New Recordings

Yours Truly, The Commuter

(Anti- ***)

nolead ends When Grandaddy, the beloved indie-rock band from Modesto, Calif., released Just Like The Fambly Cat in 2006, it had already broken up; solid though it was, the album sounded like an afterthought, a postmortem. Now, Grandaddy's Jason Lytle resurfaces with his first solo album, and it sounds like - surprise! - an excellent Grandaddy record, a resurrection.

Lytle recorded Yours Truly, The Commuter alone in his new home in Montana, and it's full of the same cryptic, dreamy, low-tech pop, spiked with the occasional buzzing, chugging rocker, that made Grandaddy's first albums so appealing. Add to that cinematic strings and sighing harmonies that bear some connection to his work on his friend M. Ward's recent album, and the result is something both strangely familiar and familiarly strange.

It won't necessarily convert anyone resistant to Grandaddy's charms, but Lytle's solo album deserves to bring old fans back into the fold.

- Steve Klinge

nolead begins Jarvis Cocker
nolead ends nolead begins Further Complications
nolead ends nolead begins (Rough Trade **1/2)

nolead ends For his second solo album, former Pulp frontman and trenchant Britpop wit Jarvis Cocker has grown a beard and cranked up the midlife- crisis rock. Now 45, the avuncular intellectual of the mid-'90s scene that also spawned Oasis and Blur has turned to a producer of that era - Steve Albini, of Nirvana and Pixies renown - to give Further Complications a rugged, at times raucous, full-band, live-in-the-studio feel.

Some trademark bon mots do appear. "I met her in a museum of paleontology, I make no bones about it," Cocker sings in the weary come-on "Leftovers." He also gets off some good lines in "I Never Said I Was Deep" - "the phrase I would like carved on my tombstone," he has said, disingenuously. And he kicks up a properly cacophonous storm of self-loathing in "Caucasian Blues." But too often Complications trades in Cocker's well-spoken distinctiveness for a bar- band squall that's a tad on the generic side. It also suffers from particularly poor song sequencing, starting off with the nondescript "Angela" and saving more memorable songs, like the winning weather metaphor "Slush" and the attractively sleazy "You're In My Eyes (Discosong)" for dead last.

- Dan DeLuca

nolead begins Tinted Windows
nolead ends nolead begins Tinted Windows
nolead ends nolead begins (Curve ***)

nolead ends Dust off the old "supergroup" label. This ad hoc quartet is made up of singer Taylor Hanson, the poster boy from the sibling trio Hanson; guitarist James Iha from Smashing Pumpkins; bass player Adam Schlesinger from Fountains of Wayne; and drummer Bun E. Carlos from Cheap Trick.

All that's missing is Rick Springfield. The '80s singer of "Jessie's Girl" would fit right into this album's retro mood of catchy pop melodies fizzing atop arena- anthem foundations.

Credit Schlesinger, Tinted Windows' principal songwriter, for providing material that is contagious ("Kind of a Girl"), nostalgic (the Byrds-like chiming guitars on "Without Love"), and clever (the nod to Slim Harpo on "Messing with My Head").

OK, the music sounds derivative. What else would you expect from a hybrid band like this?

- David Hiltbrand

nolead begins Rick Ross
nolead ends nolead begins Deeper Than Rap
nolead ends nolead begins (Def Jam **)

nolead ends You can't blame Trilla King of Miami Rick Ross for being overly ambitious. His first recordings were icily detailed, relentlessly throbbing hip-hop photo albums that captured a hustler's cold journey in the hot sun. Jay-Z fans know this tale: dealing with low ballers and cooked-rock crawlers while moving from the pavement to the penthouse. Ross has always been keen on Hova, only more mumbling as a rapper and slightly less poetic. Prose aside, once you hit crushed velvet what's next?

Aspire to more. Go deeper than rap.

Ross finds the pitfalls of the good life during drawling, drawn-out tracks like "Yacht Club" and "Bossy Lady." The sounds his crew mixed up from the Florida swamps are thick and sludgy. Yet, on the stirred-to-a-boil hot-soul hop of "Magnificent," with crooner John Legend, you get the feeling that Ross' new-found goods are worth the bads. That's smooth stuff, that. When Ross goes backward to produce decent but merely crabby cuts such as "Mafia Music" and "In Cold Blood" (both touching upon some beef between Ross and 50 Cent - who cares?), the result is pointless posturing. Stay in the penthouse, Ross the Boss. It's nice in there.

- A.D. Amorosi

Love Filling Station

(Appleseed ***)

nolead ends Four decades on from his acclaimed, Robbie Robertson-produced debut, Jesse Winchester doesn't record much anymore - this is his first studio album since 1999's slyly titled Gentleman of Leisure. As usual, however, the results are worth the wait.

The Memphis-raised singer-songwriter's genteel Southern charm has survived his 35 years in Canada (he's been living back in the States since 2002). Opening with the Drifters-like romanticism of "O What a Thrill" and closing with the propulsive Buck Owens twang of "Loose Talk" (a duet with Claire Lynch that is one of three nonoriginals on the 12-song set), Winchester mixes and matches musical styles as effortlessly as he writes about both the excitement and the heartache of love: The openhearted lyrics are set to music that also incorporates folk, swing, R&B and even doo-wop. The album title, meanwhile, comes from "Wear Me Out," a bluesy little workout revealing that Winchester also retains his low-key sense of humor.

- Nick Cristiano

nolead begins Slaid Cleaves
nolead ends nolead begins Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away
nolead ends nolead begins (Music Road ***)

nolead ends How's that for a cheery come-on of an album title? You can't accuse Slaid Cleaves of pulling his punches. The line comes from the first song, "Cry," which also promises "Every blue sky fades to gray" and sets the tone for this beautiful bummer of a record.

Cleaves has always been a sharp writer, and it's that ability that makes this relentlessly dark set more gripping than oppressive. The folk-country troubadour delivers dramatic narratives like "Run Jolee Run" ("That little .32 in her pocket is loaded") and "Twistin'," a tale told from a hangman's perspective. He deftly melds the personal and the political in "Hard to Believe" and ponders big questions in "Dreams" ("Where do your dreams go to when it all starts to turn untrue?"). The penultimate number is called "Beautiful Thing," but it's no ray of light - the phrase is just Cleaves' ironic punctuation to a litany of social and political ills, although maybe he really is being more hopeful than ironic when he declares, "Somehow I still believe in the goodness of man."

- N.C.

Folk Art

(Blue Note ***1/2)

nolead ends Saxophonist Joe Lovano's new CD is an artful one. It requires big ears to take in this set of nine originals, but Lovano, one of the music's reigning reed players, can swing between squeaking free jazz and hard swing rooted in the jazz tradition - sometimes in the same tune.

"Wild Beauty" has that free thing going in spades, although here, too, it's yoked to a swinging bottom. And "Us Five" sounds old and new at the same time. Its pedigree seems classic bebop, but it breaks the old strictures and comes out newfangled and snarling.

"Song for Judi," with pianist James Weidman's old-time intro, becomes soaring and beautiful (Lovano is married to singer Judi Silvano), while "Drum Song" begins with gongs and has a hide-and-seek melody that cavorts with the set's two drummers, Francisco Mela and Otis Brown III, who mysteriously complement each other.

Lovano is prone to changing horns here: tenor, straight alto saxophone, alto clarinet, and taragato, a fatter cousin of the clarinet that gets a screeching workout here on "Dibango."

Smoky atmospherics abound on the title track, typical of the new-and-old synthesis that Lovano, 56, pulls off.

- Karl Stark

nolead begins Kendra Shank
nolead ends nolead begins Quartet Mosaic
nolead ends nolead begins (Challenge Records **1/2)

nolead ends Singer Kendra Shank started out as a folk singer in Seattle before hearing Billie Holiday and contracting the viral jazz thing. The folkie lives here in her first tune, a reverently straight take of Carol King's "So Far Away."

Shank, who has done tributes to jazz singers Abbey Lincoln and Shirley Horn, likes to combine tunes as she puts her own extended intro to chestnuts such as "Blue Skies," leading her folk-singer's voice to reappear.

She nicely taps the classic Persian poet Rumi as a lyricist for Kirk Nurock's "I'll Meet You There." Pianist Frank Kimbrough, saxophonist Billy Drewes, and guitarist Ben Monder are among the musicians who make this recording pretty and well-focused.

Shank's recorded voice can seem precious and schmaltzy at times. But here's hoping that she's freer in person.

- K.S.

Angela Hewitt, piano

(Hyperion, four discs, ****)

nolead ends nolead begins Well-Tempered Clavier
Book II
nolead ends nolead begins Craig Sheppard, piano
nolead ends nolead begins (Romeo, two discs, ***1/2)

nolead ends nolead begins Two- and Three-Part Inventions and French Suite No. 5
nolead ends nolead begins Till Fellner, piano
nolead ends nolead begins (ICM ****)

nolead ends Is this some sort of golden age of Bach on piano? Heading this latest series of releases is Angela Hewitt, who became the world's new favorite Bach pianist about 15 years ago, has already recorded both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier with considerable acclaim, but went back to it again last year after playing both books in 58 cities. My, how she has changed over the last decade.

Previously, Hewitt seemed to be a descendant of Andras Schiff, with her gentility and surface luster. Now she's veering more toward the iconoclastic originality of Glenn Gould, though without his overanalytic dryness. Expressively speaking, this is all-inclusive Bach, full of warmth and surprising wit, with every strand of counterpoint vividly characterized. In Book II, Hewitt seems to particularly enjoy the composer's late-in-life quirkiness. Her interpretive genius is so consistent that this may be the single most desirable WTC recording on piano.

But that doesn't mean it's the only one you'd want to have. In a live recording of Book II from Seattle, Craig Sheppard takes a more rhythmically measured approach suggesting that late Bach maybe isn't so strange after all, and with an almost French-style clarity plus always-absorbing concentration. This is only the latest in a series of distinguished Sheppard recordings, all of which can be found on his Web site, www.craigsheppard.net.

The Till Fellner disc is his return to Bach after his great Well-Tempered Clavier recording came out five years ago. Now (as then) he has, quite literally, a special touch with this music. Every note has a radiance that gives an extra nobility to these relatively simple two- and three-part inventions - in performances that make you rethink their footnote status to Bach's larger collections of keyboard music. The disc is filled out by French Suite No. 5. Is it too much to hope that more of them are on the way?

- David Patrick Stearns

nolead begins Magdalena Kozena
Songs My Mother Taught Me
nolead ends nolead begins Magdalena Kozena, mezzo-soprano; Malcolm Martineau, piano; Michael Freimuth, guitar
nolead ends nolead begins Deutsche Grammophon (***1/2)

nolead ends This has to be the oldest album title in the industry, but there's nothing routine about this winning collection of songs with Magdalena Kozena singing sometimes unaccompanied, sometimes with piano or guitar. It's hard to believe that her mother was teaching her songs by less-than-mainstream composers like Petr Eben and Erwin Schulhoff, both of whom are represented here. But the common denominator in these 34 selections is a folk basis, either because they're folksong arrangements by great composers or new songs set to folk poetry from the Moravian terrains where Kozena grew up. It's all emotionally direct, sung with great vocal luster and linguistic authority. For those who caught her recent Damnation of Faust performances at Verizon Hall when she was under the weather, this disc (like her Lincoln Center recital last Sunday) shows what a great singer she is.

- D.P.S.