Justin Timberlake, Man of the Woods
“Justin Timberlake continues to stay dedicated to Timbaland/Neptunes futuresex beats and his familiar lovesound come-ons that have made him the biggest male pop star of his generation,” Christopher R. Weingarten writes about the Super Bowl halftime show headliner’s fifth album. “But, as its title implies, much of Man of the Woods also comes with the moonshine-and-mason-jar glisten of country, blues and folk. … To Timberlake, ‘rustic’ means “survivalist,’ as opposed to ‘downhome,’ and he sounds like he has the warmest, coziest doomsday bunker on the prairie.”
Read Our Review: Justin Timberlake Heads for the Country (Sort of) on Man of the Woods
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Rhye, Blood
Mike Milosh returns from major-label limbo with an album featuring new supporting personnel, including 4:44-featured guitarist Nate Mercereau and Lana Del Rey collaborator Justin Parker, and a slightly switched-up style. But, Mosi Reeves writes, Blood largely sticks to the project’s “original template of warm, breathy vocal jazz, soft rock and quiet storm. … Rhye is mostly content to slightly expand it slightly, allowing the arrangements to breathe and the musicians to add brightly colorful touches – the steady backbeat over the electro-funk tinged ‘Phoenix,’ and the handclap-like percussion of ‘Please.'”
Read Our Review: Rhye Gently Returns Years After the Alt-R&B Buzz
Read Our Feature: Drawing Blood: How Former It Band Rhye Returned From the Brink
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
John Oates, Arkansas
The soul-pop hitmaker shifts gears for his new album, a tribute to Southern music on which he fronts an amped-up string band that includes mandolin player Sam Bush and guitarist Guthrie Trapp. “I was invited to go to Wilson, Arkansas, and was inspired by the landscape where the cotton fields line the Mississippi River shore,” the now-Nashville-based Oates told Rolling Stone Country. “My entire musical life has been influenced by the music that has flowed up that river from New Orleans through the Delta, and has had such an important sonic and cultural impact on America. It occurred to me that Arkansas was the last rural stop on the musical journey northward.”
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Roxy Music, Roxy Music (Super Deluxe)
This comprehensive portrait of Roxy Music’s era- and self-defining debut celebrates the LP’s 45th anniversary with demos, outtakes, Peel Sessions and concert recordings, in addition to the 1999 remaster of the original album. You’re able to hear the group re-make and re-model their formative rock experiments, including an outtake of “If There Is Something” with a little more honky-tonk piano and a Peel Session performance where the sinewy hypnotic melody in the middle becomes even more mesmerizing. The first demo of “Ladytron” is even more robotic and rugged than the original, and “The Bob” goes through five fuzzy iterations, including a mostly instrumental, totally out-there seven-minute cut. The physical release includes a DVD with BBC appearances and rare footage from 1972, as well as a 5.1 surround mix of the original album and a 136-page book. An enlightening look at Roxy Music at their most primal. Kory Grow
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Kyle Craft, Full Circle Nightmare
Portland retro-rock savant Craft’s 2016 debut Dolls of Highland introduced a talented craftsman with a knack for reshaping familiar Seventies sounds. On his second album, he works El Lay country-rock classicism with more power-pop concision and acerbic whimsy than most modern neo-beard types even try for. Lead track “Fever Dream Girl” evokes Cheap Trick relocated to Southern California, and you could imagine Linda Ronstadt taking flight on the melodic lift of “Heartbreak Junky” and “The Rager,” even if Craft’s caustic pop sensibility is closer to Harry Nilsson’s. An album populated with a Delta Queen, a Fake Magic Angle and a Bridge City Rose should be overkill (what? No Pearl of the Quarter?), the kind of thing you’d expect from a guy who’s seen The California Split a dozen too many times. But Craft pulls it off through sheer indomitable AM Gold inventiveness. Jon Dolan
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Frank Zappa, The Roxy Performances
When Frank Zappa’s band set up shop in Hollywood’s notorious Roxy Theatre toward the end of 1973, things didn’t go exactly as planned, so he tried to quell the crowd. “Just relax and sip on your beverages and any moment the curtain will go up and we’ll be zany for you, so just cool it,” he said. Then, for a little over an hour, he and his dynamite band (which, at the time, included George Duke and percussionist Ruth Underwood) shredded through finger-breaking arrangements of Over-Nite Sensation-era tunes. Some of the recordings made it onto the essential Roxy & Elsewhere (one of Rolling Stone‘s 50 Greatest Live Albums of All Time), but now the four public shows Zappa used as partial source material for that live compendium are available in full, along with some rehearsals and sound checks. Included are plenty of quirky moments like Zappa’s introductory speech, as well as a few supersized versions of “Dupree’s Paradise” and “Be-Bop Tango (Of the Old Jazzman’s Church).” “The cowbell, as a symbol of unbridled passion, ladies and gentlemen,” Zappa declares at the start of the latter song. Kory Grow
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Steve Reich, Pulse/Quartet
The influence of minimalist composer Steve Reich’s pulsing, phasing, compositions can be heard everywhere from the Who and the Police to Sufjan Stevens and Dan Deacon. These two recent pieces – 2013’s Quartet and 2015’s Pulse – don’t expand too much on a career that spans 50 years, but are still gorgeous, partially thanks to Quartet‘s shimmering lineup of two pianos and two vibraphones. Christopher R. Weingarten
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Field Music, Open Here
British brothers Peter and David Brewis recorded their sixth album under slight duress – in addition to the late 2010s’ generally cataclysmic atmosphere, they received an eviction notice for their longtime studio in early 2017 – and that anxious energy animates its ornate, hyperactive pop. Combining the slightly smoothed-out weirdness of post-post-punk with Roxy Music’s sax-assisted moxie, and finishing it off with fastidious production that ensures every string flourish and brass drone leaps out of the mix, Open Here is delightfully audacious. Wiry tracks like the abstracted shimmy “Goodbye to the Country” butt up against the sparklingly baroque title track and the crashing yet minimalist “Cameraman,” making for chaos that hangs together on the strength of sheer nerve. Maura Johnston
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Thea & the Wild, Ikaros
Oslo-based pop auteur Thea Glenton Raknes has a tremulous voice that adds a precipice-dwelling urgency to her off-kilter, catchy gems. Her second full-length under the Thea & the Wild name opens with “Dark Horse,” a galloping synthpop track about a lover who can’t commit. “When a Kiss Becomes a Habit” begins with skeletal, snap-punctuated verses, which open into a sparkling New Wave chorus that makes its story of a relationship on the rocks even more cinematic. “Why Did You Go” reinvents the power ballad for the bedroom-pop age, while “Power Is a Lonely Place” recalls the spectral folk of Bat for Lashes. Even in the context of a nine-song album, Raknes’ music is hard to pin down, although hookiness and heart are at its vibrant, unpredictable core. Maura Johnston
Hear: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Kuniyuki Takahashi, Early Tape Works 1986-1993 Volume 1
As Fact points out, it’s a boom time for Eighties Japanese ambient music, the hyper-synthesized sound that pre-dated the feel of Oneohtrix Point Never, vaporwave and the drifts on numerous contemporary cassettes. Sapporo’s Kuniyuki Takehashi is best known as a deep house producer, this collection of early tape-released works draws a line between the gurgling pastoral post-Eno world and Aphex Twin’s ambient techno future. The first three tracks are beatless, cavernous and brooding; the last three are pulsing gloom moving from jazzy to harsh. Christopher R. Weingarten
Hear: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
