‘Startin’ Fires’

‘Startin’ Fires’

Blake Shelton (Warner Bros.)

Grade: C

“I was green before green was a thing,” Blake Shelton sings on the lead-off track of his latest album. “Green” is the kind of song that puts this amiable journeyman star in his best light — flashing good-old-boy charm on a song that comes with a dose of humor and a lot of honky-tonk flavor.

“Startin’ Fires” could use a few more songs like that. The album leans toward earnest ballads and mid-tempo numbers like the hit single “She Wouldn’t Be Gone.” Shelton delivers these solidly, although he’s best on the songs that avoid the power-ballad approach and allow more of his personality to shine through, like the spare “100 Miles,” the conversational “Never Lovin’ You,” and “Bare Skin Rug,” the campfire-style, guitar-only duet with his girlfriend, Miranda Lambert.

— Nick Cristiano, Philadelphia Inquirer

‘Speak Low’

Boz Scaggs (Decca)

Grade: B

Boz Scaggs has a long r sum . First known as a guitarist in the Steve Miller Band, he’s been a star in his own right since his album “Silk Degrees” became a smash in 1976. He’s done pop, blues and soul. He’s even run a San Francisco club called Slim’s. “In Speak Low,” he’s back to jazz standards, creating a handsome coda to his 2003 CD “But Beautiful.” Scaggs is hardly the first rocker to graduate to standards. And he’d be the first to admit he isn’t a pure jazz singer. But his efforts still rank as one of the better ones among his pop-star peers.

Joining with pianist and arranger Gil Goldstein, Scaggs sticks to the melodies of tunes such as “Skylark” and seems unwilling to riff off them. There’s a spareness and honesty to his renditions. He gets folksy. There’s an echo of Willie Nelson on “Save Your Love For Me.” Mostly his voice works on simple and elegant arrangements of such tunes as “Dindi” and “I’ll Remember April.” It’s just Scaggs and a piano on the beginning of a slowed-down “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me,” and that proves just fine, especially when the band joins in, with vibraphonist Mike Mainieri doing some fine comping.

— Karl Stark, Philadelphia Inquirer

‘Drift’

Ken Block (Rock Ridge)

Grade: B

There’s a distinctive ease to Ken Block’s singing on this solo album that recalls the glory days of his regular band, Sister Hazel.

Compared with Sister Hazel’s work, “Drift” unfolds at a mellower unhurried pace. The opening “Blue to a Blind Man” is one of several songs nudged along gently by acoustic guitar.

The lilting “I Don’t Mind,” with its strummed acoustic guitars, sounds almost like a country song. There’s an even earthier style to “So Far,” with its high harmonies and breezy tempo.

“Better This Way,” a song about acceptance, builds from a quiet foundation of guitars and congas into a big, poppy chorus. “I love you so,” Block sings, “but I know it’s better this way.”

There are glints of rock, such as the Steve Miller-esque “It’s Alright” and “33,059 Days,” a song about missing someone.

Such straight-forward themes dovetail nicely with the uncluttered arrangements to make “Drift” a simple pleasure.

— Jim Abbott, Orlando Sentinel

‘WE ARE BEAUTIFUL, WE ARE DOOMED’

Los Campesinos! (Arts & Crafts)

Grade: B

The fatalistic nature of the titles and lyrics on “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed” is such a stark contrast to the buoyant sound of Los Campesinos! that listeners might wonder what’s going on in the heads of the members of the seven-person Welsh band.

Fortunately, a DVD included in a special edition of “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed” reveals that the group is still just a bunch of silly, wry rock ’n’ rollers — the same folks who put out the irreverent EP “Sticking Fingers Into Sockets” and full-length “Hold on Now, Youngster” in the past year or so.

Foreboding and even gruesome lyrics on songs such as “Miserabilia,” “You’ll Need Those Fingers for Crossing” and “Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown 1” are apparently just a healthy venting experience for lead singer Gareth (who, along with all of his bandmates, uses the last name “Campesinos!”) and his spirited group as he mourns a busted-up relationship. Example: On “It’s Never That Easy Though, Is It? (Song for the Other Kurt),” Gareth sings, “As if I walked into the room to see my ex-girlfriend/Who, by the way, I’m still in love with/Sucking the face of some pretty boy/With my favorite band’s most popular song in the background/Is it wrong that I can’t decide which bothers me most?”

Yeah, they’re still having fun.

— Chuck Campbell, Knoxville News-Sentinel

SSLqA Different Me’

Keyshia Cole (Geffen)

Grade: C+

Keyshia Cole is 27 years old, a grizzled vet by modern R&B standards, and yet she’s just now discovering her “sexier side,” a part of her personality she politely asks to introduce on the intro track that begins her third album.

A real diva, of course, doesn’t need permission, which is one reason Cole has yet to join the hallowed ranks of Beyonc , Christina and all of the other singers who have outgrown the need for last names. Still, Cole gets points for agreeability, something “A Different Me” has in spades.

Although the disc also has its share of filler, gems like “Please Don’t Stop,” a mix of future-sexy funk and “Pleasure Principle”-era Janet Jackson, suggest that Cole could establish herself as something more than an above-average genre singer.

She also deserves credit for “Oh-Oh Yeah-Yea” and “Playa Cardz Right,” tunes on which she inspires pro-monogamy raps from Nas and 2Pac, respectively. (Granted, Pac died when Cole was 15, so it’s doubtful he had the singer in mind when he recorded his verse.) On “This Is Us,” Cole scrubs off the nightclub makeup from the previous track, the ladies’ anthem “Thought You Should Know,” and sings her man a sweet, unadorned love song. The acoustic guitar and Wilson Phillips-like chorus again underscore the idea that Cole, while a gifted performer and songwriter, is more reliable craftswoman than superstar force of nature.

— Kenneth Partridge, Hartford Courant

‘Our Bright Future’

Tracy Chapman

(Elektra)

Grade: A

Tracy Chapman fits the mainstream without belonging to it, her music always plush and accessible even as it stands apart in its own small folk pop niche. Gently crafted tunes that are equal parts willowy contour and carefully thoughtful remain a signature for the 44-year-old graduate of Danbury’s Wooster School on her eighth album, “Our Bright Future,” a gathering of supple reveries that never lose their cool.

Her placid voice is both tool and impediment, its mild quiver building comforting character alongside the light piano flow of “Sing for You,” while its gentleness keeps her from digging too deep into the troubled undercurrents of obsession within “Thinking of You.” Her songs are lush and pretty, nearly hypnotic as the sweetness of her singing trickles across the organ-laced shimmer of “Something To See.” Her sound is much the same whether the theme is hopeful or despondent, and she’s even-keeled to the point of making a clinical case for love and togetherness on “A Theory.” Despite that narrow sonic palette, her ideals inhabit them with a dreamer’s breadth, a broad spectrum where faith and apprehension blossom together in delicate fashion.

— Thomas Kintner, Hartford Courant