Jamey Johnson, Living For a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran

Jamey Johnson’s Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran directly follows the country singer/songwriter’s expansive 2010 two-disc set, The Guitar Song with a tribute to one of the masters of the heartsick love ballad. Cochran is most famous for penning Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” and Johnson’s reverent tribute album is evidence that Cochran’s pained honky-tonk ruminations continue to resonate with broken hearts everywhere.

Stylistically, these duet interpretations opt for respect over reinvention. The arrangements resemble the kind of old ’60s country record you might find at a yard sale, full of weepy pedal steel, honky-tonk piano and understated drums. The album peaks when emotions reach a boiling point: You’ll swear Emmylou Harris is crying, the way she delivers her vocal take “Don’t Touch Me.” The same can be said of Alison Krauss, who very nearly sobs her way through “Make the World Go Away.” Maybe he’s just playing the polite host, but Johnson doesn’t come off quite as convincingly heartbroken: Even that old codger, Bobby Bare shows him up during “I’d Fight the World” — especially on its tragically-voiced spoken word section. Nevertheless, Johnson’s good taste and the album’s stellar cast is enough to make Living For A Song a worthy remembrance.

Benjamin Gibbard, Former Lives

Ben Gibbard’s lyrics for Death Cab For Cutie are often real-time struggles with angst-inducing mental detritus, or meditations on either fresh heartbreak or romantic bliss. As its name implies, though, Gibbard’s solo album Former Lives (his first full-length record under his own name) isn’t focused on his present mindset. Instead, it’s an absorbing chronicle of the emotional ebbs and flows of his back pages.

Recorded partly with Earlimart’s Aaron Espinoza, Former Lives is a collection of songs Gibbard stockpiled over eight years, a time period that encapsulated “three relationships, living in two different places, drinking then not drinking,” as he writes in the album’s bio. The album is wildly varied as a result; the music touches on everything from silly a cappella (the fanciful, nursery-rhyme-like “Shepherd’s Bush Lullaby”) and mariachi-flavored folk-rock (“Something’s Rattling (Cowpoke),” which features the Trio Ellas) to a ’70s AM Gold homage (“Duncan, Where Have You Gone?”). Gibbard performed the bulk of Former Lives by himself, although several guests make welcome contributions: Drummer Jon Wurster and bassist/lap steel player Mark Spencer provide subtle color on the tropical acoustic-pop of “Lady Adelaide” and twangy lope “Broken Yolk In Western Sky,” while the jangly highlight “Bigger Than Love” is a duet with Aimee Mann that’s inspired by the letters of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

As the latter song implies, Former Lives‘ songwriting is often character-driven. The fiery woman described in “Lily” inspires passionate love, while the broken, aging “Lady Adelaide” is plagued by loneliness and regret. But the album also finds creative new avenues to address Gibbard’s familiar themes of melancholy and heartbreak. The jangly, R.E.M.-esque “Teardrop Windows” is written from the lonely perspective of Seattle’s Smith Tower — once the focal point of the city’s skyline, it’s now dwarfed by other skyscrapers — and “Oh, Woe” personifies the feeling of despair in a whimsical, Shel Silverstein way (“Oh, woe please hear this plea/ To walk away and leave me be”).

Despite this diversity, Former Lives is remarkably cohesive, thanks to its meticulous sequencing; the album organizes its textural quirks in a logical way, so there are no lulls in tempo, styles or subject matter. Thanks to the sentimental (but not overly nostalgic) atmosphere of the record, and the quality of the songwriting, Former Lives transcends “tossed-off solo project” status.

Mac DeMarco, 2

Mac DeMarco’s solo debut from earlier this year, Rock & Roll Night Club, painted the Montreal singer as a breathy, unnaturally deep-voiced, unwholesome creep. On his follow-up, 2, DeMarco has left that caricature for a more reasonable vocal register, a jangling guitar and a set of breezy love songs. Here, DeMarco embarks on a yacht-rock voyage, offering pop songs that are easy, carefree and romantic. Strumming a vaguely tropical-sounding twangy guitar and crooning gently, he focuses on the simple things — his favorite brand of cigarette, for example — and treats them simply. (From “My Kind of Woman”: “Oh baby, oh man/ You’re making me crazy, you’re really drivin’ me mad.”) But shot through with his infectious melodies and sense of goodwill, DeMarco delivers an album of satisfyingly consistent mellow gold. The final song is just DeMarco his acoustic guitar, and his falsetto, crooning the word “together” repeatedly — a fitting cap for the album’s tone of longing, romance and nostalgia.

Chelsea Wolfe, Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs

When Los Angeles singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe released her second album, Apokalypsis, last year, her read of black metal forefather Burzum’s “Black Spell of Destruction” found her voice undergoing a transmogrification into Nordic wind: a lightless, flesh-chilling howl to go with the industrial gloom. So when Wolfe sings “I want Flatlands/ I don’t want precious stones” on the opening song on her latest album, Unknown Rooms, her throat now feels sun-warmed and vulnerable. Which is the perfect change for the gentler instrumentation now about her. And when the cellos come in to mingle with her voice midway through the song, it’s a stunning amalgam.

Subtitled A Collection of Acoustic Songs, her latest album suits Wolfe’s strengths, allowing nuance, rather than more shadows. Lyrically, Wolfe remains bleak (see the a cappella “I Died With You”) — which makes her liner notes’ nod to Townes Van Zandt all the more telling — but now the songs come first. Stripped back to acoustic guitar, church organ, a tom drum and upheavals of strings, Wolfe moves towards the austerity of folk in a way that feels natural. There’s a bit of PJ Harvey on the country-tinged “Appalachia,” but more often, traces of singers like Josephine Foster and Sibylle Baier can be gleaned. But on the haunting, elegiac harmonies of “Spinning Centers,” Wolfe’s voice now feels gentle as a breeze, even as it still sends a shiver.

Max Richter, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons

Composed in 1723, Antonio Vivaldi’s four programmatic violin concertos The Four Seasons have in recent decades been the subject of degrees of revision ranging from switching the featured instrument (flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal) to switching all the instruments (the Chinese Baroque Players, who performed it mostly on traditional Chinese instruments: erhu, qung wan, di, cello and pipa) to introducing a wild card (on the album The Meeting, Dave Lombardo of thrash metal band Slayer played drums on Vivaldi pieces, including movements from The Four Seasons). None have been as drastic, or as interesting, as the efforts of the German-born British composer Max Richter.

Richter (born 1966) is classically trained, and co-founded the contemporary classical ensemble Piano Circus, but has also worked with electronic group Future Sound of London. His solo work combines ambient electronica with melodic minimalism, and in his recasting of The Four Seasons, everything is up for reconsideration except the classical instrumentation. Sometimes the melody is retained while elements of the accompaniment are reconstituted into a droning or minimalist style: Sometimes the rhythm is chopped up into uneven time signatures. Motifs are stretched through repetition in a way that reminds us of the similar construction of much Baroque music. Occasionally revisions practically result in a new melody, as in the opening movement of “Summer.” Especially attractive are the slow movements, where the violin tends to carry most or all of the melody over shimmering layers that suspend rhythmic impulse. In some fast movements, the opposite happens: the rhythmic elements of the orchestral accompaniment are foreground, giving the music a Glassian character that would fit easily in Koyaanisqatsi. Most of the time, though, Richter is inimitably Richter, even as he honors Vivaldi. It would have been very easy for Richter’s Four Seasons end up a cheap gimmick. Instead it aligns the Baroque and the modern in thoroughly enjoyable and memorable ways.

Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace

Have you ever wished your grandfather told cooler stories? Like, say, about driving his band across the Canadian prairies in an ancient hearse named Mortimer, or the time David Crosby fell asleep on his recording studio’s floor during a bout with sobriety? Never fear, Neil Young is here.

One of a recent string of aggressively unghostwritten celebrity memoirs, Young’s book, endearingly subtitled A Hippie Dream, is heavily populated with model trains, audiophile rants and lots of good old-fashioned “back in my days.” Luckily, that reminiscing is about one of the greatest musical careers of the 20th century, and the tone is so earnest and open that you quickly come to forgive any digressions that may occasionally take you off the narrative path. Besides, when he gets to the point, it’s always a fascinating one; just picture Young in 1969, during the recording of CSNY’s Déjà Vu, returning to a motel room torn apart by the bush babies he was keeping in the bathroom “for company.”

Keith Carradine’s pitch-perfect narration is warm, bemused and occasionally acidic, California cool and just as engaging as a fireside chat with your grandpa ought to be. In print, the text tends a little heavily toward ellipses and short, stilted paragraphs — aloud it flows freely and naturally. You’ll soon forget you’re not listening to Young himself — and that you’re not actually related to him.

Dan Weiss Trio, Now Yes When

Drummer Dan Weiss, pianist Jacob Sacks and bassist Thomas Morgan all share a fondness for repeated figures, so it’s not surprising that Weiss’s Now Yes When has a lot of hypnotic music on it. What is surprising is how naturally and clearly they render their often dense and complex music. This is partly a matter of rigor: “Chakrader 1″ utilizes the traditional Indian tabla technique of replicating drum lines with the voice. Sack shadows the same line on piano, enhancing the effect and forming a three-part incantation that is a model of precision.

From there, the group moves into the slowly unwinding, vaguely ominous-sounding “Not Yet,” anchored by Morgan’s steady bass. Sacks does some startling things here: His formidable technique allows him to mix crystal-clear lines with deliberately blurred ones, creating an unsettlingly dual-edged solo. “For Samirji” has a playful theme, consisting of a simple repeated melodic piano line, with variations coming from rhythmic displacement of the drums and bass. Two trombones, played by Jacob Garchik and Ben Gerstein, are added to “Wizards,” a stately piece that unwinds into an increasingly off-kilter mixture of improvisation and written melody. Both horn players have wonderfully sonorous tones, adding to the gravitas of the piece.

It’s hard to say how Richard Dawson, erstwhile host of the TV game show Family Feud, wound up getting the eponymous tribute included here. It’s more bewildering that that tribute would sound so menacing (I seem to recall that Dawson was kind of a wise guy). No matter; it’s a very good piece of music. Weiss again does some impressive rhythmic displacement in the skewed funk of “Ode to Meshuggah.” It’s arguably the strongest item in the program, with Sacks taking a muscular solo that conjures up an array of historic jazz piano references, and Morgan subtly carrying much of the weight of the composition. Morgan may not get the kind of attention that his playing deserves. He does no grandstanding, instead working creatively to the greater musical good. His fellow musicians will immediately understand how difficult the task he unfailingly pulls off. Now Yes When manages to present very difficult music simply — a sure sign of mastery. Dan Weiss puts himself more visibly on the radar with his fine work.

Benjamin Gibbard, Former Lives

Ben Gibbard’s lyrics for Death Cab For Cutie are often real-time struggles with angst-inducing mental detritus, or meditations on either fresh heartbreak or romantic bliss. As its name implies, though, Gibbard’s solo album Former Lives (his first full-length record under his own name) isn’t focused on his present mindset. Instead, it’s an absorbing chronicle of the emotional ebbs and flows of his back pages.

Recorded partly with Earlimart’s Aaron Espinoza, Former Lives is a collection of songs Gibbard stockpiled over eight years, a time period that encapsulated “three relationships, living in two different places, drinking then not drinking,” as he writes in the album’s bio. The album is wildly varied as a result; the music touches on everything from silly a cappella (the fanciful, nursery-rhyme-like “Shepherd’s Bush Lullaby”) and mariachi-flavored folk-rock (“Something’s Rattling (Cowpoke),” which features the Trio Ellas) to a ’70s AM Gold homage (“Duncan, Where Have You Gone?”). Gibbard performed the bulk of Former Lives by himself, although several guests make welcome contributions: Drummer Jon Wurster and bassist/lap steel player Mark Spencer provide subtle color on the tropical acoustic-pop of “Lady Adelaide” and twangy lope “Broken Yolk In Western Sky,” while the jangly highlight “Bigger Than Love” is a duet with Aimee Mann that’s inspired by the letters of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

As the latter song implies, Former Lives‘ songwriting is often character-driven. The fiery woman described in “Lily” inspires passionate love, while the broken, aging “Lady Adelaide” is plagued by loneliness and regret. But the album also finds creative new avenues to address Gibbard’s familiar themes of melancholy and heartbreak. The jangly, R.E.M.-esque “Teardrop Windows” is written from the lonely perspective of Seattle’s Smith Tower — once the focal point of the city’s skyline, it’s now dwarfed by other skyscrapers — and “Oh, Woe” personifies the feeling of despair in a whimsical, Shel Silverstein way (“Oh, woe please hear this plea/ To walk away and leave me be”).

Despite this diversity, Former Lives is remarkably cohesive, thanks to its meticulous sequencing; the album organizes its textural quirks in a logical way, so there are no lulls in tempo, styles or subject matter. Thanks to the sentimental (but not overly nostalgic) atmosphere of the record, and the quality of the songwriting, Former Lives transcends “tossed-off solo project” status.

Interview: The Jim Jones Revue

There is an assumption in rock that artists make their most exciting music in their late teens and early 20s, but that early excitement soon gives way to something rather dubious known as “maturity.” The Jim Jones Revue are living, fire-breathing proof that this needn’t be the case. Jim Jones himself has been around on the London scene since the late ’80s, initially with Stones-meets-Stooges rockers Thee Hypnotics, and then with various combos including the more soul-injected Black Moses.

The Jim Jones Revue, which he formed five years ago with guitarist Rupert Orton, have been crowned “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world right now” by MOJO Magazine. They earned such plaudits fundamentally for activating rockabilly, boogie-woogie, blues and R&B with such feral garage-punk intensity that those vintage strains felt palpably alive, here and now, in the present tense.

Their first, self-titled album was an exercise in ear-splitting carnage, while 2010′s Burning Your House Down found Nick Cave’s towering drummer Jim Sclavunos at the controls, attempting to channel the quintet’s vital energy for maximum impact.

Two years on, their new album brings some changes. Again produced by Sclavunos, it allows for space in the sound — a little less sawn-off shotgun, a little more arsenic. At their East London rehearsal space, eMusic found Jones and Orton vibing with characteristic zeal about their latest creation.

How do you marry up your tastes in early rock and punk-rock?

Rupert Orton: We see no differentiation between Johnny Thunders and John Lee Hooker. You listen to John Lee Hooker, and it’s right in your face. He says he’s gonna fuck your wife and then kill you. Johnny Thunders was doing exactly the same thing, with a different delivery. To us, it made no difference.

Jim Jones: It’s like you take the rock ‘n’ roll beast, chop it into a load of pieces, then put it back together in a different order. Like, yeah, we’ve heard it in this order plenty of times — let’s pull off the tail and shove it at the other end and see what we get!

Your starting point might be old-school rock ‘n’ roll, but you would’ve been run out of town in the 1950s for sounding like you do.

Jones: Yeah, too disrespectful!

Orton: With the first album, we’d been into various studios where you get that cold, clinical sound, with everything separated. We didn’t have any money, and it was like, “What the fuck are we gonna do?” Then it came to us in a blinding flash: why don’t we just record it live, as we would in a rehearsal room?

We got a couple of mics and went for it for two days. That was a real statement of intent — this is what the band is like, take it or leave it. There weren’t any overdubs, and in places it turned into white noise. We thought the recording might get us a few more gigs. But it took off, and it was incredible where it ended up. But obviously we couldn’t make that record again, which is why we brought Jim [Sclavunos] in, to sonically define us a bit more, but still retain the energy and excitement.

So was it a conscious decision with The Savage Heart to change things up?

Jones: We wanted to go out into deeper waters, to see what we can find.

Orton: We both re-read Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness last winter. There’s an interesting part where he’s looking for what he’s going to do with his life, and he looks at the map, and the Congo is white, because it’s uncharted, and he’s like, “That’s where I wanna go.” It was a bit like that with us. Where aren’t we? Let’s go there!

There’s a song called “In And Out Of Harm’s Way,” which is long — six minutes. It started off as an Eddie Cochrane jam, and it just mutated — we didn’t really have any control over it. It ended up as a sprawling, tribal spiritual. That’s a good example of how the songwriting went. And then, “Seven Times Around The Sun” is the only song we’ve ever recorded with no guitars on it.

It felt radical to you to have no loud guitars kerranging away?

Orton: Exactly!

Jones: People would say to us at gigs, “You guys could really do with a bit in the middle where it goes somewhere else for a bit.”

Orton: We got to know [pub rocker/punk sympathizer turned UK country luminary] Nick Lowe — he came to a show we did last year. We were like, Fucking hell, Nick Lowe! He produced the first Damned record!

Jones: We both ran up to him going, “How did you do it?”

Orton: Like, “Where were the mics? How do you capture that absolutely electric sound? It is possible.” So we approached him and said, “We’re making this new record…”

Jones: He invited us to Leicester Square Theatre to see him play, and when we were chatting afterwards, we were like, “We’re in the studio now, we’d be honored if you’d swing by.”

Orton: He came down and he gave us his thoughts, and one of them was, I really like all the stuff, but it would be great maybe if there was some light that went with the shade. It was great to have his inspiration.

So what actually fed into the new vision on The Savage Heart?

Jones: We wanted to open things up. As much as we love high-energy rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s still the Jim Jones Revue, it’s now mutated into different forms. It’s more arsenic and less shotgun, but still with a bit of shotgun.

Orton: It’s not like it’s a concept album, but there are certain underlying themes in it. A lot of bands who go out on tour after their first record say, “Aw, well, all we see is the back of a tour bus, then we see a hotel, then we see a venue, so we’ve got nothing to write about.” We can’t really understand that, because we tour all the time, and our perception of what’s going on around us becomes deeper and wider.

For example, we’d been doing some festivals in France last summer, and we were driving back to London on the Sunday, and we stopped at a service station, and looked at a TV, and we could see all these buildings on fire. We were like, [mildly curious voice], “It looks like Tottenham’s burning…”

So when we got back to the UK and switched on our iPhones, and it was like, “Blimey, it’s kicked off in Tottenham.” We both live in Dalston [also in North-East London], and we get back and there’s bricks and bottles and firebombs going off, and we’re in the middle of a riot zone — the biggest civil unrest this country has seen for 100 years.

So that sparked off lots of little things. It got our minds working, like, it’s only a little scratch from the veneer of civilzation, and suddenly you’re in complete anarchy — like Heart Of Darkness.

So you started writing explicitly political songs?

Jones: The song “Where Da Money Go?” was about how just a couple of years ago, everything seemed peachy, for some people at least, and now suddenly it’s like, “We’re fucked!” You know — what happened? Where did the money go?

Then we started thinking about how that joined in with that general feeling of unease, the feeling that civilization is that thin, and as soon as something happens to break through, we’re straight back to our deepest tribal roots.

Orton: It’s not like we’ve turned into Crass or something, it’s just these things affect you personally, even though it’s political.

Do you still live the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle?

Orton: There’s a lot of non-sleeping involved in being in this band, but it’s usually because we’ve got to fly from Marseille to Copenhagen, via Paris, like we did last week. We decided recently that the things that drive this band are sleep deprivation, adrenaline, psychosis and extreme volume.

Since the last record, you’ve acquired a hot new piano player called Henri Herbert. He’s only 27, and is regarded as one of the best young boogie-woogie pianists in the UK. Yet, on The Savage Heart you seem to have moved away from that boogie-woogie feel. Is he happy about that?

Jones: Henri transcends boogie-woogie into these very dark uncharted corners. He’ll say, “This is a style that [1930's pianist] Albert Ammons was doing which almost sounds like Victoriana.” So we’re like, “Right, we’re having some of that!” It was like stumbling on buried treasure. No one uses that shit anymore! Who’s doing that?

When we were looking around for people, we’d seen YouTube clips of Henri, and we thought he wouldn’t be interested because he was so boogie-woogie…It turned out that he was at his wits’ end with that scene, and was chomping at the bit to spread his wings and try something new. Perfect timing! Planets totally aligned! So he came to us, and it was like letting him out of a cage. He was like, Whoosh! He was off!

As you say, though, there are still sawn-off shotgun moments!

Jim: “Never Gonna Let You Go” — that’s almost going into the territory of Black Flag, one of the hardest songs we’ve got. There were points when we were recording it, it felt like a rock ‘n’ roll laboratory, where Sclavunos would be like coming up with all these test-tubes smoking, going, How can we make this harder!

When most bands decide to try and upgrade their sound, they get in a new producer hotshot. You stuck with the same one. How come?

Jones: Sclavunos is a good guy, he’s got this great wealth of experience and advice to offer you.

Orton: He’s an interesting dichotomy, because on the one side, he’s a real stickler, an authoritarian, who brings a discipline in the sound, but the flipside is he’s got the whole avant-garde background, having played with some of the most out-there bands — Sonic Youth, Tav Falco, Grinderman and Nick Cave, Wreckless Eric…

I’d just been watching the Rowland Howard film, Auto-Luminescent [Howard was the guitarist in Nick Cave's early band, The Birthday Party]. There’s a story in it where they got the producer to put corrugated iron all round Rowland’s amp to make more feedback. We had this song “Chain Gang” where we wanted more feedback. I was saying, “Why can’t we get a load of corrugated iron like Rowland Howard?” And Jim said, “Rupert, I think you’ll find there were a lot of drugs being taken when they were making that record — it had no benefit whatsoever.”

Jones: But if we’d have still wanted it, Jim would’ve said, “What kind of corrugated iron?” If we’d have said, for this particular drum sound we need virgin’s blood on the drums, he’d go, [cryogenic New York drawl] “Our first question is, Which kind of virgins do we want?”

Orton: Four options! Like multiple choice!

Jones: [still drawling] There are three things to consider: one, are we comfortable with the repercussions with the law?

Orton: He really gets stuck in. On another song, Nick the drummer wasn’t stopping where he should. Jim’s a big bloke, 6-foot-8 or something. It came to this stop again, and Jim launched himself over Nick, and had him in a grasp, physically, to stop him drumming. It was like taking your job description to the max.

Jones: Throw yourself in front of a moving drummer!

Is The Savage Heart, for you, a modern, post-millennial take on all the music you love from the mid-20th century?

Jones: Yeah, and without trying. There is that thing of trying too hard. When you’re young, you’re who you are — the young pretender. You’re aspiring to stuff. Now I feel like the seasoned veteran. I’ve got nothing really to prove, other than I really wanna make great, exciting music, and play. I was thinking about it the other day: rock ‘n’ roll, you could look it at one way, as a dusty old relic, but then if you find the right doorway into listening to it, and you hear all the blood and guts that was there from day one, it just makes you wanna share that with other people. Like, I want you to feel and enjoy this, the way I do. You hold the door open so they can see the same thing you’re seeing. That’s our mission.

Patrick Wolf, Sundark And Riverlight

Not one to be satisfied with a cake and some candles, Patrick Wolf has marked the 10th anniversary of his debut album Lycanthropy by re-recording 16 tracks from his back catalogue to create an acoustic double album. He calls it a “make-under,” designed to show off the skeleton of the music, but there’s still plenty of greasepaint smeared over the impressively sharp cheekbones of these songs. Divided into two halves — Sundark is melancholia, bitterness and introspection, Riverlight is love and euphoria — the collection polishes Wolf’s romanticism to a burnished glow, exposing the rich grain of cabaret and folk beneath the glittery pop opulence. The more serious songs are most efficiently served by this treatment — “The Libertine,” from 2005′s Wind In The Wires, flaunts new levels of Klezmer-tinged drama, while “Paris,” from Lycanthropy, is stripped of its electronic static, all the better to revel in its tears (“The bath was spilling over/ My self-pity spilling with it”). The happier moments also flourish, however, with both “House” and “The Magic Position” given a freshly painted backdrop of emotional veracity. Where Wolf goes from here is anyone’s guess, but if this is spring cleaning, then the summer of his career looks set to shine.

Daphni, JIAOLONG

As Caribou, Canadian producer/multi instrumentalist Dan Snaith has honed his richly-layered, electronically-enhanced psychedelia over the course of four albums. No longer a leftfield curio, the dreamy textures of 20011′s Swim were praised by the club music establishment and indie experimentalists alike, and landed Snaith a spot supporting Radiohead in their stadium shows. At the same time, he has quietly been putting out DJ-friendly 12″ releases under the Daphni alias, which puts a greater focus on the dance pulse underpinning Caribou songs. Like his friend and frequent collaborator Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden, Snaith has distilled his sonic experiments, making house music in its purest form.

That doesn’t mean it’s nakedly retro, though, or that it repeats the clichés of standard club tracks. Rather, Snaith has gone right back to the first principles of house, proving how much can be done through the repetition of simple, but well-chosen elements. Each track is built on a steady electronic kick drum, a funky sample and some big rubbery synthesiser noise repeated over and over with alteration of layering and effects creating the structure. But the variety he wrings from that is fantastic: within the house grooves, he absorbs ’70s Afro-funk (as in “Ne Noya” and the cowbell-riddled “Pairs”), vintage soul (the Buddy Miles-sampling “Yes I Know”) and early 20th-century electronic experimentalism (the amazing “Jiao” which sounds like minimalist composer Terry Riley getting down at the disco) with equal ease.

In short, the album is about total sensualism — about a direct and delightful effect on the nervous system. It might be simple in approach, but the ingenuity with which the most basic swooshes, boings, clonks and loops are arranged into hip-twitching, butt-wiggling structures is nothing short of sublime.

Various Artists, Yep Roc Records 15th Anniversary Sampler

Some indie labels are started by naive upstarts with wide eyes and big dreams, anxious to either make their mark or flame out trying. The North Carolina label Yep Roc, which celebrates its 15th birthday this year, was different. Founders Glenn Dicker and Tor Hansen were more or less industry vets by the time Yep Roc released its first record. In a way, though, that almost makes their effort that more admirable — though they were already established, both of them felt they could be doing more. Their efforts launched the careers of countless young artists and provided support for legends like Nick Lowe and Robyn Hitchcock. Now, you can listen to the label’s legacy with this free sampler.

The Jim Jones Revue, The Savage Heart

Dorothy Parker famously remarked of Katharine Hepburn that her acting “runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” The same accusation could traditionally be leveled against the Jim Jones Revue without being even mildly derogatory. The incendiary London rockers have always suffered from a particularly glorious form of tunnel vision, yet while their third studio album finds them once again delving back into the, yes, savage heart of early rock ‘n’ roll with an evangelical fervor, this time around they have a few more tricks up their sleeve.

Ever since his days in Thee Hypnotics, front man Jim Jones has venerated the feral Detroit thrash of the MC5 and the Stooges, yet wild-eyed tracks on this album like “It’s Gotta Be About Me” and “Never Let You Go” reach back even further to original 1950s talismanic rock touchstones such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. The band’s new pianist Henri Herbert is a revelation: his hammered keys on “Catastrophe” are worthy of the Killer himself. “In And Out Of Harm’s Way” deviates from the Revue’s normal wham-bam formula and unfolds into an expansive six-minute epic, while the drum-driven, Grinderman-like “7 Times Around The Sun” boasts — sacrilege! — no guitars at all. And reassuringly, at the savage heart of it all, their carpe diem love of primeval rock ‘n’ roll remains thrillingly intact.

Martha Wainwright, Come Home to Mama

“There are fewer and fewer people to complain to/ so I built a ship of shit and directed it to you,” Martha Wainwright sings on “Can You Believe It,” the second song on her third record, her voice a wry curl. This is no apology song (that would be the simmering opening track, “I’m Sorry”), more like a monument to her own capacity for churlishness and her partner’s ability to bear it. Come Home to Mama is Wainwright’s first record since she gave birth to her first child and lost her mother, the folk singer Kate McGarrigle, within the span of a few months in 2009 and 2010, and the ironies of those concurrent milestones figure heavily into her lyrics here, alternately searching and celebratory, casting wide nets of existential despair and fixating on domestic minutia. This, plus the kitchen-sink instrumental production (horns and strings, beeps and bloops; “I Wanna Make An Arrest” even borders on a disco boogie), leads to a few moments of tonal and textural whiplash. But maybe that’s how life seems when you’re grappling with suddenly becoming the one doing the calling-home, never again to be called home yourself. The high point of the record, and perhaps Wainwright’s whole career, is “Proserpina,” the last song McGarrigle wrote, unrecorded until now; it spills over with beautiful, fruitless longing, Wainwright’s aching voice floating above a cascade of strings but pulled back to the hard, real earth by a mournful, pacing piano line. She is, at once, both Hera, the desperate mother, and Proserpina, the wayward child lost to the underworld.

Tamaryn, Tender New Signs

Tamaryn’s Tender New Signs is a middle-of-the-night meditation on love and its constant companion, heartbreak. Titular frontwoman Tamaryn curates her band’s after-hours malaise with a breathy murmur, guitarist Rex John Shelverton supporting her efforts through a fuzzed-out wall of guitars. Playing like the nebulous thought patterns that occur between the time the head hits the pillow and the brain finally calls it a day, their desolate shoegaze is a place where fantasies and nightmares lay side-by-side.

The San Francisco duo’s nine-song cycle hinges on a Creation Records-worthy palette. It would be deceptively easy to use The Jesus and Mary Chain to describe their sound: Like the Scottish quintet, Tamaryn have a penchant for detached vocals and heart-on-sleeve songs that often come within hair’s breadth of mope. But Tender New Signs is a far lusher affair than any Reid brothers’ record — its “Just Like Honey” emotional leanings tempered with a large helping of quiet contemplation.

The pair lingers in a stage of lackadaisical bliss on “Afterlight,” Tamaryn repeating the Goth poetry refrain, “Wilted is the flower” as though caught somewhere between comfort and curse. “I’m Gone” breathes air into their delicate underwater grooves, its lush reverb streaked with a Mazzy Star-by-moonlight doomed romanticism. But for all their philosophical meandering (with the help of pathetic fallacy, the earth, sky — and everything in between — is given emotional weight), Tamaryn are obstinately rockers. Luxuriating in the ghostly refrains and hypnotic riffs of “Prizma” that seemingly from here until daybreak, the band doesn’t simply catch listeners’ ears — it commands them. A notable widescreen meditation on the darker side of life, love, and the great beyond.

Freelance Whales, Diluvia

On their sophomore release, the Freelance Whales return with a tighter, more confident update on the organic blend of acoustic chamber pop embellished with electronics that marked their popular debut Weathervanes. The quintet still has the quirky sound of a group busking in New York City subways, with echoing arrangements and amicable group interplay. Frontman Judah Dadone continues to lead the charge with his airy tenor, which slips often and easily into an ethereal falsetto. But this time around, synthesizers sit more comfortably among the banjos and mandolins, creating a soft-edged, panoramic world that feels as homespun as it does modern.

Themes of travel, nature and relationships sweetly intertwine throughout: The lead track “Aeolus” drifts in on a wave of synth and plucked strings, enveloping the listener while building a melancholy tale of mythical characters that ruled the winds. “Land Features,” builds from a humble banjo arpeggio into a gloriously full-blown, near-orchestral climax, punched up with a horn section. The Freelance Whales world is a dreamy one, but it is not without moments of introspection: on “Dig Into Waves,” Dadone plans to both “dig into the waves” as well as “dig into myself.” “Emergence Exit” is a fitting finale, a lilting balance of lullaby and sing-along, guiding us safely home.

Waylon Jennings, Goin’ Down Rockin’: The Last Recordings

Waylon knew. He wasn’t getting any younger and his body was starting to let him down. He’d been on and off the road over the past few years, even sold the bus, and now the doctor had told him that he better take a break from a life he’d always traveled. He was feeling restless. One night in 1999, he went over to his pedal steel guitar player’s house and told Robby Turner to press record. “I’m going to put a few things down,” he said. And so he did, leaving us with Goin’ Down Rockin’, his last will and a fine testament.

Like Jennings himself, the album is stylistically diverse and spiritually unified. The original tracks consisted of just Waylon’s guitar and voice, with Turner accompanying on bass, but these bare bones have since been accessorized by sympathetic musicians who shared many good times with Waylon in his career, among them drummer Richie Albright (the four-on-the-floor timekeeper of the Waylors), Reggie Young and Tony Joe White. Finished by his friends, as he would’ve wanted.

Waylon himself picked the songs, infused with his belief in music’s emotional deliverance, and the hard-fought battles he waged standing up for the right to play his songs his own way. It might have made him an “outlaw” in the eyes of the Nashville establishment, but the uncompromising stance gives his body of work a resonance that has not dimmed with his passing 10 years ago. If anything, as a moral compass and honky-tonk high-water mark, his legacy shines ever brighter.

It’s hard to listen to his lyrics without a sense of hindsight, eavesdropping on a man who’s ruminating on where he’s been, and whether he’s lived up to his own ideals. “Spent a little time in trouble/ But I do have my ways,” he confesses in the title cut, and delivers a paean to the love of his life, Jessi Colter, in the achingly beautiful “Belle of the Ball.” The Cajun stylings of “Wrong Road to Nashville” take one back to Waylon’s first recording, a version of “Jole Blon” produced by Buddy Holly. And then, of course, there’s “Never Say Die.”

The album’s centerpiece is “I Do Believe,” where the Jennings credo is set forth honestly and directly. When I had the honorable privilege of helping him write his autobiography, Jennings chose its words to bring his legendary tale to epiphany. This wellspring of inner faith — “In my own way I’m a believer” — beyond the strictures of organized religion or mythology tells more than anything of why he was able to illuminate “that inner spirit that keeps us strong.”

I miss you, Hoss, but hearing your voice, first or Last, is to have you by my side, in the room with me, letting me know that things’ll be all right as long as we keep singing your song.

Ray Stinnett, A Fire Somewhere

To the extent that he is known at all, Ray Stinnett is best known as the guitar player for Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs. That’s him supporting the grotty garage groove of “Woolly Bully” and shearing through “Black Sheep,” two of their biggest hits. At the height of the band’s popularity — just after Billboard magazine named “Woolly Bully” song of the year in 1965, over hits by the Stones and the Beatles — they disbanded acrimoniously and Stinnett, along with his wife and newborn, set out for California. First he made the Haight-Ashbury scene, then he settled briefly at the infamous Morningstar Commune just outside San Francisco, where he expanded his musical and spiritual horizons.

Stinnett’s sole solo album, A Fire Somewhere, reflects that westward journey, blending the folk-rock and pop spiritualism of the West Coast with the R&B-descended grit of the Mid-South. He’s a fine guitar player, with an agile strum that has much in common with his more famous Memphis contemporary, Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the MGs. Stinnett’s never quite as tight as his Stax counterpart, but commune living may have taught him that not everything had to be so squarely in the pocket. A Fire Somewhere is loose but not laconic, with a rambling vibe that belies its darker sentiments.

Nor did everything have to adhere to the strict structures of the kind of mainstream pop Stinnett played in the Pharaohs. Much like Arthur Lee of Love — another Memphian transplanted to the West Coast — he apparently felt no need to repeat his catchiest melodies or to assign much emphasis to choruses or bridges. A sudden key change imbues “Silky Path” with ominous foreboding: “If you go down to see the lights of the city,” he sings, before lowering his voice in warning, “don’t you fall off of your cloud.” Stinnett’s songs meander and lope, but they always end up someplace interesting. Closer “The Rain” begins as a stoner gospel-folk number, then morphs into a hectic pop jam, florid with saxophone and piano. The two halves of the song couldn’t be more different, yet they make a skewed kind of sense sutured together.

At the behest of friend and mentor Booker T. Jones, who was by then embarking on a second career as a producer and talent scout, Stinnett signed to A&M Records. For a variety of reasons, most having to do with friction between label and artist, A Fire Somewhere was shelved and largely forgotten for four decades. But yesterday’s insufficiently commercial dud can be today’s revelatory relic, and the album is finally getting a proper release via Seattle-based Light in the Attic Records (which has a fine track record with Memphis-related releases by unsung Stax horn player Packy Axton and singer Wendy Rene). Even so many years after its creation, this album still sounds lively and wiry and full of ideas, suggesting a very different path that Memphis pop music might have taken — one that wandered defiantly westward.

New This Week: Josephine, Tame Impala & More

Josephine, Portrait It may have taken Josephine Oniyama years to become the next big thing, but this classy collection sets success in her sights, embracing percussive weirdness (on glorious neo-soul single “Original Love”) and proggy samba (“Pepper Shaker”) without ever becoming the sort of thing that would unduly alarm listeners of Radio 2. What magic is this? Recommended.

Tame Impala, Lonerism The Aussies deliver a brilliant second album of Instagrammed psyche-rock. Caitlin Dewey writes:

“Songs like “Elephant” and “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” are trippy Rorschach blots — full of sun and slow burn if you don’t listen to lyrics, and subsumed by self-pity if you do. It’s too bad Tame Impala draw so much inspiration from loneliness — Lonerism will make them plenty of friends.”

Daphni, JIAOLONG Dan Snaith, aka Caribou, pays homage to house as his alter-ego Daphni. Joe Muggs writes:

“Timeless is an overused term, but this is as fresh and strange and wonderful as dance music has ever been.”

Yoko Ono, YOKOKIMTHURSTON It won’t win X Factor, but this album that unites New York’s three avant-garde icons, and could probably refine the word ‘challenging’, has been acclaimed as Yoko’s best. Steve Holtje writes:

“Now that indie rock’s caught up to where Yoko Ono was on her 1970 debut LP, her new album — her most challenging in more than three decades — fits the zeitgeist perfectly.”

PAWS, Cokefloat! The Glasgow trio’s impressive debut combines the slacker-rock of Pavement and Sonic Youth with an endearingly unmacho attitude. Marc Hogan writes:

“Sore Tummy” and “Miss American Bookworm” put bubblegum melodies beneath heavily scuzzed noise-pop and throat-rending screams, like early Foo Fighters but more awkward and relatable… punchdrunk and easy to love.”

AC Newman, Shut Down The Streets Newman, of New Pornographers, unites with his old bandmate Neko Case for this mature album about the birth of his son and the death of his mother. Dad rock, in the nicest possible way.

Bo Ningen, Line The Wall The Japanese four-piece – who seem to be channeling the horror film Ring in their press shots – bottle their thrilling live show in this cathartic blast of psychedelic noize.

Jesse Bering, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human

Jesse Bering is sort of the Michael Pollan of boners; he’s read up, studied up, sought out, asked around and second-guessed all of the available research, but remains wise enough to know there’s a lot we still don’t know about human sexuality. The joy of Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? comes as much from the questions it raises as the answers it provides. And Bering’s fearless curiosity (and affinity for juicy tidbits) has led him to some interesting places in this collection of essays: the adaptive function of the female orgasm, “fag hags,” zoophiles, gorilla pubes, the relentless pursuit of autofellatio and more.  If somebody’s doing lab work on female ejaculate or determining the R.E.M. sleep factors that lead to morning wood, this man is on the case.

A former psych researcher and professor whose byline you’ll find in Scientific American and Slate, Bering’s got a place in his heart for hard science and nerdspeak. But he’s also a funny dude. Humor is a useful lube, intellectually, and Bering’s willing to get playful and personal. It helps that he’s the narrator; it’s much easier to gauge his confidence in his jokes this way. Now we know that his centaur sex dream was serious business.