There seems to be a lot of good music out there these days, maybe because there is just so much music out there. Depending upon whom you ask, anywhere from 750 to 1,500 albums are released each week in America, in every imaginable genre, so the odds are good that you might find a dozen or so albums every month to please your particular palette.
Heck, you might even buy some of them.
The democracy of Internet music distribution (or the anarchy, depending upon one’s point of view) has made it possible to evaluate music in ways unimaginable when the record industry controlled the flow of product. It has led to the curious point at which a supergroup such as U2 can be criticized for force-feeding its latest album, Songs of Innocence, at no cost to people who have iTunes software. The online opinion site, Salon, was so exercised by such effrontery that it proclaimed U2 “an Internet punch line” and “the most hated band in America.”
That seems a bit excessive. I, for one, like getting a free album now and again and, unlike a reportedly large number of hysterical people, I know how to delete music from the iTunes library. Songs of Innocence is a perfectly agreeable bit of U2 product. It’s no Achtung Baby, but then again, it’s no Rattle and Hum.
However, the stuff I’m listening to more often these days features unconventional voices. If you, too, are intrigued by singers untrammeled by perfection, consider new releases by Marianne Faithfull, Lucinda Williams and Leonard Cohen.
There are other vocalists of distinction with new music of note, especially in the country realm. When RCA started out in the record trade, it did its big business with the operatic voice of Enrico Caruso, but it also sold millions of disks with the unschooled singing of Jimmie Rodgers, the first superstar of country. On his second release for Bloodshot Records, Everlasting Arms, Luke Winslow-King provides an intriguing blend of those two strains. Well-schooled in music theory at home and abroad, he received his essential education playing in the streets and in the clubs of New Orleans. The new album finds him infusing his simple, evocative songs with strains of jazz and blues, as did Jimmie Rodgers before him, and when he sings duets with his wife, Esther Rose, it’s not hard to imagine him featured on the original Grand Ole Opry.
In the way he lets the rough side drag, King also reminds one of the late Jesse Winchester, whose final album, A Reasonable Amount of Trouble, is now out, an elegant bookend for that distinguished career. The dying man nodded to mortality in a couple of the songs, but no more so than he’d done when he started out in 1970. His soft, self-assured voice perked up palpably when he tackled some classics of his youth, such as “Rhythm of the Rain” and “Devil or Angel,” and producer Mac McAnally kept the musical mood cool and comfortable throughout. With autumn closing in, this is an album you’ll want to listen to by firelight.
If you want pretty voices, turn to Red Sky July or The Haden Triplets (sadly, no kin), but if it’s a handsome-sounding record you want to hear, that’d be by Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst, whom you may know better as Shovels & Rope. Swimmin’ Time offers more of the salty-and-sweet recipe that made O’ Be Joyful (and their hit song, “Birmingham”) a breakthrough CD in 2012. More of this smart songwriting and sinuous vocal interplay in forthcoming efforts might well make these two a Conway and Loretta for the new millennium.
Speaking of legends, behold a new set from Marianne Faithfull. She ran with the Stones in Swinging London, but a lifetime or two of blissful dissipation sanded down her pure singing voice into an instrument of corruption, unleashed upon an unsuspecting public in 1979’s wittily titled Broken English. Now she’s ready to Give My Love to London, a celebration of surviving 50 years in the music biz, with backup from the likes of Nick Cave and Roger Waters. An import for now, the CD, showing the chanteuse wreathed in smoke on its cover, suggests how cabaret in Hades might sound, and, depending on your mood, you might want a front-row seat.
Leonard Cohen offers a similar world-weariness on his new Popular Problems, but even pushing age 80, he’s more worldly than weary. A poet first and foremost, he will never make an album the way anyone else does, and this one is juicy with idiosyncrasy. The nine songs cover a lot of waterfront, thematically speaking, from wars within and without to the odd joys of survival, and tying it all together is his remarkably demolished baritone, the voice of a shade followed from track to track by angelic choruses in search of a song that Buddha might sing in Clarksdale.
Then there’s Lucinda Williams, her voice perhaps the most evocative of the lot, thumbing her nose at expectations by releasing a double album in the age of single downloads. Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone (the title from a verse by her poet father, Miller Williams) is a welcome burst of creativity from an artist once given to lengthy contemplation of her recording process. For this album, she has expanded her ring of collaborators to include Jakob Dylan and peerless guitarist Bill Frisell while expanding the scope of her compositions from her wheelhouse, romantic heartbreak, to consider political matters, cultural conflicts and the power of compassion.
One thing hasn’t changed: that feral Arkansas voice, at once searing and sensual, the very sound of a Southern night. If she was whiskey straight, no chaser, in 1998 when she cut Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams has become bourbon aged in good wood for this remarkable album, her Blonde on Blonde.