It Was a Good Day," and the doomed "What Can I Do?"‑-this downplays his hard act because hard is getting old, especially for him. It leads with two of hip-hop's great anti-moralizing sermons, the Snoop- and Lil Jon-powered "Go to Church" and the grinder's credo "A Bird in the Hand," then proceeds to his greatest song, the fact-filled paraplegic memoir "Ghetto Vet." It closes with "Dead Homiez" and "Cold Places," two distinct and convincing arguments for keeping ya head up and ya ass off the street. A MINUS

 

 

The Klezmatics: Live at Town Hall (Klezmatics Disc)

Recorded in 2006, this concert program performs roughly the same function as Piranha's 2008 cherrypick Tuml = Lebn. But personally, I'd rather hear these New Yorkers trying out their English than honoring tradition on a German best-of boasting "7 songs in Yiddish, 1 song in Yiddish/English + 8 instrumentals." Thus I gravitated to the four Woody Guthries and one Holly Near on the second disc, wished Susan McKeown would join the band already, welcomed cameo-ready Joshua Nelson, and was perfectly fine when half the Tuml = Lebn songs showed up. And then in a contemplative mood I sat still and listened to the first disc's 12-minute, quarter Yiddish, quarter English, half instrumental "Dybbuk Suite." Understood every note, I swear. A MINUS

 

Ravid Kahalani: Yemen Blues (GlobaLev)

Singing in many languages you don't understand, including at least one he made up, Yemenite vocalist Kahalani, Jewish and now based in Israel, joins Israeli bassist Omer Avital, Jewish and now based in New York, to create Arab-inflected rhythm music over horns, flute, violin of some kind, and percussion. From falsetto-Afrochant-o​ver-hummed-beat to Middle-Eastern-popsong-with​-show-jazz-brass, his music seems ecstatic even before you know his border-crossing backstory. You can hear liberation in the intensity of the ensemble playing, the vocals, and the groove. A MINUS