Concept: Virginia sludge rock group continues their ‘primary’ saga, following their Eps 1, 2, 3, and their Red Album.

Sound: Rock music isn’t really in need of any more throwbacks — there’s still a bad taste in its mouth after Wolfmother, Chickenfoot, and countless others. On the other hand Baroness is better at achieving the old-school appeal, keeping close to southern touches and frequent interludes that recall all the good elements of Alice In Chains and Led Zeppelin. There are two major gripes with the sound: first and foremost the vocalist’s goofy macho bellow, and the drummer’s affinity for ‘dance’ beats. Disco-style hi-hat hits on the offbeat have a hard time meshing with metal riffs, enough said. If the guitar work is your uncompromising focus in listening, though, this is an appreciable revival of metal’s brighter side.

Lyrics: Secondary, to be plain. Often vocals will not be introduced to a track until about three minutes in, are difficult to decipher between the vocalist’s tone and accent, and hold unusual themes. The album’s central image is the bullhead (a fish), and descriptions of its environment are typically nonsensical: “Steel that sleeps the eye/swollen and halo“. Okay, you guys are trying to keep things abstract, but there’s more to a reasonable, bearable sentence than grammar. Maybe they should team up with Chomsky for their next LP — Green Ideas Sleep Furiously.

Quick And Dirty: Overlooking poor vocals, this album does a decent job of putting the golden back in the oldies. An easygoing, less pretentious Mastodon? (♦♦♦½)

Concept: Conor Oberst uses his new label for an all-”star” shindig.

Sound: Not folk, so sorry. There is a wide range of Americana, which is honestly better unless you have a damn good lyricist/songwriter. Every member of the band could use some time to brainstorm and recover; My Morning Jacket hasn’t gained much from their obscenely self-deprecating funk rock exploits, and Bright Eyes has simply never been much more than a pile of soggy melodramas in a bean bag chair. This album was the right move for them by all counts. The album is a flattering gallery, moving from ambient soul to rock conventions to dusty spaghetti western crawls to bombastic country, and so on and so forth. With its opening and closing songs as two of the very strongest, the album feels complete in spite of some deep dead spots.

Lyrics: Business is good. My Morning Jacket have occasionally allowed themselves some adept songwriting, and tracks like Baby Boomer and The Sandman, The Brakeman, and Me invite multiple listens. Oberst’s lack of lyrical talent is not an issue. It seems working with new people has tempered his taste for moot morbidity, and he keeps it short and sweet.

Quick And Dirty: Of all the inter-group collaborative releases we’ve had this year, this one delivers best. (♦♦♦½)

Concept: Canadian composer Michael Brook remixes the work of the Qawwali superstar.

Sound: Sometimes it’s too much techno, not enough Khan. They still use him as an excuse to drag their remixing out for several minutes at a time. Occasionally he’ll leak through with a total face-melter, and you forget about the suffering the preceding techno has inflicted upon you.

Lyrics: Punjabi. It’s probably totally awesome Sufi exultations that would blow my mind if I even guessed at their content.

Quick And Dirty: Really uneven, but I could be persuaded that the beats were a good idea if somebody cranked this in the middle of a dance party, and from there we go sublime. R.I.P., dude. (♦♦♦½)

Concept: Why the hellll would you ever name your band this? Okay, now that that’s out of my system, it’s about being a regular joe with visions of grandeur.

Sound: Pop rock. Did I miss something? There are some very catchy riffs and vocal harmonies. I think that’s it.

Lyrics: With each track so mercifully short (1-3 minutes,) there’s no time to be irritated by the lyricism. A lot of it is actually pretty cute, from the understated adolescent anxiety to the way the frontman occasionally rushes to fit the line into the end of the chord progression after stalling dramatically for the last few bars (sometimes/I begin to think that we’d lost you/don’tyouknowthatyouusedtomakeme maaaaad). The second to last track is an exceptional so-bad-it’s-good masterpiece.

Quick And Dirty: Damn it, I like it. I have no idea how this happened. (♦♦♦½)

Concept: Steve shows off the potential of the ‘Chapman Stick,’ better known as the freaking Warr guitar.

Sound: This really is an awesome instrument that needs more use. What you have is more or less a bass running straight into a guitar, with big ol’ pickups so that everything can be finger-tapped: the closest you get to an upright piano short of the keytar, and honestly this thing has a much more organic sound. It’s only two guys on the album, but it certainly doesn’t sound like it. Hahn can cover atmosphere, rhythm, and melody all at once, and while the new-age effects are a little outdated the instrument’s slap tone is just wonderful. The compositions are plenty entertaining in their own right. Hahn isn’t all about technical achievement. He’s picking up this instrument so that he can add more musical structure than conventional strings could allow. If this wasn’t enough, he plays a little trumpet simultaneously with his stickwork.

Lyrics: Eh.

Quick And Dirty: This is still a cool instrument, and here you get to bask in its glory without the distracting lyrical theatrics of Yes and King Crimson, or the impish metrical pranks of Behold…The Arctopus. The pieces themselves make for a full demonstration of its potential as the key to a one-man jam band. Burst that stick! (♦♦♦♦½)

Concept: French postrockers show everybody how it’s done.

Sound: Alright, it’s not really postrock, nor is it ambient, nor shoegaze. You can certainly see all the elements of these in their music, though. Violins can get a bad rap outside of classical music, but here they’ve taken the foreground as harsh, dry, swarming devils. The drummer is deliberately ever so slightly out of sync, which adds to the tension of the tracks. The most notable influence might actually be chant, with a few choral arrangements, alternative percussion (telephone bells, cans, chimes), and synthesized overtones stepping in to circulate even more dissonance through the album. The result is a meticulous, sinister coiling of alternative rock’s instrumental underdogs into the form of a convulsing hand stretched mechanically towards the listener.

Lyrics: Scattered dialogues in French, and English records of psychological studies.

Quick And Dirty: The quiet, twisted voice in the back of your head. Use sparingly. (♦♦♦♦)

Concept: Raekwon speaks up to complete his small saga a decade after the first installment, and as with anybody working with the Wu-Tang Clan he’s got company.

Sound: The samples are what you can expect, with Kung-Fu pulp, graphic sound effects, and all kinds of backing tracks from dark, spare jazz to raw soul to Minaret calls. Raekwon and his guests have the right inflection, and they can match the energy of the music. Raekwon might actually bring out the best in them.

Lyrics: Despite the one-track mind, the rappers have such an eye for detail that you can’t help but feel they’ve experienced it. The only things that distract from the work are the conversations and re-enactments between tracks. It makes things more cinematic than storytelling. Otherwise, the album is transportive in all of its grotesque glory.

Quick And Dirty: A solid if overdramatized addition to Raekwon’s career. I should mention that guest star Ghostface will always hold a place in my heart for pushing 50 Cent down a flight of stairs. (♦♦♦½)

Concept: South African band takes their act abroad to flex their rock muscles.

Sound: Blk Jks score big on the enthusiasm factor. The vocalist’s earnest melancholy and the wonderfully dynamic drummer keep things wild and loose. The band’s tinkering sprawl on this album is very similar to that of De-Loused In The Comatorium, using South African pop influence very sparingly in favor of psychedelic rock. While the first four tracks are a thrilling experience, it becomes clear in the remainder of the album that Blk Jks are too hooked on their initial grooves and tone to do any more than rehash them. I’m not sure they ever change the key, either, which is a common problem that can be found in the work of The Scorpions or Kings Of Leon. It’s of greater consequence when a band so often decides to take things slow as Blk Jks do. Their jamming can get choppy, too. The guitarist sometimes falls head over heels and starts stuttering all over the place, and the drummer sometimes decides to switch up his rhythm at the most inappropriate times in the middle of a groove. 

Lyrics: As the title suggests, there are a slew of sci-fi images and ad libbing of technical terms. Although much of the vocal parts are in Zulu, the English component varies from corny to genuinely touching expression of introspective despair and apostrophe (sometimes a monster is what you need to be).

Quick And Dirty: Blk Jks could be something powerful and new. Not yet. The opening tracks make a strong bid for the spotlight, though. (♦♦♦½)

Concept: Wild Beasts shoot to elevate the proletariat.

Sound: The sparkling opening bassline sets the bar pretty high for the band, but the whole album keeps the glam and flamboyant dance atmosphere popping along. The hardest part to get over is the frontman’s preposterous range. He holds both a stable baritone and an alarmingly effeminate falsetto that sound like two entirely different people. Mixed percussion and a guitar that insists on the background push forward the cheerleader, and function and form find a good balance with each other.

Lyrics: It’s hard not to scoff at the silly puns and indulgent melismas, but the band eventually drops the foppish gag reel and reveals a storyteller’s tone and sense of change. There is also an unassuming violence to many of the tracks which somehow greets the bright and up-tempo environment. Nowhere is this more evident than on the two-track title piece, painting a dark temper in a light heart.

Quick And Dirty: Fantastical and physical tunes that almost harken back to Bowie. (♦♦♦♦)

Concept: Jazz marathon man John Zorn presents the fifth installment in his ‘Dreamers’ collaboration, with odes to birds surrounding the extinct titular Hawaiian species.

Sound: Zorn has literally released hundreds of albums, most of which concentrate on free jazz and range from unlistenable blathering to riveting facsimiles of torture and suffering. Very little of his work takes the time to focus on more familiar and accessible material like this, and it is even more uncommon for it to hold to such an upbeat perspective. For a composer given hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to further his craft, this album can seem simple, offhand, or even inconsiderate, but it’s far from a disservice. Every member of the band is a solid independent voice, expressing extended melodic themes that beat again and again until each bird reaches flight, with healthy disregard for the barriers between music’s forms. Samba, blues, jazz, rock, and soul cooperate fully, and the album can be interpreted as a clean and colorful whole.

Lyrics: None

Quick And Dirty: It’s in the largest of contrasts to Zorn’s typical work. This reprieve from his demented namesakes shows his versatility and his capacity for conventional excellence. (♦♦♦½)