Lyle Lovett – Natural Forces
Lovett’s latest is an epic in the wide-open Texas tradition, featuring four original songs (“Natural Forces” and “Empty Blue Shoes” ranking among the finest he’s written) and another seven from various Texas songwriters, including Lovett’s heroes Townes Van Zandt and Robert Earl Keen (who co-wrote “It’s Rock and Roll,” the gritty, uptempo, album closer). Far more than just a curator and tasteful interpreter of others’ material, Lovett once again proves he can stand alongside the finest storytellers. (Read The Full Review)
Lightning Bolt – Earthly Delights
Earthly Delights is all about pure, elemental hedonism. The opening salvo of “Sound Guardians” and “Nation of Boar” finds the pair pilfering equally from the avant-jazz and thrash playbooks with jaw-dropping results, particularly when the latter track comes to its searing finale. But mostly, it’s their own playbook that Lightning Bolt keeps going back to: the otherworldly metal of Hypermagic‘s “Riffwraith” and “Megaghost” isn’t so much a reference point for “The Sublime Freak” as it is a blueprint, while “Flooded Chamber” rehashes “Bizarro Zarro Land.” For every track that expands the band’s sound (say, “Funny Farm,” with its boozy Southern rock, or the quirky African-pop sketch “Rain On Lake I’m Swimming In”), there’s a much longer track rooted firmly in the familiar. The highlights demonstrate that these guys have yet to exhaust their uncanny vision, but by and large this is Lightning Bolt doing a Lightning Bolt album. Still, we sure as hell weren’t going to get one from anybody else. (Read The Full Review)
Atlas Sound – Logos
On Logos, his second album under the Atlas Sound moniker, Cox provides us with 11 songs that are far less insular, though no less dreamy, than those he has penned in the past. While his fractured compositions still evoke the myth of the bedroom pop auteur, the songs on Logos sound considerably more refined than the lo-fi sketches being churned out by many of his peers. This, as it turns out, is a very good thing. (Read the Full Review)
Kings of Convenience – Declaration of Dependence
The songs on Declaration of Dependence reveal everyday tensions with a cool, undemonstrative reserve. You can hear the spare but descriptive verses as about romance, the band itself, or global politics, depending on your preference. Where Riot opener “Homesick” offered the suggestive image of “two soft voices blended in perfection,” the new album’s first track, tender “24-25″, declares, “What we build is bigger than the sum of two.” Slowly shuffling “Renegade” uses bold, vivid brush strokes to carry out that old maxim, “If you love something, let it go”; “Why are you whispering when the bombs are falling?” a solitary voice asks, between slightly dissonant strums. “Riot on an Empty Street”, a holdover since years before the album of that same name, finds a traveling singer lost for words, but not for delicate melodies. (Read The Full Review)
