Mavis Staples
Mavis Staples revisits the civil rights era with her album “We’ll Never Turn Back,” produced by Ry Cooder.
Rare and unreleased Elliott Smith songs appear on the posthumous “New Moon.”
A description of Mavis Staples’s “We’ll Never Turn Back” (Anti-) — a collection of songs associated with the civil rights movement — might make it sound earnest and dated. Yet the music is anything but: It’s bluesy, unvarnished, gutsy and knowing. Ms. Staples, 67, was the lead singer of the Staple Singers, who performed at civil rights gatherings alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the years before her sultry voice recorded hits like “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself.” Her producer on “We’ll Never Turn Back” is Ry Cooder, and his syncopated guitars jostle against Jim Keltner’s loose-limbed drumming, while Ms. Staples sounds deeper and huskier than ever. Exhorting, confiding, moaning or chuckling, she’s serious about these songs, with a fervor and pride that reclaims civil rights as a moral crusade. The music is righteous, not self-righteous, and never far from roots in the Mississippi mud.
Elliott Smith
After Elliott Smith’s death in 2003, after a stabbing in unresolved circumstances, many of his songs began to sound like warnings. With his graceful, Beatles-tinged tunes and gentle but tenacious voice, he delineated loneliness, self-doubt, alienation and addiction. “They come here alone and they leave in twos/Except for you and me, who just came to use,” he sang in “Whatever (Folk Song in C),” one of 24 rare or previously unreleased songs collectedon “New Moon” (Kill Rock Stars). He worked quietly but steadily in four-track and eight-track studios, and “New Moon” collects songs he recorded from 1994 to 1997 but didn’t include on the albums “Elliott Smith” and “Either/Or.” They are sparse but finished recordings, with his own vocals overdubbed in unison and backed mostly on acoustic guitars. The songs parallel those he released at the time — ballads, waltzes and a few arrangements that expand into full-band rockers — but they weren’t throwaways. Whether they started as character studies or confessions, they’re sad, ghostly songs that sound even sadder now.
Keren Ann
Keren Ann Zeidel still builds songs around ballad melodies and her serenely languid voice. But on her new album, “Keren Ann” (Metro Blue), she opens up in all directions. As a singer she whispers less and fills out her tone. And instead of the old quiet close-ups, she places her vocals in new, reverberating spaces defined by electric guitar chords or hovering angelic choirs and sometimes both, as in “Lay Your Head Down” (myspace.com/kerenann). These songs also seek a grander scale, pondering war and love, betrayal and transcendence. “The lips of time, they kiss again/ When I walk alone, into the night,” she sings as the album begins. And when she decides she’s said enough, she luxuriates in sublime textures: the lyrics to the album’s finale, “Caspia,” are “La, la, la.”
Dungen
Pure psychedelic revivalism guides Gustav Ejstes, the songwriter and singer who also plays most of the instruments in the Swedish band Dungen. On its fifth album, “Tio Bitar” (Kemado), period production style, à la 1968, means as much to him as song structures that place sincere, catchy harmony choruses between long instrumental passages, which in turn can be neatly composed or veer into space-rock jams. Electric guitars run through fuzz boxes, the drumming sounds both frantic and properly thin, and the prettier interludes feature flute, organ and, for a Swedish touch, fiddle. Because the lyrics are in Swedish, listeners who don’t know the language can just savor the vintage sound and imagine a light show.
Amon Tobin
Now that anyone with a computer can thump out a dance-club beat, electronica auteurs like the Brazilian musician Amon Tobin aren’t satisfied with samples and synthesizers anymore. His album “Foley Room” (Ninja Tune) is named after movie sound-effects laboratories, and it’s a rhapsodic, ominous minor-key excursion: sometimes meditative, often percussive and closer to film scores than dance-club bangers. The tracks were assembled from, among other things, sounds captured on a tape recorder with a hand-held microphone before extensive digital processing. Motorcycles, fuzz-toned guitars and close-miked wasps merge into a buzz. Chickpeas thrown at drums spatter a beat. Breaking glass interrupts sustained tones. Kronos Quartet string chords throb. Metal bowls floating in water make notes that shimmer and bend. A DVD shows how some of the music was made, but the album sounds even better as a mysterious reverie.
Sly and the Family Stone
Epic Records couldn’t find much in its vaults to add to its complete reissues of Sly and the Family Stone’s albums. (Not that “Stand!” and “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” needed bonus tracks; Sly’s psychedelic extrapolations of James Brown funk and Stax soul are still jubilant and deep.) The best of the newfound songs is “Only One Way Out of This Mess,” added to the band’s 1967 debut album, “A Whole New Thing.” It starts with a boppish horn line leading to a verse that’s proto-rap, offering advice like “Knock the corners off the squares” and the indisputable “You can’t stand long on wobbly knees.”
Handsome Furs
Dan Boeckner, who sings and plays guitar in Wolf Parade, turns that Montreal band’s exuberance inside out for Handsome Furs, his duo with his fiancée, Alexei Perry. On their debut album, “Plague Park” (Sub Pop), he plays stark electric-guitar chords and sings; she adds rudimentary drum-machine beats and minimal keyboards; and the resulting music is somewhere between electric Neil Young and Beck. The album title comes from a park, Ruttopuisto, once on the outskirts of Helsinki and now within the city, where plague victims were buried in 1710. And the songs contemplate mortality with choruses like “Oh, life is long and hollow” or “We hate this place here/It’s our home.” Bleak as it might appear, he’s not complaining. In fact he sounds almost proud.
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