New Recordings

Bare Bones

(Rounder ***)

nolead ends Madeleine Peyroux has spent her career exploring the intersections of early 20th-century jazz and blues and mid- to late-century country and pop: She's proved herself an adept interpreter of Fats Waller and Billie Holiday as well as of Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, and Tom Waits. Her fourth album, Bare Bones, however, is a departure: although she had a hand in a few songs on her previous albums, this one's all originals.

Peyroux partners with some excellent cowriters: Joe Henry, Steely Dan's Walter Becker, producer/bassist Larry Klein. But she has set herself in pretty heady company as an interpreter, and perhaps inevitably, these smoky love songs and moody vamps can't quite compare.

Still, Peyroux sings with her characteristic sensitivity and understated grace - especially on the seductive "Our Lady of Pigalle" and the gently swinging "To Love You All Over Again" - and that's enough to make Bare Bones rewarding.

- Steve Klinge

nolead begins Various Artists
nolead ends nolead begins War Child Presents Heroes
nolead ends nolead begins (Astralwerks ***)

nolead ends War Child, which aims to raise money to aid "children affected by war," is a benefit album with a unifying concept. Its 16 cuts pair songs by legendary types with young artists of their choosing. So: Beck does Dylan's "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," the Hold Steady essay Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City," and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs yelp through the Ramones' "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker." The weaker versions - like the Hold Steady's, and the Kooks' rendition of the Kinks' "Victoria" - don't take enough liberties with the originals, while a few master strokes stand out, such as Rufus Wainwright's soaring medley from Brian Wilson's Smile and TV on the Radio's gloriously noisy juicing of David Bowie's title track. But while most of the remakes don't succeed in radically transforming the source material, that's OK with material this strong. Sure, Franz Ferdinand don't reinvent Blondie's "Call Me," but would you want them to? It's satisfying enough to hear a young band reveling in covering an obvious influence with such obvious glee.

- Dan DeLuca

nolead begins . . .And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
nolead ends nolead begins The Century of Self
nolead ends nolead begins (Richter Scale ***)

nolead ends With some legitimacy you could call the nervy Texans in . . .And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead the first blog band. Before Lily Allen, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, MySpace, or blogs themselves, AYWKUBTOD blessed and cursed their epic brand of guitar-indie with an ungodly long name and album covers more suited to Dead Sea Scrolls or 12-sided die games. Then they loosed a batch of their best tunes with the prophetic title Source Tags and Codes and erupted at a time when it was being realized that Napster wasn't just for snapping up Slim Shady. Ah, the days. Seven years and at least four releases later, the band resides in discarded hype purgatory. 2004's Worlds Apart traded Sonic Youth squall-and-jangle for shiny MTV2 bombast and longer travails, and 2006's So Divided folded in catchy baroque experiments that bordered on a Sgt. Pepper's acid trip. Both were somewhat overly maligned by the source-tag-and-code culture that created them, seemingly bent on proving it can destroy them, too.

But don't hate them just because the The Century of Self is more of the same, tuneful bombast that never quite outrocks its foggy haze or successfully obscures its guitar-piano-and-even-synth anthems in disguise. Conrad Keely still yowls like Ian MacKaye awaiting a strep test, with an abiding chorale of Keelettes on backup bellowing in tow. The band continues jubilantly to work up a half-hooky dust cloud, never quite deciding whether to go to heaven or hell. Maybe purgatory?

- Dan Weiss

nolead begins Diego Bernal
nolead ends nolead begins For Corners
nolead ends nolead begins (Exponential ***1/2)

nolead ends Such a strange little record - and with an odder backstory to boot.

Bernal is a civil rights attorney from San Antonio, Texas, who in his spare time (of which he'll have little after this) is a dreamily atmospheric, sample-heavy producer of lo-fi electronic hip-hop with bits of Latin jazz and tangy Southwestern flavor running throughout his debut recording's swiftly swaying 19 tracks.

His debut recording? Dang.

Not since Danger Mouse merged the Beatles and Jay Z for The Gray Album has giddy plunder-phonics sounded so easy, innovative, and warmly soulful. It's even sad in spots. The trippy Texican border suite is defined by its first track, the break beats and royal brass sounds of "Diego's Donut (RIP Dilla)." And it never lets go of the ghost all the way to its mournfully nostalgic and troubling double finale of "Summer's Over" and "The Way It Was." In between those elegant poles, blips of woe-begotten work songs, swampy spirituals, garage guitars, and synthetic drones become gently relaxed hip-hop instrumentals tender as the Pillsbury Doughboy. For Corners is magnetic, hypnotic, forlorn, and original - a bar-raiser for all future hip-hop.

- A.D. Amorosi

Written in Chalk

(New West ***)

nolead ends Written in Chalk is only the second album to carry the names of both Buddy and Julie Miller, although the stunning sets these husband-and-wife singer-songwriters have released under their individual names are also close collaborations. This is another high-quality effort from the first couple of Americana, though it doesn't pack quite the overall punch of their earlier work, including 2001's Buddy and Julie Miller.

Buddy's in top form with his honky-tonk/soul amalgam on such tracks as "Gasoline and Matches," Mel Tillis' "What You Gonna Do Leroy" (a duet with Robert Plant) and "One Part, Two Part," and a seductively bluesy duet with Julie, "Smooth." Julie sounds as fragile as ever, but the numbers she sings lead on - spare acoustic ballads wracked with hurt - vary little in style and mood, and drag the album down a bit as they fall short of her usual haunting power.

- Nick Cristiano

nolead begins J.J. Cale
nolead ends nolead begins Roll On
nolead ends nolead begins (Rounder ***)

nolead ends "Roll on" is J.J. Cale's philosophy of music and life, at least as he lays it out in the title song of his new album. Over one of his trademark loping boogies, the writer of "After Midnight" observes: "Ain't nothing to it at all/ Just a little bit of rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll."

Of course, it's not all that simple. The key is making it look simple, and his ability to do that has helped make Cale so consistently satisfying for four decades. The Oklahoma native most often comes across as an easygoing hipster. But whether taking a perceptive look inward on "Former Me" or painting an empathetic portrait of a woman with a "void to fill" on "Fonda-Lina," he manages to snake real feeling - along with tangy if unassuming guitar solos - through the infectious grooves.

- N.C.

Flat Planet

(OwlStudios.com ***)

nolead ends Great cultural meldings like the one that produced jazz from African and European elements are rare.

The Chicago-based guitarist Fareed Haque attempts something similar. His goal is to take folk melodies from northwestern India and Pakistan and meld them with elements of funk, jazz, and even a kind of rap, using instrumentalists from both cultures.

The son of a Pakistani father and a Chilean mother, Haque has the chops - classical, jazz, and South Asian - to undertake this project.

His music sounds like exotic jazz fusion with hints of Weather Report. You could call it grooving with tablas.

"Blu Hindoo," which Haque named for what he calls the "blu-est" of Hindu deities, Lord Krishna, offers some bluesy keyboards from Willerm Delisfort. Haque's harsher guitar lines are agreeably softened by Indrajit Bannerjee's sitar on "Bengali's Bud," but the effect, while impressive technically, also seems crowded.

"The Hangar" is a straight South Asian boogaloo with flutist David Hartsman that could presage a new frontier for jazz: the curry circuit.

- Karl Stark

nolead begins Various Artists
nolead ends nolead begins A Brief History of Miller Time
nolead ends nolead begins (www.dreamboxmedia.com ***1/2 )

nolead ends Drummer Jim Miller likens this CD to a time machine: The longer you listen, the further back in time you go.

The set starts in 2005 and ends in 1981, with Miller as a universal constant. You have only to hear the splashy lines that pianist Jim Ridl gave to "Oleo" in a 2005 live concert at Rowan University to know that this is a special set. Guitarist Jef Lee Johnson makes a cool putty of the melody.

Two performers are no longer with us. The late Philly pianist Eddie Green gives an untraditional take of "Lift Every Voice" (2002), while the late singer Evelyn Sims provides a brassy view of "By Myself" (1988).

Many Philly notables appear on these nine tunes. Baritone saxophonist Denis DiBlasio lays down some muscular lines - with some ribald animal sounds coming from trumpeter George Rabbai - on DiBlasio's "Rhino," circa 1998.

"Below the Beltway," of 1995 vintage, kicks off with Newt Gingrich in high form; it features many more sampled voices and some saucy singing by Dreambox label cofounder Suzanne Cloud.

E.J. Yellen lays down a screaming saxophone solo on "Water Dreams" of 1981, with a vivacious Gerald Veasley on bass.

- K.S.

Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner conducting

(Soli Deo Gloria ***1/2)

nolead ends nolead begins Symphony No. 2, Alto Rhapsody and others
nolead ends nolead begins Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner conducting
nolead ends nolead begins (Soli Deo Gloria ***1/2)

nolead ends Typical of John Eliot Gardiner, he takes on a large new chunk of standard repertoire while casting a beady, revisionist eye toward any sort of received wisdom in his zeal to create performances as historically informed as possible. And though each of these discs has its featured symphony intelligently preceded by smaller related choral works (not just by Brahms, but also by Mendelssohn), the symphony performances don't provide that initial rush of rediscovering familiar music performed in unfamiliar ways.

Unlike other Gardiner recordings, though, diminishing returns don't set in later. In fact, the stature of these performances grows upon repeated listenings. The relation between the choral and orchestral pieces, which is rarely obvious, continuously unfolds, as do the subtleties of the performances. In the symphonies, the winds have a distinctively unvarnished tang that takes the grandiosity out of the sonorities. Lack of vibrato lends a natural portamento effect to the phrasing, while the less-suave natural horns act as a musical spur in Gardiner's swift, Toscaninian approach. Smaller in scale, these performances sound like no others and, once heard (like them or not), are likely to be an aural reference point for any Brahms heard thereafter.

- David Patrick Stearns

nolead begins Haydn
Italian Arias
nolead ends nolead begins Thomas Quasthoff, baritone; Freiburger Barockorchester, Gottfried von der Goltz conducting
nolead ends nolead begins (Deutsche Grammophon ***1/2)

nolead ends Though Haydn was a great but gradual innovator with string quartets and symphonies, he wrote a greater number of mature operas than Mozart - but with far less impact. Most were written for the isolated circumstances of the Esterhazy estate. And though all have been recorded, they've made little headway in the opera house, for reasons that are far less vague once you've heard Thomas Quasthoff's cross section of baritone arias, from nine operas up through his late-period Orfeo ed Euridice.

The music is presented in the best possible light. Quasthoff's light, hearty, often-comic approach feels comfortably Haydnesque, seconded by the smaller-scale sound of the Freiburg baroque instruments. However, the music lacks the dimension of his instrumental works. The operas are populated by cardboard characters in well-worn plots. Compared to his featherweight Viennese contemporaries (Mozart aside), Haydn must have appeared operatically substantial, but now these stock plots and characters seem to have imposed limits on his creativity. Remember that in his later, better oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, he was mainly working with ideas, not stories.

- D.P.S.