The Himes 100: Best Albums of 2009


By Geoffrey Himes

Buddy & Julie Miller: Written in Chalk (New West)
This album was born out of trauma. In recent years, Julie Miller has been in seclusion, coping with her brother's death and a nerve disease, while her husband Buddy has been out on the road, pursuing a workaholic schedule that led to a heart attack soon after the album was released. The couple responded to all this stress by turning to each other, wedding her wispy folk-rock soprano to his raspy honky-tonk tenor, her lovely ballad melodies to his road-house rave-ups, her impulsive spontaneity to his painstaking studio craftsmanship, her poetic metaphors to his gutbucket directness. The result is one of their least emotionally guarded and most generous, one of the best albums of this or any decade, a brilliant example of how spouses can find the missing pieces in one another. More: www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/05/buddy-julie-miller-walk-the-line.html

Bill Frisell: Disfarmer (Nonesuch)
It was only after Mike Disfarmer, a commercial photographer in Heber Springs, Arkansas, died that his pictures were recognized as high-art portraits. Frisell was commissioned to create a musical suite about Disfarmer, and the photos inspired the guitarist's most mesmerizing fusion yet of post-bop jazz and Americana country-folk. The music--mostly Frisell originals with a few Hank Williams and Arthur Crudup pieces tossed in--transcend the pastoral prettiness of previous fusions to evoke the eerie edge of survival and meaning that small-town life really consists of. You can see that abyss edge in Disfarmer's photos and you can hear it in the music played by Frisell, fiddler Jenny Scheinman, bassist Viktor Krauss and steel guitarist Greg Leisz. And this was merely the best of the five projects Frisell released this year. Also worth checking out were his two-disc collaboration with his early hero and teacher Jim Hall, Hemispheres (ArtistShare); his DVD of an unaccompanied-guitar performance, Solos (Songline/Tone Field); his DVD of his original scores for three Buster Keaton silent-film comedies, The Films of Buster Keaton: The High Sign, One Week, Go West (Songline/Tone Field); and an anthology of his best Americana-jazz fusion recordings, The Best of Bill Frisell Vol. 1/Folk Songs (Nonesuch).

Dolly Parton: Dolly (RCA Nashville/Legacy)
These 99 songs, spread across four CDs, accompanied by a 64-page booklet with a strong essay by Holly George-Warren, makes a solid case for Parton as one of the greatest artists country music has ever known--not just as a charismatic icon beyond compare but also as a major vocalist and songwriter. The first disc includes her early stabs at being a teenage rock'n'roller like Brenda Lee, and the fourth disc cherry-picks the uneven later stage of her career. The 65 songs from the middle of the first disc to the end of the third, representing the years 1967-79, is a 12-year streak of sustained brilliance unmatched in country music by anyone except maybe Hank Williams or Merle Haggard. Included are 11 duets with Porter Wagoner, all the hits, and obscure album tracks so good they take your breath away.

Fly: Sky & Country (ECM)
Mark Turner's saxophone tone is remarkably intimate on this record credited to the trio Fly, as if he were confiding something personal. That confidence seems hopeful when it breaks into a spirited run of brisk notes and worried when it slows into low-register self-questioning. In either case, Turner never plays an unnecessary or showy note, allowing the elegant shape of his spare lines to hold our attention. His triomates--bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard--are on the same less-is-more wavelength, making this one of the most unified, most restrained, most emotion-drenched jazz albums of the year.

Lucero: 1372 Overton Park (Universal Republic)
This was the year's best Bruce Springsteen album, an alternate version of The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, a horn-pumped rock'n'soul fusion with lyrics about aging outsiders in a provincial American town with gravelly vocals that seem to split the difference between Bob Dylan and Levi Stubbs. This Memphis sextet has been around the entire decade and has made some pretty good records, but given a shot at a major-label release, they step up to the plate and hit their first home run. Singer-songwriter Ben Nichols has come into his own as a chronicler of the tug-of-war between unkillable hopes and undeniable disappointments, and his faithful comrades can now translate his every intention into storming roadhouse rock&roll.

Joe Lovano/Us Five: Folk Art (Blue Note)
Saxophonist Lovano had a dream of a jazz quintet that would feature two drummers. He recruited Cuban-American Francisco Mela and African-American Otis Brown and added Esperanza Spalding on bass and James Weidman on piano. The percussion dialogue within the group, dubbed the "Us Five," inspired a new kind of writing from the leader, and their first album together is also the first album for which Lovano composed all the material. His blossoming as a writer is evidenced by the dramatic encounters he sets up for various subsets of his band, along with the juicy themes he gives them to chew on. The nine Lovano originals are built around constant conversation, sometimes among all five players but just as often among selected duos and trios. More: http://jazztimes.com/articles/25164-joe-lovano-party-of-five

Sam Baker: Cotton (Music Road)
Baker's third album, again with co-producer Tim Lorsch, completes a trilogy that marks one of the most auspicious beginnings to any singer-songwriter career ever. Baker's dry-as-dust tenor and deadpan delivery take some getting used to, but eventually you realize his vocals serve his sharply etched lyrics perfectly. His portraits of Texans on the margins of society--with an emphasis this time on young couples stumbling into parenthood--are simultaneously rich in their carefully chosen detail and unsentimental in their detached distance. Baker neither condemns nor condones his characters, but he reveals the inner workings of their lives as few songwriters can. And the minimalist arrangements provide just enough lovely melody to offer a whisper of hope.

Miranda Lambert: Revolution (Columbia)
More than anyone else, Miranda Lambert holds the near future of country music in her hands. More daring than Brad Paisley, rootsier than Taylor Swift, smarter than Carrie Underwood, Lambert takes another big step forward with her fourth album. She cranks up the Texas twang in her vocals but also the guitars and drums in her band, becoming both more and less traditional at the same time. She reaches out to such alt-country songwriters as Julie Miller, Fred Eaglesmith and John Prine and writes her own songs in the same vein but gives them a country-pop polish and oomph that you'll never find on a Miller or Prine record. She advances a strange brand of feminism that claims that women can drink, lie, fight and handle guns like any man. All these contradictions are resolved by the sheer force of her confidence and result in a landmark country album. More: http://www.nashvillescene.com/2008-01-24/news/blonde-ambition/

Mika: The Boy Who Knew Too Much (Universal Republic)
Mika, a singer-pianist in the flamboyant, gay-pop mode of Elton John, made an impressive debut in 2007 with Life in Cartoon Motion, and the new follow-up is even more ambitious, more successful. Typical is "Touches You," ostensibly a riposte to an ex-lover who recently broke it off, but also a comeback to a whole society that tried to marginalize him. Over co-producer Greg Wells' industrial-strength programmed beats, brightened by Mika's bell-ringing piano chords, the singer announces, "Growing up, I needed to compromise; well, I've had enough." As the hand-clapping, booty-shaking, choir-singing hymn nears its climax, Mika is no longer singing just to his ex-lover but to anyone out there in the broad pop audience who has ever felt it necessary to disguise his or her true nature: "When you've had enough and you need somebody to know/ When you're looking tough but you need a way to let it go.../ I can't seem to leave you alone/ Touching me, touching you." More: http://sonicboomers.com/albumreviews/mika

The Bottle Rockets: Lean Forward (Bloodshot)
If you've been wondering when someone would articulate how the Bush Recession is being experienced on the ground in blue-collar Middle America, here's the answer. Brian Henneman, the band's primary singer-songwriter, begins the song "Hard Times" by toting up all his overdue bills. Then, over a muscular, catchy guitar riff, he seems to shrug and declares, "I'd pay it if I had it; I will eventually." He's not intimidated by hard times because he's been through them before. "I ain't broke down," he sings. "I'm just out of gas." It's not just that the album's lyrics capture the experience of losing a neighbor to the Iraq War ("Kid Next Door"), of working as a chauffeur for suits ("Nothin' But a Driver") or of making empty promises to the wife ("Shame on Me"), it's that the meat-and-potatoes rock'n'roll captures the sound of Midwesterners hunkered down in the cellar as the tornado roars by. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/03/AR2009090301332.html

Whitney Houston: I Look to You (Arista)
Here's my prediction: When the history of recent pop music is written from the perspective of the mid-21st century, Houston will play a much bigger role in the narrative than Madonna. From that distance, all of Madonna's marketing gambits will look like quaint advertising fads, while Houston's extraordinary voice and heart-on-a-sleeve performances will still pack an emotional punch. A key part of that story will be this comeback album, an unhoped-for return from the hell of tabloid headlines and snickering jokes, a soul-music masterpiece, a messy, mind-boggling mix of forgiveness and revenge, humility and arrogance.

Bob Dylan: Together Through Life (Columbia)
As the canine quality of Dylan's singing grows ever more pronounced, his voice becomes less suitable for some material (Christmas pop songs, for example) and more effective at others (mostly the king of blues and hillbilly numbers that might have been in Harry Smith's collection of 78s). Dylan has also grown more attuned to the existential angst lurking within the enigmatic hand-me-down aphorisms and everyone-join-in chord changes of pre-Pearl Harbor, rural American music and has grown more adept at writing new lyrics with the same language and hidden meaning for the same old melodies. Maybe he's done it better over the past dozen years, but no one else did it better this year.

The Branford Marsalis Quartet: Metamorphosen (Marsalis)
It's not just that these four musicians (saxophonist Marsalis, pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis and especially drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts) are terrific players; it's that they've stayed together long enough to become a real band--an increasing rarity in jazz. They have such a remarkable rapport that they can write challenging compositions and arrangements for each other (and all four do) and not just rely on a simple theme and a series of solos. As a result, all four are contributing something original to nearly every measure, offering variations on the knotty rhythms as often as the detouring changes. The one cover tune, Thelonious Monk's "Rhythm-a-ning" is a hint to the source of these catchy but off-kilter tunes.

K'Naan: Troubadour (Octone/A&M)
As a refugee from Somalia's anarchic Civil War, K'Naan has an irresistible back story--and he incorporates East African rhythms and autobiographical stories into this Nelly-like pop-rap album. But what makes this disc such an unexpected treat is K'Naan's ebullient delivery, his tuneful bounce and his willingness to address a central question in this troubled time: how does one balance legitimate worries over war, recession and climate change with the just-as-legitimate desire to flirt, dance and get high?

Dave Douglas with Jim McNeely + Frankfurt Radio Bigband: A Single Sky (Greenleaf)
Douglas, an irrepressible trumpeter and composer, released two impressive albums this year. The first, Spirit Moves, credited to Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy, was a tribute to Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy and Bowie's spirit of mixing jazz, R&B, serious improvising and playful humor. The second, even better release was A Single Sky, Douglas's first original work for a big band. His insinuating themes and surprising changes work just as well in these expanded proportions as they have in one of the best record catalogues of the decade. Jim McNeely, leader of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and Douglas's college composition teacher, did the marvelous charts for the house band of Germany's public radio. Why doesn't NPR have a resident jazz big band?

Flight of the Conchords: I Told You I Was Freaky (Sub Pop/HBO)
Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, who star on their HBO comedy series as "New Zealand's fourth most popular a cappella-rap-funk-folk duo," are so funny that it's easy to overlook how smart their songwriting is. That's why it's good to listen to these songs again on an audio CD, without the distraction of the video. It's not just that they can do spot-on impersonations of everyone from Prince to Beck, Kanye West to David Bowie, but that they also come up with new hooks and grooves as catchy as those of their targets. Moreover, they have a knack for puncturing every pompous pretense in today's pop, from macho hip-hop to passive-aggressive emo. This is more than just good comedy, more than just good pop craftsmanship; this is some of the best music criticism of the year. Do rappers really get "Hurt Feelings"? Why not?

Tinariwen: Imidiwan: Companions (World Village)
The desert herdsmen of northern Mali probably don't care that their plugged-in electric guitars and flatted-note vocals suggest echoes of John Lee Hooker and R.L. Burnside, but it matters to those of us in North America who are seeking a way to make sense of these eerie Saharan songs. If fellow Malian Ali Farka Toure had played on his nation's drier, wilder frontier with a battalion of drummers and a choir of singers, it might have sounded like this.

Joe Ely: Live Chicago 1987 (Rack 'Em)
In 2007 Ely launched his own label, Rack ‘Em Records, to release out-of-the-mainstream projects. This latest release comes from a much-bootlegged concert that featured the same quintet that recorded his terrific Lord of the Highway album that year. What separates this live disc from that studio album are the faster tempos, longer solos and unleashed abandon of the playing. What separates it from Ely's other live albums is the presence of Bobby Keyes, the saxophonist so prominent on Rolling Stones records and shows since 1969. In fact, Live Chicago 1987 resembles one of those legendary Stones shows from the early ‘70s, with Ely's rhythm guitar sounding like Keith Richards, David Grissom's lead guitar sounding like Mick Taylor and Keyes sounding like, well, like himself. It's as if the Stones had devoted a set to Texas country-rock at its best. More: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/09/AR2009040901438.html

Various artists: Fire in My Bones: Raw, Rare + Otherworldly African-American Gospel (1944-2007) (Tompkins Square)
If you're like me and you haunt junk stores in search of cheap vinyl, you've probably bought more than one gospel record because it had a strange, low-budget cover photo or intriguing title. If so, you know that only one in 10 of those records is as passionate as you'd hoped. Maybe you wish someone would comb through all those albums and singles and collect the primo tracks. Someone has. Mike McGonigal has assembled 80 tracks onto three CDs, unified only by their low-budget, ramshackle origins and their astounding commitment to the message and the music that carries it. Some are rocking and some are slow and bluesy, some are austere and talky and all are riveting.

Lyle Lovett: Natural Forces (Lost Highway)
This is Lovett's best album in 11 years, an unexpected late-career revival. The heart of the album is a trio of songs that contemplate the strange, fragile otherness as well as the revivifying power of nature: Eric Taylor's "Whooping Crane," Don Sanders' "Bayou Song" and Lovett's epic title track. The weight of these performances anchors the album and allows jokey dance numbers about masturbation, Texas cooking and rock&roll to enter as welcome diversions. And that weight leads to two stunning songs about broken love: David Ball's "Don't You Think I Feel It Too" and Lovett's "Empty Blue Shoes."

The Hold Steady: A Positive Rage (Vagrant)
Craig Finn was a great songwriter and his Brooklyn band was a great live band long before they learned how to be a good studio band. On this live record, recorded in Chicago on Halloween night 2007, the band sums up the first part of its career with a vibrancy missing from the studio versions. The best introduction to this important rock&roll band.

The Decemberists: Hazards of Love (Capitol)
At a time when the very concept of the album itself is in question, the Decemberists' singer-songwriter Colin Meloy has written and executed a concept album that works so well that it's almost impossible to pry individual songs out of the tight weave and just as difficult to turn away from the fascinating narrative and music. Set in a fairy-tale old England, the album presents a love story where the betrayals, lusts and hazards are sharp as razors. Most of the 17 tracks segue from one into the other in seamless fashion, as Meloy uses repeating motifs to tie the pieces together but also different voices and instruments to keep refreshing the material.

Willie Nelson: Naked Willie (RCA/Legacy)
It was another busy year for the prolific Nelson. Lost Highway is an uneven anthology of tracks from his uneven albums for that label; included are duets with Rob Thomas, Elvis Costello, Lee Ann Womack, Toby Keith, Lucinda Williams and Ray Price. American Classic is his latest though not best plunge into the American Songbook. Willie and the Wheel, his infectious collaboration with Asleep at the Wheel, is a tribute to the Texas Swing tradition both acts owe so much to. Best of all, though, is Naked Willie, a project spearheaded by harmonica virtuoso Mickey Raphael to "unproduce" Nelson's 1960s recordings by removing the schmaltzy strings and cooing singers to reveal the inimitable honky-tonk singer and band below. The results are revelatory; here are some of the best country tracks of that decade--every bit the equal of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens.

Vijay Iyer Trio: Historicity (ACT)
Most articles about Iyer focus on his injection of South Asian music into jazz--and understandably so, for that's been one of the top stories of the decade. But this piano-trio album makes clear that Iyer is also a master of the avant-garde jazz-piano tradition, a legitimate heir of Andrew Hill and Don Pullen. Whether he's working with his own compositions or those by Hill, Julius Hemphill, Leonard Bernstein and Stevie Wonder, Iyer has a remarkable ability to tie his rhythms and harmonies into convoluted but elegant knots and then untie them with a magician's wave of the arm as he finds the perfect resolving phrase. He's joined by bassist Stephan Crumb and drummer Marcus Gilmore.

The Del McCoury Band: Live from State College, PA (McCoury Music)
This has been an astonishingly fertile year for the Del McCoury Band. They released a five-CD box set, Celebrating 50 Years of Del McCoury that summed up the impressive breadth of the family patriarch's career. The group also released a strong studio album, Family Circle that featured original interpretations of songs by Buddy Miller, Mark Knopfler, Charlie Rich and Johnny Mercer. But the most exciting release was the least publicized, Live from State College, PA, a concert recording that catches the quintet at the height of their powers, proving how much they've improved on their studio versions of such songs as "My Love Will Not Change," "Moneyland" and "1952 Vincent Black Lightning." More: http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=18587

Hall & Oates: Do What You Want, Be What You Are: The Music of Daryl Hall & John Oates (RCA/Legacy Records)
These guys weren't about albums; they were about radio singles. They didn't belabor concepts; they threw things at the wall to see what would stick. And they were incredibly prolific; while Bruce Springsteen was releasing eight albums in the ‘70s and '80s, Hall & Oates were releasing 15. Anyone who listened to the radio in those two decades will experience a small flush of pleasure at the mere mention of titles such as "Sara Smile," "Rich Girl," "Kiss on My List," "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)," "Did It in a Minute," "Adult Education" and "Method of Modern Love." The duo scored 28 Top 40 hits between 1976 and 1988, including six #1s. They're all here, and so are the songs that should have been hits but didn't stick to that wall for whatever reason: "It's Uncanny," "I Don't Wanna Lose You," "Everytime You Go Away," and more. More: http://sonicboomers.com/shelflife/hall-oates

Patterson Hood: Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs) (Ruth St.)
The title of the Drive-By Truckers' 2009 release, The Fine Print (A Collection of Oddities and Rarities), refers to the band's contract with New West Records which required two more albums--which they satisfied with this compilation of rarities and Live from Austin, TX. If they were trying to get back at the label, they failed, because both are splendid discs. The first offers inspired covers of songs by Tom Petty, Tom T. Hall and Bob Dylan as well as lost gems from the band's studio session; the second offers the band's 2008 Austin City Limits TV show, a great performance featuring an epic, 11-minute version of "18 Wheels of Love," featuring one of Patterson Hood's best autobiographical monologues. But of all the DBT projects to come out this year, the best was Hood's second solo album, a project he started in 1994 and released only after wriggling free of the aforementioned contract. When he did, these songs about murderers, suicides, widows and hustlers anticipate all the virtues of his writing and performing with the DBTs (who back him on most of these tracks).

Sarah Jarosz: Song Up in Her Head (Sugar Hill)
The remarkable thing about Jarosz is that she sings the old-time country/folk music she loves from the perspective of who she really is: a middle-class kid who has just left her Texas high school to begin college in Boston. This makes her more authentic, not less, than most of her young string-band peers. When she writes about leaving home for the first time or falling in love for the first time, she locates the timeless universality of those personal experiences and channels them with all the power roots music can provide. Because she is projecting her own life rather than someone else's through the tradition, the impact is all the stronger. Of course, it helps that she's a terrific singer and picker.

John Adams: Doctor Atomic Symphony (Nonesuch)
Adams is the classical equivalent of such jazz composers as Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers and David Murray--walking the line between tonality and atonality, between tension and release, between melody and noise, between modern conflict and timeless resolution. In this wordless symphony, an adaptation of his opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, Adams creates a thick orchestral world of sound, a world of nuclear terror and regret, of anxiety-ridden strings and brass explosions.

Rosanne Cash: The List (Manhattan)
The title comes from the list of "100 Essential Country Songs" that Johnny Cash gave his daughter in 1973. She learned many of them that summer after she graduated from high school and she returns to them in chamber-pop arrangements by her husband/guitarist/arranger/producer John Leventhal. There are special guests (Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy, Rufus Wainwright, Larry Campbell, her daughter Chelsea Crowell) and new light is shed on the roots of her unusual career. More important than any of that is the emphatic proof that Cash is a first-rate country-pop singer, in the same class as Emmylou Harris and Patty Loveless.

Bob Mould: Life and Times (Anti-)
Here's yet another brilliant Mould solo record that no one paid much attention to. No one--not Kurt Cobain, not Lee Thurston, not Lou Reed, not Nels Cline, not Jimmy Page--has ever done guitar noise better because no one has so successfully translated that noise into an emotional cloud. In these songs of broken romance, that cloud is dark and stormy; it sometimes obscures the tuneful pop songwriting below and the confessional-howl singing but never for long. Mould played everything himself but the drums.

Diana Jones: Better Times Will Come (Proper)
I wrote the liner notes for this album but only because I was so impressed by this artist and her songs. She works in an Appalachian vein and the acoustic string-band arrangements are deceptively simple, for their restraint reveals the haunting originality of the melodies and the understated skill of the performances. This reflects the deceptive simplicity of the lyrics, which tell their stories with the hypnotic repetition and plain speech of old mountain song. Pay closer attention, though, and you'll hear a modern literary voice working with irony and implication.  More: http://www.properamerican.com/008.html

Prince: MPLSound (NPG)
In one of his typical, self-defeating marketing moves, Prince bundled three very different projects in one package this year. Elixir by his latest female protégé Bria-Valente, was so-so R&B, and his own Lotusflower was stimulating but unfocused rock-guitar CD. But the third disc, MPLSound, was a terrific funk record with deep dance grooves, contagious hooks and lubricious come-ons. Its impact was blunted by the confusing collection, but MPLSound was classic Prince and is well worth searching out.

Holly Williams: Here with Me (Mercury Nashville)
The excellent exhibit, Family Tradition: The Williams Family Legacy, has been running at the Country Music Hall of Fame for nearly two years and has another two years to run. It's worth seeing just for the diorama of squirrels shot by Hank Sr. arranged by a taxidermist to look like the Drifting Cowboys. The museum cases chronicle Hank Sr., Hank Jr., Hank III, Audrey and Jett. In one small corner is Holly, Hank Jr.'s daughter, who has just released the family's best album in 30 years, since her daddy parted ways with the Allman Brothers. The country arrangements on Here with Me are understated, relying on acoustic guitar, piano and a tasteful rhythm section, as if the songs and the singing could carry the load. They can, for these confessions of a daughter of divorce are as smart as they are true, as moving as they are simple.

Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys: The Tiffany Transcriptions (Collector's Choice)
While Wills' commercial releases stuck close to the cowboy imagery and sound of his earliest hits, these 1940s radio shows reveal just how broad his tastes were. Especially revealing are the adaptations of such African-American hits as Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train," Count Basie's "Jumpin' at the Woodside" and Nat King Cole's "Straighten Up and Fly Right," where the hillbilly musicians nail the syncopation and the fiddles and steel guitars function like jazz horns. Singer Tommy Duncan breaks into helpless laughter more than once, but the soloists stretch out longer and more adventurously than they ever did in the studio. You can hear hints of the rollicking, race-mixing records soon to come from Bill Haley & the Comets and Jerry Lee Lewis. More: www.americansongwriter.com/2009/03/bob-wills-and-his-texas-playboys-the-tiffany-transcriptions

The Matt Wilson Quartet: That's Gonna Leave a Mark (Palmetto)
Wilson can be a solid bop drummer; he leads his quartet through a convincing version of Gillespie's "Two Bass Hit" here. But Matt Wilson is most exciting when he draws from the funk of his own generation and transmutes it into jazz. Listen, for example, to his new arrangement of War's 1975 funk hit, "Why Can't We Be Friends?" Wilson plays the funk beat with authority, smacking the snare on the off-beat. Unlike real funk drummers, however, he never stays in one pattern for long, always finding a new way to restate the groove, a constant reinvention that allows the funk feel to become a jazz rhythm. On his own appealing compositions, Wilson never surrenders to the fallacy that funk has to be steady and unchanging; he's forever altering his phrasing--sometimes with a loud snare, sometimes with a rattling cymbal, sometimes with a tom-tom lick--without the listener ever losing track of the beat. More: http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=19189

Low Anthem: Oh My God, Charlie Darwin (Nonesuch)
At times, this breakthrough album from the Rhode Island trio Low Anthem resembles a small-town band from early-20th century rural America, what with the pump organ, mandolin, fiddle and clarinet backing Ben Knox Miller's high tenor as it warbles minimalist, fatalistic stories about floods, angels and dying sweethearts. But the gazebos of Dayton, Ohio, 1903, were not populated by secular bohemians singing songs by Jack Kerouac and songs about Charles Darwin--and it's that time warping of ancient and post-modern that makes this such a disorienting, compelling experience.

Chuck Prophet: Let Freedom Ring (Yep Roc)
If Randy Newman had grown up not as the heir of Hollywood composers but as a scruffy garage-rocker and had recorded an album about the United States in 2009, that record might have sounded a lot like Chuck Prophet's Let Freedom Ring. It would have had the same untrustworthy third-person narrators and bitterly comic commentators; it would have had the same perky melodies arranged in the same passed-by styles of the past; it would have had the same sharp powers of description and the same barely constrained outrage. Whether he's singing through the persona of a barely articulate boxer, the mother of a foolhardy child, an unemployed husband, the ominously quiet kid at school or the couple on one last credit-card spree, Prophet inhabits each character with just the right diction, just the right guitar riff, just the right mix of anger and hope. More: http://www.citypaper.com/digest.asp?id=19415

John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble: Eternal Interlude (Sunnyside)
Hollenbeck's compositions resemble a collection of clocks that are all wound to count off the seconds at different intervals. Each clock pursues its own pattern, tick-tocking in counterpoint to all the clocks around it. At key moments, however, they all chime together. This is mesmerizing when there're only five different patterns, as in the drummer's Claudia Quintet, but it's exponentially more dizzying when pursued by his 20-member big band, featuring the likes of Gary Versace, Ellery Eskelin and Tony Malaby. Five of the six pieces on this album are more than eight minutes long, time enough for each musician's individual line to move from background to foreground and back again, time enough for the seemingly disparate patterns to intersect in unexpected and satisfying ways. Every person seems to be following his or her own path, and yet all those paths were woven together to create a larger design. More: http://www.citypaper.com/digest.asp?id=19456

St. Vincent: Actor (4AD)
Annie Clark, the woman behind the St. Vincent name, is heir to the legacy of Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, Lindsey Buckingham and Andy Partridge, cracked utopians who thought they could summon up a better world by creating such majestic pop harmonies that one could live inside them. On her second album, Clark gets the musicians and studio to do such a vision justice, layering her tuneful song-wishes in woodwinds, strings and feathery voices. The results are intoxicating, but there's just enough skepticism in the lyrics to suggest that Clark is far more grounded than Wilson or Spector ever were.

Dan Auerbach: Keep It Hid (Nonesuch)
The Black Keys are far more interesting than most blues-rock acts, because the Ohio duo incorporates pop melodies, country-folk lyrics and psychedelic touches into their energetic blues stomps. Those beyond-the-blues elements are explored much further on the terrific first solo album from the duo's singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach, Keep It Hid, and the broader range reveals a major pop songwriter. The disc begins with the understated hillbilly lament, "Trouble Weighs a Ton," full of sorrow and dignity, and moves through several Black Keys-like stomps before arriving at the garage-rock ballad "Real Desire," full of throbbing organ and nervous guitar. Taken together, the 14 songs suggest that the novelty aspect of the Black Keys' guitar/drums format is the least interesting thing about the immensely talented Auerbach, just as the same format is the least interesting thing about the White Stripes' Jack White. This year Auerbach also produced the delightful debut album from Hacienda (see below) and the inspired rock-rap fusion project Blakroc (Blackroc), a collaboration with Mos Def, Ludacris, Raekwon and more. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/26/AR2009022601370.html

David Binney: Third Occasion (Mythology)
Binney has a tender, bruised tone on his alto saxophone, not as if he's seeking pity but as if he's seeking the like-minded. He finds them in this superb quartet (pianist Craig Taborn, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Brian Blade), which surrounds the lovely melancholy of the leader's themes with sympathetic harmonies, transforming loneliness into community through the alchemy of jazz.

Steve Earle: Townes (New West)
Earle's claim that "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world" was only slightly exaggerated, as Earle proves on the 15 Van Zandt compositions that make up this album. Whether it's well known numbers such as "Poncho and Lefty" and "White Freightliner Blues" or obscurities such as "Colorado Girl" and "Brand New Companion," the language is less showy than Dylan's but just as muscular and evocative--and fits just as comfortably into the borrowed folk melodies. Those who have only heard Van Zandt's songs interpreted by Willie Nelson or Emmylou Harris or by Van Zandt himself in his post-1979 years of decline have no idea how mesmerizing the songwriter's sandpaper voice could be in his 1970s concerts and recordings. Earle recaptures that vocal approach with all its dry-as-dust irony. But because Earle has a much better vocal instrument than his mentor ever did and a more imaginative approach to instrumental arrangements (new-grass on most cuts, electronica, blues or Beatlesque-rock on a few), these interpretations add something new to the songs. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060403720.html

Otis Gibbs: Grandpa Walked a Picket Line (Wanamaker)
Gibbs isn't the first artist to adopt a gravelly voice and loosey-goosey hillbilly band in an attempt to tap into the older, deeper currents of rural American music. The difference is that Gibbs does this not as a substitute for songwriting craft but as a supplement. These songs about stubborn union organizers, violent patriarchs and cynical clergymen are so well structured--the stories seamlessly sewn into the melodies--that they'd work in any setting. The arrangements, produced by Chris Stamey and suggesting Tom Waits backed by the Flying Burrito Brothers, make them that much better.

Hacienda: Loud is the Night (Alive Natural Sound)
The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach was so impressed by the demo tape from Hacienda, a San Antonio quartet of three brothers and a cousin that he agreed to produce their debut album. The results offer persuasive evidence that Hacienda is a worthy heir of such Tex-Mex rock bands as the Sir Douglas Quintet, Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs and the Texas Tornados. It's not just that Abraham Villanueva's electric organ and Dante Schwebel's R&B tenor prove so effective in the classic Tex-Mex style, but that Hacienda also writes such wonderfully melodic, heartfelt rockers. And when these family members add Beach Boys-like harmonies to songs such as "Hear Me Crying" and "Angela," the effect is exhilarating. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/26/AR2009022601370.html

Hal Galper: Art-Work (Origin)
Hal Galper joins John Coltrane's final rhythm section (bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Rashied Ali) for a jazz piano trio concert that never loses its pell-mell tumbling momentum even as it stretches the harmonies of tunes by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Galper himself into shapes the composers never dreamed of.

Hilary Hahn: Schoenberg/Sibelius Violin Concertos (Deutsche Grammophon)
This was not only a #1 album on the Billboard classical charts but also the first Arnold Schoenberg recording ever to appear on the chart at all. Hahn has the violin chops to tackle Schoenberg's notoriously difficult score but also the visceral directness to collaborate with such posters as Tom Brosseau, . . . And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead and Josh Ritter. She combines these two qualities on this album, tapping into the emotional currents of Schoenberg's anxiety-ridden modernism and Sibelius' folk-fueled romanticism. More: http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=18157

Bela Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart/Tales From the Acoustic Planet Vol. 3/The Africa Sessions (Rounder)
Fleck's ambitious journey to Africa in 2005 in search of the origins of the banjo and so much of American music, resulted in both this audio CD and an impressive documentary film. It works better than many such projects, because Fleck did his homework and was neither too deferential nor dominant. He engaged the African musicians he encountered in genuine give and take, creating neither African nor American music but a fascinating fusion. Fleck created another such hybrid project when he collaborated with Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain, bluegrass/jazz/classical bassist Edgar Meyer and the classical ensemble the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to create The Melody of Rhythm (E1). More: http://thesessionspot.com/wordpress/?p=562

The North Mississippi Allstars: Boulderado: Live at the Fox 2008 (Songs of the South)
This was a year of tragedy and dislocation for the members of the North Mississippi Allstars. While Luther Dickinson was off touring with the Black Crowes and Cody Dickinson and Chris Chew were playing with their side project, the Hill Country Revue, Jim Dickinson, father to two-thirds of the group and producer for all three, died on August 15. Luther pulled together a well intentioned if under-rehearsed wake album, Onward and Upward (Merless/Memphis International), credited to Sons of Mudboy. Luther also joined Jimbo Mathus and Alvin "Youngblood" Hart to become the acoustic trio, the South Memphis String Band, to record a dozen old-timey tunes for Home Sweet Home (Merless/Memphis International), while the Hill Country Revue released the shaggy but likable Make a Move (Razor & Tie). But the best NMAS release of the year was Boulderado, a blistering live recording from their last tour, a reaffirmation of their status as one of the best Southern-rock bands of all time, ranking right up there with Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers and the Drive-By Truckers. The trio is reuniting for a new album next year.

Cyrus Chestnut: Spirit (JLP)
Chestnut's new album is sub-titled Solo Piano, and it's true that the Baltimore native's piano is the only thing heard on the 14 tracks. But the record nonetheless provides a fascinating dialogue between two distinct voices: Chestnut's right hand and his left. Listen, for example, to "Wade in the Water," the traditional spiritual. The right hand seems light and happy, as if basking in the joys of Christian faith, while the left seems to be straining every muscle as it wrestles with temptation and sin. Even though the two hands seem to be pursuing different paths, somehow they mesh to form grand, unexpected chords. The whole album is full of such gospel-flavored one-man duets, perfectly balanced between soloist melodies, choir-like harmonies and hand-clapping rhythms, between the opposing pulls of faith and sin. More: http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=19460

Beausoleil: Alligator Purse (Yep Roc)
This project features a bevy of guest artists: the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian plays harmonica on “Valse a Beausoleil”; Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs sings a duet with Michael Doucet on Julie Miller's “Little Darlin’”; the Band’s Garth Hudson adds organ to Bobby Charles’ I Spent All My Money Loving You," and jazz legend Roswell Russ plays trombone on “Les Oignons." But when singer/fiddler Doucet was asked if he was worried that the band might lose its identity amid all these famous guests, he laughed. "We’re the gumbo," he replied. “They’re just the seasoning on the gumbo." More: http://www.offbeat.com/2009/02/01/beau-brothers/

Wale: Attention Deficit (Allido/Interscope)
Maybe it’s because he came out of DC/Maryland’s go-go scene, but Wale chooses to weave his raps through the busy whirl of keys, voices and drums around him rather than standing in contrast to them, creating a communitarian hip-hop in contrast to the belligerent loners who dominate the genre. It only works because this Nigerian-American kid has a sweet, joyful tenor even when he's spitting rhymes.

The Krayolas: Long Leaf Pine (No Smack Gum) (Box)
The Krayolas, a San Antonio garage-rock band modeled on the Sir Douglas Quintet, were local heroes in the ‘70s but could never break out of Texas and disbanded in 1988. They reunited in 2007 with help from their hero Augie Meyers and discovered the missing ingredient that had eluded them in their first incarnation: lyrics that mattered. Co-founder Hector Saldana had become an accomplished journalist and he used those skills to write songs about capital punishment (“That's how they make a saint every time”), aging (“You chop me all down, but I've grown back again”) and ruptured romance (“Like a fish out of water I blow bubbles in the sand”). The music is as catchy and muscular as it ever was, and the combination is irresistible.

Roswell Rudd: Trombone Tribe (Sunnyside)
Rudd has brought his distinctive trombone voice to collaborations with everyone from Steve Lacy and Cecil Taylor to NRBQ and the Mongolian Buryat Band. On this wide-ranging, rewarding project, Rudd puts himself in some very strange settings: the West African gospel brass band Gangbe, the New Orleans  funk/parade band Bonerama, the irreverent modern-jazz band SexMob and a trombone choir that includes Eddie Bert, Wycliffe Gordon, Ray Anderson, Josh Roseman and Sam Burtis. No matter what the context, Rudd’s ebullient spirit and playful rambunctiousness make themselves felt.

Rickie Lee Jones: Balm in Gilead (Fantasy)
On this album, Jones rediscovers her old love for finger-snapping, sing-along ‘60s R&B, and that structure provides the necessary skeleton for her ongoing experiments in lyric-writing. She tries to blur the line between the kind of prose monologues you might encounter on stage with the rhyming verses and choruses you find in pop music, and that R&B foundation--along with her big, open-hearted, yelping soprano--makes that experiment more successful here than ever before. She is joined by such guests as Bill Frisell, Alison Krauss, Vic Chesnutt, Ben Harper and Tex-Mex virtuoso Joel Guzman.

Karen O and the Kids: Where the Wild Things Are: Motion Picture Soundtrack (DGC/Interscope)
When she's leading her regular band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Karen O always seems to be trying too hard--as demonstrated on this year's It’s Blitz. But composing and performing the soundtrack for Spike Jonze's great Where the Wild Things Are, ostensibly a kids’ movie, has drained away all her adult self-importance and hipster cool and awakened her inner melodist. The tracks here are more often fragments than fully fleshed out songs, but the tunes are so catchy, the rhythms so vibrant and the overall vibe so damned joyful that they’re impossible to resist--and ultimately more ironic and complex than her allegedly adult music. 

The Flatlanders: Hills and Valleys (New West)
The Flatlanders are an unusual vocal trio. They really don’t rely that much on harmonies; most of the singing is one man at a time. Instead, the crucial collaboration takes place at the songwriting stage. Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock have been friends since they were teenagers in the West Texas cotton town of Lubbock, and they share a common sensibility whether they’re writing songs together--as they do on eight of the 13 tracks on their new album “Hills and Valleys”--or separately. The same blend of passionate idealism, irreverent humor, philosophical questioning and West Texas rowdiness flavors everything they do. More: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/09/AR2009040901438.html

Carla Bley: Carla's Christmas Carols (WATT)
While Bob Dylan’s brave failure got the most attention, Carla Bley released this year's best holiday record. If Gil Evans had done a Christmas album, it might have sounded a lot like this one, for Bley’s skills are exactly the same as Evans’; her jazz arrangements have the same proportions of grandeur, playfulness, modernism and originality as did Evans’ arrangements for Miles Davis. In tackling these nine traditional carols plus two originals and Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song," keyboardist Bley joins her musical/personal partner, bassist Steve Swallow, and the Partyka Brass Quintet, showcasing trumpeters Tobias Weidinger and Alex Schlosser as Evans once showcased Davis. More: http://www.nashvillescene.com/2009-12-03/music/bob-dylan-s-latest-follows-the-tradition-of-the-weird-christmas-album

Tom Waits: Glitter & Doom Live (Anti-)
Early in his career Waits hung his heart on his sleeve a bit too readily in his Kerouac-on-Skid-Row cabaret songs. Midway through his career, when he switched to that junkyard rock'n'roll sound, he often hid his heart so far up his sleeve you could barely hear it beat. More recently, though, he has struck a just-right balance between sweet melody and harsh percussion, between romanticism and skepticism. You hear that especially on this fabulous live album, where he revisits his recent songs by stripping away every trace of studio trickery, relying instead on his rocks-in-the-throat voice and tough, versatile sextet. Instead of offering a souvenir of one particular concert--always a dubious choice--he cherry-picks the best performances from an American/European tour for 17 songs on the first disc and his inimitable spoken monologues on the second disc.

Bobby Lounge: Something's Wrong (Abitian)
Lounge, a folk-art painter from McComb, Mississippi, remains one of the best hidden treasures in American music. He writes about the bohemian underworld with the same bittersweet humor as the young Tom Waits and performs them with the boogie-woogie piano and rockabilly shout of a young Jerry Lee Lewis. For his rare live performances, he has a nurse roll him out inside an iron lung from which he bursts in a Mardi Gras costume. This latest album may not be as overpowering as his two classics, 2005's “I Remember the Night Your Trailer Burned Down” and 2006’s “Ten Foot Woman,” but he takes these songs about snake-farm women, burning televisions and giant squirrels to the edge of delirium--and then dives over, adding one absurdist punch line to the last.

Patty Loveless: Mountain Soul II (Saguaro Road)
Loveless is one of the finest country singers of her generation, and nothing serves her gift better than returning to the bluegrass of her East Kentucky childhood. This is her second such album, and once again the majority of the material comes from greatest-hits collections but from contemporary Nashville songwriters such as Rodney Crowell, Tony Arata, Jon Randall and Loveless's husband/producer Emory Gordy Jr. For this is not an album about the past but about the present; the string-band picking by Bryan Sutton, Mike Auldridge, Rob Ickes, Ronnie McCoury and Del McCoury are merely the best vehicles for these songs and this voice. Even Harlan Howard’s old Bakersfield anthem of hard times, “Busted," couldn’t be timelier.

Ella Fitzgerald: Twelve Nights in Hollywood (Verve)
What comes through most clearly on these 77 previously unreleased live performances from 1962 is the sheer joy in Fitzgerald's voice, as if she knew she was at the peak of her powers and should enjoy it while she could. Whether she’s singing show-tune lyrics or improvising scat syllables, she revels in her extraordinary ability to make her big voice do whatever she wanted.

Boys Like Girls: Love Drunk (Columbia)
Martin Johnson, the lead vocalist of this Boston pop-rock quartet, sings a duet with Taylor Swift on this new album, which makes sense because both Johnson and Swift have a knack for translating the incomparable highs and lows of adolescence into the kind of phrases that frantic friends blurt out to one another and into the kind of choruses that lodge in the brain and won’t leave. What phrase better summarizes teenage romance than “Love Drunk?” These Green Day-lite romps will leave the listener hook-drunk.

The Portland Cello Quartet: The Thao & Justin Power Sessions (Kill Rock Stars)
Classical chamber groups have been invading pop music in a serious way lately. The string quartet Osso just released an album with Sufjan Stevens; the Tosca Quartet has recorded with Alejandro Escovedo and David Byrne; and now the Portland Cello Quartet has released The Thao & Justin Power Sessions, a model of how a chamber group's close-interval harmonies and luscious tone can work in a rock-and-roll context. West Coast indie-rockers Thao Nguyen and Justin Power each sing four original songs on the album, and the Oregon cellists exploit the tension between sprightly melodies and plangent yearnings. It's a challenge for classically trained musicians to give a rock-and-roll push, but they pull it off. Nguyen also has a strong new album with her band, Thao With the Get Down Stay Down: Know Better Learn Faster (Kill Rock Stars). Her ability to translate the disappointments and dislocations of post-college years into memorable melodies and compelling rhythms makes her one of the best young songwriters around. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/profile/thao-with-the-get-down-stay-down,1086332/critic-review.html#reviewNum1

Dailey & Vincent: Singing from the Heart (Rounder)
The IBMA’s Entertainer of the Year Award is the biggest prize in bluegrass. The duo of Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent have won that award the past two years for some of the most sumptuous harmony singing in the genre’s history. On this album, they turn their voices to the a cappella gospel-quartet tradition, with help from the likes of Doyle Lawson and Shawn Lane. Singing doesn’t get much prettier than this.

Freddie Hubbard: Without a Song: Live in Europe 1969 (Blue Note)
Here’s how we prefer to remember the late Hubbard, not as the injury-hampered ghost of recent years, not as the crossover-compromised star of the late ‘70s, but as one of the most technically accomplished, ferocious trumpeters of his generation. These previously unreleased live performances capture Hubbard at the peak of his powers with an all-star quartet that included pianist Roland Hanna, drummer Louis Hayes and bassist Ron Carter. More: http://jazztimes.com/articles/20387-freddie-hubbard-the-show-must-go-on

George Colligan: Come Together (Sunnyside)
This album opens with the title track, the John Lennon tune that the Beatles released in 1969, the year Colligan was born. The pianist immediately grabs hold of Lennon’s famous bass riff and gives it an even funkier, more R&B phrasing. This is reinforced by Russian bassist Boris Kozlov and New Orleans drummer Donald Edwards, Colligan’s frequent colleagues in the Mingus Big Band. The format may be jazz piano trio, but the rhythms are very different from the usual swing and bop flavors, for the leader proves that the rock and funk beats of his own era can stimulate heady improvisation as readily as the rhythms of an earlier time. The same is true of Colligan’s eight originals, which also make connections between the jazz, rock and funk worlds. More: http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=19460

Brad Paisley: American Saturday Night (Arista)
Given that his audience overlaps quite a bit with Glenn Beck’s, you have to admire Brad Paisley’s courage in endorsing of multi-culturalism on the title track and the Civil Rights movement on “Welcome to the Future." You also have to admire the Beatlesque backward-tape swirl that opens the former and the extended rockabilly guitar solo that ends the latter. As a guitarist, singer and songwriter Paisley has long been the most talented country artist of his generation, but he’s always pulled his punches, giving us jokes that were funny but not too funny, ballads that were sad but not too sad, arrangements that were modern but not too modern and arguments that were angry but not too angry. On this remarkable record, he loosens the reins on his own talent and gives us the breakthrough album we’ve been waiting for.

The Olympic Ass-Kickin Team: National Champions (Double Naught)
Terry Anderson is some kind of neglected genius: His songs have been recorded not only by his own bands (the Woods and Yayhoos) but also the Georgia Satellites (“Battleship Chains”), Warren Zevon, Etta James, Al Anderson and Jo Dee Messina--and why not? His songs always boast an ear-grabbing pop hook that fits snugly into a garage-rock boogie. Drummer/singer Anderson’s latest vehicle is the Olympic Ass-Kickin’ Team, and these songs about Willie Mays, the Indy 500 and getting the brush-off from girls are not only ass-kicking but also damned catchy--and often very funny.

John Patitucci: Remembrance (Concord)
With this album, Patitucci finally steps out from behind such bandleaders as Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter and becomes an important jazz figure himself. The difference is not in the bassist's playing, which has always been top-notch, but in his writing, which has never been as tuneful or as evocative as these 11 pieces. Many of them are titled after legendary saxophonists--John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson and Michael Brecker--and Joe Lovano translates Patitucci’s themes into memorable saxophone lines.

PJ Harvey & John Parrish: A Woman a Man Walked By (Island)
Harvey writes and sings the note-bending, minimalist words; Parrish writes and plays the harsh, brittle music. Linked together, the two halves are anything but easy listening but they do produce an unsparing examination of modern relationships and a hypnotic, otherworldly sound.

The Soul of John Black: Black John (Electro Groove)
Singer-songwriter-guitarist John Bingham has used the band name, the Soul of John Black, as his vehicle for a rootsy African-Americana. In much the same way that Steve Earle has used the songwriting example of Townes Van Zandt, the commercial example of Bruce Springsteen and the traditional example of Pete Seeger to fashion his own sound, so has Bingham used Bill Withers, Curtis Mayfield and Taj Mahal to fashion his. The title track is an update of the “Stagolee” story, and many of the songs dissect male/female relationships as if there were more to them than cheap sex and cheaper sentiment.

Neil Young: Fork in the Road (Reprise)
The roar is back. The band isn’t Crazy Horse, but the full-throated roar of rock'n'roll is back in Young's music. The lyrics--rants about automobile politics and reworkings of automobile mythology--aren’t as ambitious as one might hope, but his always fetching melodies at least have the amplifier wind at their backs.

Pat Metheny/Gary Burton: Quartet Live (Nonesuch)
Musical reunions are often a bad idea, but not always. This reunion of guitarist Metheny, vibist Burton and bassist Steve Swallow, who constituted three-fourths of the Gary Burton Quartet in the ‘70s, strikes just the right balance of preserving what worked in the first place and adding the perspective of the elapsed years. Joined by young drummer Antonio Sanchez, the three old friends recreate that sound of non-urban jazz they did so much to invent and add the discipline of self-editing that comes only with age. In many ways, the key to this live recording is Swallow, whose throbbing pulse is so melodic that it adds a third equal part to the harmonies.

Art Brut: Art Brut vs. Satan (Downtown)
Like the Flight of the Conchords’ I Told You I Was Freaky and the Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera, this is smart music criticism in the form of a rock'n'roll album. Eddie Argos, Art Brut's main singer-songwriter, is a witty but angst-ridden wisecracker in the tradition of fellow Brit Ray Davies. When he declares that “DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshake” are pleasures that he refuses to drop in adulthood, he sounds a bit embarrassed, just as he does when he shouts out, “I can’t believe I've only just discovered the Replacements--some of them are nearly the same age as my parents." It’s that willingness to aim his humor at himself that saves these fast, brittle, hooky songs from mere snarkiness. 

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: The Live Anthology (Reprise)
Though he’s had a handful of cool singles, Petty hasn’t made a really solid studio album since 1985. But he has always led one of the best arena-rock bands around, just a half-step below U2 and Springsteen. The evidence is on this four-CD box set of cherry-picked live performances from 1980 through 2006. Highlighted by guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench and blue-eyed soul singer Petty, these tracks crackle, especially on the tunes taken from the songbooks of Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Van Morrison, Jerry Garcia, James Brown and pre-1986 Petty.

Joshua Redman: Compass (Nonesuch)
Saxophonist Redman plays with nothing but bassists and drummers on this album, but sometimes it’s with two bassists at once and a few times it's with two bassists (Larry Grenadier and Reuben Rogers) and two drummers (Brian Blade and Gregory Hutchinson) together. The double basses form chords far lower and far more percussively than you expect and leave Redman’s lyrical horn isolated on top. It’s an unusual sound--not your usual saxophone trio but not your usual quartet or quintet either--but Redman takes advantage by writing themes that deserve the high-register isolation and benefit from the low-register push.

Marty Ehrlich Rites Quartet: Things Have Got To Change (Clean Feed)
This jazz quartet’s name is a clue to its approach, for they often intone the kind of repeating simple phrases and eerie harmonies that mystic religions use to alter their adherents’ thinking, and then the quartet improvise madly to suggest what the consequences of such altered thinking might be. With Erik Friedlander’s cello replacing the usual bass, with Pheeroan Aklaff rattling exotic percussion, and with James Zollar's trumpet snaking around Ehrlich’s alto sax, the band handles both tasks quite effectively.

Los Lobos: Los Lobos Goes Disney (Disney)
David Hidalgo, Los Lobos' lead singer, is as much an icon of Los Angeles culture as Walt Disney. By bringing those two icons together, songs originally sung by roosters, monkeys, dogs, dolls and dwarves now sound like an East L.A. wedding party set to a rocking border beat. Has there ever been a more yearning song of emigration than Roger Miller's "Not in Nottingham"? Has there ever been a more revealing song about the lure of assimilation than Richard & Robert Sherman's "I Wanna Be Like You"? Has there ever been a sadder song about the end of a dream than Randy Newman's "I Will Go Sailing No More"? Have these songs ever been as poignant and as muscular as they are here? No, no, no and no. Hidalgo also provided the highlights on Los Cenzontles’ American Horizon and on Bob Dylan's Christmas in My Heart. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/12/AR2009111207797.html

Paul Motian Trio 2000 + Two: On Broadway Vol. 5 (Winter & Winter)
Motian began his On Broadway series as a way to filter show tunes through his jazz-as-the-sound-of-impressionist-painting sensibility. Vol. 1 was a quartet of Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden; this year’s Vol. 5 is a quintet with saxophonists Loren Stillman and Michael Attias, pianist Masabumi Kikuchi and bassist Thomas Morgan, but from first to last the drummer has always controlled his records by the ever-subtle shifts in his light touch. The result is a wistful kind of beauty that's never sentimental or obvious.

Shemekia Copeland: Never Going Back (Telarc Blues)
Copeland has been trying to escape the “New Queen of the Blues” label since she released her first album as a 19 year old in 1998. She finally found the escape hatch on this album with crucial help from Oliver Wood, who not only produced the project but also co-wrote five of the 12 songs. Wood is one half of the terrific singer-songwriter duo the Wood Brothers. The other half, Chris Wood, a member of the jazz trio Medeski, Martin & Wood, joins bandmate John Medeski on the album, too. The twin influences of singer-songwriter pop and jam-happy jazz inoculate the session against the usual blues cliches and allow Copeland's imposing voice to dig into narrative detail and musical surprises. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/12/AR2009021200931.html

Madeleine Peyroux: Bare Bones (Rounder)
Like her role models Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee and Emmylou Harris, Madeleine Peyroux allows vowels to drop from her mouth like ripened pieces of fruit: soft, round and bruised. There's a Steely Dan-ish wit to the title track ("The truth itself is nothing but a gamble/It might or might not set you free"), but Peyroux tosses off the lines with an insouciant shrug of the shoulders. She had top-drawer help. Larry Klein, Joni Mitchell's former producer and husband, is Peyroux's producer and co-wrote seven of the songs. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/18/AR2009061801168.html

Wye Oak: The Knot (Merge)
The second album from this Baltimore duo is far more cohesive than the first, for it was written and recorded in a more concentrated time frame and was defined by Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack's two-person live shows. The lack of other musicians forces Wye Oak to forego needless clutter and to make simple gestures count.  Often they translate the turmoil of romantic relationships, those swings between great hope and great despair, into quiet-to-loud and loud-to-quiet transitions. Stack generates the churning rhythmic energy, while Wasner supplies the pleasure-principle melodies and the bell-chiming vocals. More: http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=18364

Fastball: Little White Lies (Fastball)
In 1998 the Texas trio Fastball enjoyed three hit singles off their platinum album, All the Pain Money Can Buy, and then disappeared as quickly as they’d arrived. This year they released another gem of a power-pop album with anxious verses that galloped toward choruses that wrapped hooky melodies inside honeyed three-part harmony vocals. No one paid attention, but this record delivered as much pleasure as the fluke hit.

Ann Hampton Callaway: At Last (Telarc)
Unlike so many singers of jazz standards, Callaway never sounds merely decorous or respectful. Callaway’s big alto voice is full of blues, humor, lust and second thoughts, as if these songs were about her own life and not someone else's. When Wycliffe Gordon and Jay Leonhart lend gutbucket trombone and strutting bass to her version of “Comes Love," Callaway sings with the same provocative swagger. Mads Tolling underlines the free fall of heartbreak with his fiddle on “Landslide," and Callaway captures the song's ache much as its composer Stevie Nicks did but with fuller tone and surer pitch.  More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/17/AR2009121701538.html

Malcolm Holcombe: For the Mission Baby (Echo Mountain)
Holcombe drinks like a fish and sings like a bear, which doesn’t make him the easiest sell. But he writes spellbinding songs about life on the margins where he resides and accompanies himself with quicksilver guitar. That has won him many admirers in Nashville, including Tim O’Brien, Mary Gauthier and Steve Earle’s producer Ray Kennedy, who all helped Holcombe make this, the best album of his career.

James McMurtry: Live in Europe (Lightning Rod)
McMurtry's band has delivered some of the most incendiary live shows I've seen in this decade--a combination of brilliant songwriting and no-quarter-given attack--but this live record, taped before a lackluster Amsterdam audience, doesn’t come close to those triumphs, not even with the addition of Ian McLagan on keys. But even on an off night, this is a great rock'n'roll band, and the bonus DVD offers six extended songs that aren’t on the CD.

George Strait: Twang (MCA)
It’s not just that Strait has one of the great country voice--not just of this era but of all time--but he also has great taste in songs. Two of the first three tunes on this album are hook-happy two-steps from Jim Lauderdale, including the anthemic title track. Following in their wake are a barroom boogie from Delbert McClinton, strong story songs about a teenage pregnancy and an unrepentant horse thief plus left-field ventures into zydeco and Tex-Mex conjunto. Tony Brown produced.

Los Texmaniacs: Borders y Bailes (Smithsonian Folkways)
When German and Czech immigrants poured into the Lone Star State in the middle of the 19th century, they brought the accordion and polka with them. By the late 20th century, Mexican-American accordionists such as Flaco Jimenez, Tony De La Rosa, and Esteban Jordan were virtuosos on the box and regularly played polkas. They gave the syncopation much more of a snap than the typical wedding band, however, and thus sustained the notion that polkas could rock. You can hear their legacy on this terrific new album by Los Texmaniacs, the quartet led by Max Baca, the longtime accompanist for both Jimenez and Doug Sahm’s Texas Tornadoes. "Marina," just the first of six energetic polkas on the disc, kicks off with a fast, fluttery accordion riff from Dennis Farias. But soon, the rhythm section enters with the punchy, bottom-heavy attack led by Baca's chording on the bajo sexto, a 12-string instrument that straddles the divide between guitar and bass. More: http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=18487

Wilco: Wilco (The Album) (Nonesuch)
Jeff Tweedy has never seemed to understand his own strengths. He’s not much of a lyricist or a conceptualist, but he is one of the best pop tunesmiths and studio arrangers of his generation. When he acts more like the ambitious Paul McCartney of 1964's Beatles for Sale and less like the too-clever-by-half McCartney of 1968's Magical Mystery Tour, his best instincts overwhelm his cleverness. On this release, there’s more of the former than the latter with the result that the listener is more pleasured than awed.

Seth Walker: Leap of Faith (Hyena)
If you’ve ever wondered whatever happened to that distinctive Little Feat sound, that mix of funky New Orleans R&B and California country-rock, here's the answer. Produced and co-written by Nashville songwriter Gary Nicholson, Leap of Faith boasts catchy, finger-snapping choruses boosted by Walker's likable, blue-eyed-soul tenor and by the vintage big-band arrangements.

Justin Townes Earle: Midnight at the Movies (Bloodshot)
It would seem an impossible burden of expectations to have Steve Earle as a father and to be named after Townes Van Zandt, but Justin Townes Earle has shrugged off that weight to find his own voice on his second album, a kind of breezy string-band swing that softens up the listener for sharpened observations on human folly. On “Mama's Eyes," the son confronts his dad's shadow, admitting that he has inherited many of his dad’s strengths and weaknesses even if, he sings, “We don’t see eye to eye." But he also inherited his mother's eyes, and that enables him to see the world differently than his famous father.

Terence Blanchard: Choices (Concord)
The title reflects the lessons this jazz trumpeter learned from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of his hometown of New Orleans. He came to believe that Katrina was not a random event but the inevitable outcome of decisions the nation made about whom to elect and where to invest its money. For the album, he wanted to use more words to explore the topic, those sung by the progressive-soul singer Bilal and those spoken by philosopher Cornel West. Those snippets make explicit the themes that the brilliant instrumental passages imply. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060401613.html

Jim Black AlasNoAxis: Houseplant (Winter & Winter)
Drummer Jim Black describes his AlasNoAxis quartet as "melodic singer/songwriter music without vocals, instead with distortion, electronics and a saxophone." In other words, this is jazz that grows out of rock rather than funk, bop, or swing. But Black is not a rock drummer in the way that Dave King, the heavy-handed percussionist for the Bad Plus, is. Black never falls into a repetitive pattern--he endlessly varies the rock patterns he borrows, omitting expected accents, adding unexpected accents, even adding secondary patterns from his laptop. Thus he transforms steady rock grooves into elastic jazz rhythms, much as Papa Jo Jones transformed ballroom dance bands into jazz in the '30s. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Black writes ravishingly gorgeous tunes and chord changes, so that the high-octane rockers are broken up by equally arresting ballads. More: http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=19189

Deadstring Brothers: Sao Paulo (Bloodshot)
When the Rolling Stones went through their flirtation with country music in 1968-1973, marked by songs such as “No Expectations," “Wild Horses” and “Sweet Virginia," they created a strange fusion of snarling, Cockney hillbilly-blues. No one has recaptured that sound better than the Deadstring Brothers, a Detroit garage-rock band that eventually recruited British country musicians into their ranks. Lead singer Kurt Marschke has Mick Jagger's nasal whine and Keith Richards’ knack for catchy guitar riffs and writes alt-country songs nearly as catchy as his heroes’. This music may be second-hand, but it’s real good.

Tommy Keene: In the Late Bright (Second Motion)
The title track boasts a hopeful guitar figure that is contradicted by the downbeat lyrics: "The night time world has lost its appeal/The dirt is done; I cannot feel anymore." It's as if the singer, a former night owl, is complaining about the lost glamour of the neon-lit streets, even as the guitarist is celebrating newfound joy. That the singer and the guitarist are obviously the same person is what makes it such a fascinating song. And it’s that push-and-pull between the younger self and current self, between regret and desire that gives this album its power-pop drama. More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043001281.html

Mac McAnally: Down by the River (Show Dog)
McAnally has had few hits on his own, works steadily as a Nashville studio rat and tours as part of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band. None of that nails his true identity as a swampy country-blues-swinger in the vein of Jesse Winchester and Tony Joe White. McAnally reveals that side of his music on this delightfully relaxed, rootsy solo record.

J.J. Cale: Roll On (Rounder)
Cale turned 70 in December, and the four best songs on Roll On confront the end stage of life. He contemplates the "Former Me," that "fancy man" who "was lighter on his feet." With its jaunty blues piano figure, the song seems to be poking fun at Cale's old age, but a sadness creeps into the vocal, as if he is mystified by the stranger staring back at him from his own past. "Old Friend" is one of Cale's loveliest country ballads, the double-tracked vocal tracing a melody full of affection and longing for a longtime pal. "Leaving in the Morning" is ostensibly a song about leaving your hometown for good and wishing farewell to all one's friends. As Cale leaves his guitar to one friend, his dog to another, and his job to a third, his self-assured vocal implies that he's not going to miss any of it, that he's glad to be going. Such assertions are belied, however, by the drawn-out, descending phrases of the guitars, suggesting sobs of regret. Cale also contributed a composition and lead vocal to the Tractors’ terrific Tulsa-music tribute, Trade Union. More: http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=17583

The William Blakes: Wayne Coyne (Last Gang)
The Flaming Lips are one of the decade’s most interesting rock bands not because their psychedelic experiments travel so far out but because they mix those experiments with timeless pop craftsmanship. The band’s new album, Embryonic, makes the mistake of neglecting the pop half of that formula, but the Danish rock band the William Blakes makes no such error on its album named after the Flaming Lips’ lead singer. Playing the same kind of lushly layered folk-rock that the Decemberists specialize in, the William Blakes are not afraid of a little dissonance or the kind of skepticism about organized religion you rarely hear from American rock bands. The title track sounds like acid-era Beach Boys set to a disco rhythm track. But the tunes are so catchy and the harmonies are so full that these Danes just might convert you away from religion--or maybe even the Flaming Lips.

Frog Holler: Believe It or Not (Zobird)
Frog Holler's latest album is further evidence that lead singer Darren Schlappich is one of the more underrated songwriters in the Americana field. He writes fetching melodies that are stubbornly reluctant to resolve, leading the listener into the lyrics' thicket of ambivalence. You can hide out in "Whiskey Ditch," where the high school kids drink and the hobos hide, but, as he sings on "New Year's Day," that won't "change the patterns." The songs wouldn't be nearly as effective if Schlappich hadn't kept the core of Frog Holler together for 10 years. The blend of banjo, mandolin and roaring guitar fits the opposite pulls of rural tradition and bohemian invention in the lyrics. More: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=39654076&blogId=494341203