Alex Chilton -- Free Again: The "1970" Sessions

Alex Chilton fronted the Box Tops but he never led them. He was a hired hand, picked for his preternaturally soulful voice but, like any red-blooded American teen, he soon bristled against the constraints on his freedom. Chips Moman and Dan Penn masterminded the Box Tops, rarely letting Chilton record his own material, so he did what any rebellious adolescent would do: he sneaked around, cutting material at the fledging Ardent Studios without the knowledge of American Studios, who owned the rights to Chilton's recordings. These contractual issues meant that the recordings Alex made at Ardent in 1969 with Terry Manning were still called "1970" when Ardent released them on CD in 1996 -- it was the year Chilton was released from his American contract -- but this tremendous 2012 reissue adds a more poetic title in Free Again. It's a title that accurately reflects Chilton's frame of mind: he was breaking free of the constraints of the Box Tops, finding his voice as a songwriter and musician, leaving behind the strict blue-eyed soul of his first band without quite ditching soul. He hasn't left behind the light, Baroque psychedelia that marked some of the latter-day Box Tops LPs, either -- there’s a distinctly British undercurrent to the sweeter pop tunes here -- but there are also hints of country and loose-limbed, dirty rock & roll, particularly in a wildly inventive cover of "Jumpin’ Jack Flash" that slows down the groove and turns Keith Richards' riff inside out. In that sense, the music on Free Again is just as much a bridge between the Box Tops and Big Star -- something that's quite clear on the more delicate moments here -- as it is an indication of what he would do after Big Star. Much of this points the way toward the willful, ornery vibe of Like Flies on Sherbert, or the casual R&B crooner of the '80s and beyond, but in 1969, Alex has yet to prize contrariness over craft: he is still writing with passion and, with Manning and the Ardent renegades figuring out just what they could do in the studio, this crackles with invention and spirit. Sure, it's messy, but Alex Chilton always was -- it's also some of his richest and best music, and it's never sounded better than it does on Free Again: The 1970 Sessions. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

Punch Brothers -- Who's Feeling Young Now?

The third outing from the Punch Brothers picks up right where 2010's Antifogmatic left off, offering up another quality set of offbeat sophisti-grass that blends the whirlwind musicianship of Béla Fleck & the Flecktones, the spirited delivery of the Louvin Brothers, and the cinematic urban melancholy of Jeff Buckley into a sometimes impenetrable but always fascinating (check out the detailed cover of the instrumental title cut from Radiohead's Kid A) new take on new acoustic. On the delightfully weird Who's Feeling Young Now?, the truest moments are provided by virtuoso mandolinist/vocalist Chris Thile's expressive, measured voice and deeply personal lyrics. In anyone else's hands, densely layered, ultra-mercurial songs like "Movement and Location," "No Concern of Yours," "Clara," and "Don’t Get Married Without Me" would fly right out the window and disappear into the night sky, but for every acrobatic run, music-nerd time signature, or dissonant key change, there's a moment of unbridled, emotional connection to remind us that there is a very thin line between showboating and heartache. ~ James Christopher Monger, Rovi

Jim White --Where It Hits You

Jim White's music seems to come from a world all his own, a curious place where Flannery O'Connor and Big Star's Third hold sway as key cultural signposts, and with each album he adds a few more details on life in his Southern gothic universe. White's latest collection of missives from his version of the Deep South, 2012's Where It Hits You, is his first full-length project since leaving David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, but if you imagined that being without a successful patron would cause White's art to suffer, your fears were unfounded -- this album finds White in typically fine and eccentric form, spinning tales of oddball characters accompanied by music that's often beautiful but also spectral and curiously introverted, conjuring the sound of ghosts drifting through a lonely town at three in the morning. However, as much as atmosphere plays a key role in Where It Hits You, sometimes White seems more interested in creating a shadowy mental picture of his universe than in crafting a melody, and the second half of Where It Hits You suffers from too much meandering and too little focus. But when White hits the target -- and he does so more often than he misses -- he's still a singular musical artist with a singular vision, and he's not even close to running out of stories on Where It Hits You. With any luck, we'll be receiving communiqués from Planet White for many years to come. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow

“I was born in a cloud,” sighs art-rock sorceress Kate Bush on her mesmerizing 10th studio album. “Cloud-like” is a fairly fitting adjective for 50 Words of Snow, which blooms into your headphones with “Snowflake,” an immersion of pillowy piano ambience, synth pulses and guitars that flicker like a dying flame. “The world is so loud,” Bush sings, her trademark sensual lisp masked in heavenly vocal-room reverb. Snow, perhaps in response to the noise that clogs our every waking human moment, is defined by its stirring stillness—the radiating quiet that haunts every ghostly piano drop and evaporating syllable. It’s a wondrous calm from an artist in absolutely no hurry, as if Bush has spent the last half-decade making snow angels on a distant mountainside and sipping fine wine by her living room fireplace, tinkering with waves of melody when they happened to dance through her brain. Though nearly 10 minutes in length, “Snowflake” feels like a luxurious century.
That wintry, unhurried atmosphere defines every second of 50 Words for Snow, Bush’s most striking work since 1989’s The Sensual World. “50 Words for Snow” is…well…exactly what it says it is: Bush counting to 50 in a gorgeous bath of flange, while guest speaker Stephen Fry lists a half-hundred translations of the same word—all layered over the heady rhythmic rush of John Giblin’s nimble bass and Steve Gadd’s stacked percussion. It’s a linguistic lesson you never asked for, or even wanted, but also one you’ll never forget.
Ryan Reed – Paste magazine

Atlas Sound - Parallax

Parallax, the visual phenomenon that affects the perception of objects’ relative positions depending on the viewer’s distance from them, couldn’t be a more apt namesake for Bradford Cox's third officially released Atlas Sound album. Cox plays with distance, motion, and emotion on this set of songs, oscillating between the sparkling pop he does so well with this project as well as Deerhunter and the hazy experiments that are all Atlas Sound. From the start, it’s clear that Parallax will spend as much time with the blurry edges of Cox’s sound as with its catchy center: “The Shakes” starts things with pretty pop that has both feet more or less on the ground, but “Amplifiers” floats off into space instead of delivering the big choruses the verses seem to anticipate. When Cox removes all the fog and filters, the results are glorious pop like “Mona Lisa,” which features MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden on keyboards and the song’s irresistible hook. However, for most of Parallax he plays with listeners’ expectations, sometimes switching between pop and atmospherics with seamless shifts, sometimes with jarring jump cuts: “Lightworks”’ cheery strumming follows “Flagstaff”’s white-on-white introspection so suddenly it feels like hitting the ground. While Parallax's flyaway nature makes it less accessible than Logos, it’s a quietly satisfying album with a determined fragility that makes it all the more moving. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi

Black Keys - El Camino

Picking up on the ‘60s soul undercurrent of Brothers, the Black Keys smartly capitalize on their 2010 breakthrough by plunging headfirst into retro-soul on El Camino. Savvy operators that they are, the Black Keys don’t opt for authenticity à la Sharon Jones or Eli “Paperboy” Reed: they bring Danger Mouse back into the fold, the producer adding texture and glitter to the duo’s clean, lean songwriting. Apart from “Little Black Submarines,” an acoustic number that crashes into Zeppelin heaviosity as it reaches its coda, every one of the 11 songs here clocks in under four minutes, adding up to a lean 38-minute rock & roll rush, an album that’s the polar opposite of the Black Keys’ previous collaboration with Danger Mouse, the hazy 2008 platter Attack & Release. Danger Mouse adds glam flair that doesn’t distract from the songs, all so sturdily built they easily accommodate the shellacked layers of cheap organs, fuzz guitars, talk boxes, backing girls, tambourines, foot stomps, and handclaps. Each element harks back to something from the past -- there are Motown beats and glam rock guitars -- but everything is fractured through a modern prism: the rhythms have swing, but they’re tight enough to illustrate the duo’s allegiance to hip-hop; the gleaming surfaces are postmodern collages, hinting at collective aural memories. More than any other Black Keys album, El Camino is an outright party, playing like a collection of 11 lost 45 singles, each one having a bigger beat or dirtier hook than the previous side. What’s being said doesn’t matter as much as how it’s said: El Camino is all trash and flash and it’s highly addictive. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi