‘This Addiction’

‘This Addiction’

Alkaline Trio (Epitaph)

Grade: B

For an album that takes most of its imagery from foil-darkened heroin dens, Alkaline Trio’s “This Addiction” feels more like a sugar high than an opiate.

The goth-tinted punk band, credited for better or worse as one of emo’s progenitors, long paired sly, cartoonishly bleak lyrics with downright chipper melodies.

“Addiction” is its clearest distillation of that formula in years, and will remind a lot of prodigal fans about singer Matt Skiba’s songwriting strengths.

Alkaline Trio has never been as evil as they imagined, and their obsidian sheen has sometimes bogged down their tunes.

Not so here: “Dead on the Floor” imagines Buddy Holly’s sock-hop rock as a delicious romance-is-murder ballad, and “Eating Me Alive” drags up ’80s-era Cure synths that could run your mascara from 100 yards away.

“Dine, Dine My Darling” is a witty Misfits homage, appropriate for a band built on two-minute pop tunes about suicide and vampires.

The album is a pointedly minimal production, though — most tracks are simple guitar-bass-drum affairs with a few tasteful harmonies that put the surprisingly durable hooks up front.

Alkaline Trio may have a mouthful of purloined pills here, but Skiba’s tongue is perfectly in cheek on his band’s best album in years.

— August Brown, Los Angeles Times

‘Way Out Here’

Josh Thompson

(Columbia Nashville)

Grade: C

Newcomer Josh Thompson rides pounding arena beats and crunching electric guitars while boasting about his backcountry, blue-collar bona fides on his debut album, “Way Out Here.”

He stakes his ground on “Blame It on Waylon,” suggesting he learned his defiant attitude from the country music outlaws of the 1970s. Set to a slicked-up imitation of Waylon Jennings’ signature rhythm, the song finds Thompson boasting that he means every word he sings — while also saying he was born on a freight train.

Therein lays the problem: Thompson adopts a pose of the hard-partying back-country rebel on songs like “Beer On The Table,” “You Ain’t Seen Country Yet,” and “Always Been Me,” but it sounds like posturing rather than real life. Instead of finding his own point of view, he relies on the same pickup truck, dirt-road, fishing-hole cliches used by so many young country singers.

The Wisconsin native strives for a muscular-yet-polished sound similar to Jason Aldean, with whom he shares a producer, Michael Knox. He’s at his best when he relaxes and tells stories, as on the slyly humorous “Won’t Be Lonely Long,” which turns a breakup into a reason to hit the town, and the sensitive “Back Around,” about an evening when two teens become lovers.

— Michael McCall, Associated Press

‘Love & War’

Daniel Merriweather (J-Records)

Grade: B

Great artists often have a go-to-guy they use repeatedly when they need to show off. Martin Scorsese has Leonardo DiCaprio. Seth MacFarlane has himself. And producer Mark Ronson has Daniel Merriweather. The Australian vocalist with the soulful, airy pipes graced Ronson’s little-heard 2003 effort “Here Comes the Fuzz.” On the smashing “Version” (2007), where Ronson had inventive singers Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen by his side, Merriweather reigned with a coolly emotional “Stop Me” medley of the Smiths’ “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before” and the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”

Now, Ronson repays the favor by producing Merriweather’s debut and bringing “Version’s” band the Dap Kings to horn up the likes of the hypnotic Motown-ish “Impossible.”

Merriweather’s gusty winds are designed for R&B-flavored melodies like “Water and a Flame,” a duet with smoky diva Adele. His voice is huffy at every slow burn. But the nicest thing about this CD is how Merriweather proves he’s no one-trick pony. Sure, there’s plenty of acrobatic leaping about from the 27-year-old, but he pares down nicely on the folkie ballad “Red” and the singsongy “Change” for music tender and low-key.

— A.D. Amorosi, Philadelphia Inquirer

‘reform school girl’

Nick Curran and the Lowlifes

(Eclecto-Groove)

Grade: B

As a guitarist with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Nick Curran was one of several successors to the impeccable Jimmie Vaughan, who played on Curran’s national debut in 2003. Now, for his third album, the onetime apprentice to Ronnie Dawson gets the imprimatur of another great roots-rocker, Blasters singer Phil Alvin, who duets with Curran on their co-written “Flyin’ Blind” and who hails him in the liner notes as a “pedal to the floor American rock-and-roll musician, the kind that made you love rock music in the first place.”

Alvin’s got that right. Curran is an unabashed throwback who flirts with being excessively derivative, but he delivers everything with his own ripped-throat intensity and dirty-toned flair.

Save for one ballad, “Reform School Girl” hurtles along relentlessly, a glorious cacophony of guitars, horns, and piano, from the Little Richard-style wailing of “Tough Love” to the girl-group homage of the title song and the psychobilly of, well, “Psycho.” Curran’s only misstep is “Kill My Baby,” whose nasty sentiments seem out of place on an album that is one huge blast.

— Nick Cristiano, Philadelphia Inquirer

‘genuine negro jig’

Carolina Chocolate Drops

(Nonesuch)

Grade: B

Any band that shows up with banjo, fiddle and a jug is in danger of being categorized as just another bunch of revivalists.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops rise above easy classification on their second album, “Genuine Negro Jig,” however, using the blues as filtered through the unique Piedmont string band movement as a stepping stone to something more.

There are plenty of moments you might expect on the band’s Nonesuch debut. “Trouble in Your Mind” is a fiddle-burnin’ traditional lament and “Your Baby Ain’t Sweet Like Mine” bounces along on a beat provided by a ceramic jug, for instance.

Producer Joe Henry helps the North Carolina band rise above the roots its members — Rhiannon Giddens, Justin Robinson and Dom Flemons — have so carefully studied, though. The album achieves liftoff velocity with “Hit ’Em Up Style,” Giddens’ take on Blu Cantrell’s R&B hit of a few years back.

The song floats along on an energized fiddle line and Giddens’ voice is a revelation, both modern and timeless.

Robinson uses an autoharp on the original “Kissin’ and Cussin”’ to lend the song a haunted and hypnotic quality. It’s the tale of a rocky relationship and a nice counterpoint to Giddens’ condemnation of cheaters.

— Chris Talbott, Associated Press