Music|New CDs
New CDs
By The New York Times
"Real Animal"
(Back Porch/Manhattan)
Alejandro Escovedo can be a pensive, cryptic, death-haunted songwriter, as his recent albums attest. But every so often he prefers to blast some basic rock, and that's what he does on his ninth studio album, "Real Animal." Mr. Escovedo looks back on his punk rocking 1970s youth, when he was a founder of a San Francisco punk band, the Nuns, and then of what was called a "cow-punk" band, Rank and File. This time his songwriting embraces bluntness. "It's 1978/We know we're not in tune/We know we'll never be great," he sings in "Nuns Song."
Mr. Escovedo, 57, isn't trying to erase the decades between his past and present. Mortality is still on his mind in songs like the harmonica-hooting "People (We're Only Gonna Live So Long)," which observes, "We still got time/But never quite as much as we think." The album has some hard-riffing two-chord guitar stomps, but it's not wedded to a punk sound. "Real Animal" was produced by Tony Visconti, who worked on David Bowie's best '70s albums, and it has tracks that knowingly look back, like the "Ashes to Ashes" homage in "Golden Bear." Elsewhere it uses Mr. Escovedo's own preferred configuration: a rock band augmented by a string quintet.
The particulars of Mr. Escovedo's autobiography on this album — his wanderings to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin — may not matter much to those not already following his music. But the songs also tell a larger story: of reckless youth and unrepentant maturity, of time's ravages and insights. In "Slow Down," which concludes the album, Mr. Escovedo sings, "Want to live in this moment/But I'm tangled in the past." He doesn't pretend to be young on "Real Animal," but he hasn't forgotten how it felt. JON PARELES
"Last 2 Walk"
(Hypnotize Minds/Columbia)
A couple of years ago it would have been easy to mistake the core members of Three 6 Mafia — Juicy J and DJ Paul — for rap stars. In 2005 they had their first pop hit, the sweeping and sinister "Stay Fly," and in 2006 they won the Oscar for best original song, memorably performing "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," from "Hustle & Flow," to an Academy Awards audience that didn't seem quite sure if it was being punk'd: Who were these guys?
But Three 6 Mafia, from Memphis, had been making terrific, spooky albums for more than a decade, though it hadn't had much success or recognition outside the South. After the Oscars Three 6 Mafia rode the wave of unlikely fame, excising an ancillary member, Crunchy Black, and moving to California to tape an MTV reality series, the occasionally amusing, more often uncomfortable "Adventures in Hollyhood."
On that show Three 6 Mafia members were routinely portrayed as country folk not quite sure how to cope in the big city. And there is a slight residue of their "Hollyhood" days here, particularly "My Own Way," a dismal team-up with ordinarily antic (but here gloomy) rock band Good Charlotte. But mostly, and thankfully, the group seems to have forgotten its brush with the limelight. Which is to say "Last 2 Walk," its first album since the excellent "Most Known Unknown," from 2005, sounds like vintage Three 6 Mafia: bruising production, gloriously foul-natured lyrics, single-minded focus on life's pleasures — the humorously lewd "I'd Rather" and "Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body)" — all under a cloud of paranoia. "Play with your Playstation," they warn, slightly absurdly, on "Playstation," "Don't play with me, boy."
And yet, even when Three 6 Mafia menaces, it's exuberant. Over the years it has learned to create minor key arrangements that bend in curious, exciting ways, seen here on "First 48" and "On Some Chrome," a collaboration with UGK. (When Pimp C of UGK died in late 2007, he was in Los Angeles collaborating with Three 6 Mafia on tracks for this album.) Given the choices Juicy J and DJ Paul could have made — and for a time, did make — "Last 2 Walk" feels almost willfully obscure: in other words, right back where they belong. JON CARAMANICA
"I Know You're Married
but I've Got Feelings Too"
(Zoë)
Betrayal and self-doubt arrive with gleaming guitars and Martha Wainwright's high, clear voice on her second album, "I Know You're Married but I've Got Feelings Too." Ms. Wainwright — Rufus Wainwright's sister, and the daughter of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III — shares the family tradition of mixing craft and candor. "You were cruel in a different way than I was used to," she sings in "Hearts Club Band."
Breakups are everywhere, from first-person romances to her parents' divorce; she's not sure she can trust anyone, herself included, and the songs are filled with regrets and unresolved memories: "It was the time before the last/and we did not make up," she sings in "In the Middle of the Night." Liaisons are tangled with infidelities and musicians' hustle. In "Comin' Tonight" she trysts with an old flame who's on tour, and her anticipation is mixed with calculation: "I can steal a melody," she sings. "You would never sue me baby/It would be weird."
While the moments she sings about are awkward, the settings are not. Ms. Wainwright moves amid prettily finger-picked folk-rock and more eccentric arrangements like "Tower Song," a vision of love during wartime set to a pump organ waltz and an expansive string arrangement. "You Cheated Me" puts the beat, harmonies and handclaps of old girl-group productions behind a bitterly incredulous chorus: "You cheated me and I can't believe it/I've been calling since four o'clock last night." Luckily for Ms. Wainwright her melodies are more reliable than her past loves. JON PARELES
TODD SICKAFOOSE
"Tiny Resistors"
(Cryptogramophone)
The bassist Todd Sickafoose builds grooves from the ground up, but that's no impediment to the flow or buoyancy of his music. "Tiny Resistors," his third and strongest album as a leader, features a number of tunes in which multiple horn parts and guitar lines swirl around a tonal center, and over a calmly asymmetrical pulse. "Cloud of Dust," the title of one, feels appropriate; so too does "Invisible Ink, Revealed."
Mr. Sickafoose has serious training in jazz, and there are more than enough intelligent solo flashes on the album to place it on a progressive post-bop axis. But he's also a rock musician, best known to many fans as a longtime confrere to Ani DiFranco (who appears briefly and unobtrusively here). As a composer he favors a straightforward rhythmic thrust and deceptively simple melodies; the most intricate developments tend to occur in a hazy middle register, where layered chords agglomerate and shift.
Crucial to this balance is the rapport of a working band, cultivated within the eclectic Brooklyn scene. Some individual playing stands out — the trombonist Alan Ferber and the guitarist Mike Gamble both distinguish themselves — but nothing outshines the collective sound. Obviously Mr. Sickafoose, who augments his bass playing with assorted work on keyboard and mallet-percussion instruments, has a band identity in mind here. He achieves it with a rigorously focused imagination, and with no apparent strain. NATE CHINEN