Record reviews

April 24, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Record reviews

ROBBIE ROBERTSON

Album: “How to Become Clairvoyant”

Grade: C

Robbie Robertson is a great songwriter — or at least he was, back in the late-’60s heyday of the Band. He plays a heck of a lead guitar, too.

Plus, he knows lots of cool people, including Clairvoyant guests Steve Winwood, Trent Reznor, Robert Randolph, Tom Morello and Eric Clapton, the last of whom co-wrote three songs on this, Robertson’s first album since his highly forgettable 1998 effort “Contact From the Underworld of Redboy.” What Robertson isn’t, however, is a good singer. That wasn’t a problem in a Band that had Levon Helm, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko in it. But it is a problem on the well-made but uninvolving “HTBC,” in which the 67-year-old Canadian talk-sings without distinction as he looks back wistfully on the likes of “When the Night Was Young” and “The Right Mistake,” agreeably mild exercises that never take hold.

—Dan DeLuca

NEW YORK DOLLS

Album: “Dancing Backward in High Heels”

Grade: B

This marks the third studio album by the New York Dolls since their 2004 re-formation, but only their fifth overall. Thus, their career’s second half is now officially more productive than their 1971-1976 run as hugely influential, street-savvy Gotham glam-rockers and de facto proto-punk icons. The quick take? Front man David Johansen and co-songwriting guitarist/ vocalist Sylvain Sylvain — the only remaining (or living) original members — have backed off the classic Dolls guitar-driven raunch of yore; instead, they’ve creatively embraced their ’60s pop/girl-group inclinations. (After irreplaceable lead guitarist Johnny Thunders’ death, 20 years ago Saturday, any later NYD would lack their signature sting anyway.) “End of the Summer” even hits a breezy reggae groove, punctuated perfectly by Sylvain’s cooing “sh-bop” vocals while Johansen gives closing, deep-voiced evidence of his superior song-stylist skills.

Ever the opinionated New Yorker, Johansen pokes memorably at Big Apple gentrification by outsiders on “I’m So Fabulous.” And there are notable Philadelphia nods. Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles’ 1962 debut single, “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman,” gets a great run-through. And after rhyming “Pablo Casals” with “New York Dolls” on “Streetcake,” erudite musicologist Johansen quotes lines from the 1963 hit “South Street” by locals the Orlons. An impressive, legacy-expanding album.

—David R. Stampone

K.D. LANG AND THE SISS BOOM BANG

Album: “Sing it Loud”

Grade: B

Throughout the ’80s, Canadian singer/composer K.D. Lang crafted an aesthetic of boisterous camp and countrypolitan cool, artful but never artificial. Onto that melodic hum, Lang applied vibrato-laden, pitch-perfect vocals whose impressionistic lyrics gave her brand of luxurious C&W a distingue elegance. With the aptly-titled “Absolute Torch & Twang” (1989), Lang left country behind to focus on the torch side of things.

Until now.

With her first band and steady collaborators since the Reclines and Ben Mink, Lang maintains the deeply nuanced soigne vocal sensibility of her past while bringing a country-influenced ambience to everything she surveys. She brought the twang. Not tons of it, just enough to line “Sing it Loud’s” echoing open spaces with prickly sagebrush. From its melodic drift to the use of pedal steel and banjo, there’s a quiet ruckus going on throughout the proceedings. Her voices bellow and coo throughout the operatic “I Confess” and the blunt “Sugar Buzz.” There’s a live and immediate folksiness to “The Water’s Edge” that goes beyond Lang’s big vocals. She’s carrying her torch on stuff such as “Sorrow Nevermore,” but there’s still a lightness to Lang that hasn’t been heard since the ’80s. Yee-hah — kind of.

—A.D. Amorosi

TUNE-YARDS

Album: “wh o k i l l”

Grade: B

Merrill Garbus doesn’t want to make things easy, starting with the typographic quirks of the name of her project, tUnE-yArDs. She recorded her first album, 2008’s Bird-Brain, at home on a digital voice recorder, using found sounds and field recordings to scuff up her percussion, ukulele, and startlingly dynamic voice. The new “w h o k i l l” is a studio recording, and Garbus is joined by bassist Nate Brenner. It expands her sound without diminishing her eccentricities.

The foregrounding of beats — often a pounded snare drum — roots Garbus’ songs in hip-hop and bhangra, and “Gangsta” sounds a bit like M.I.A. But tUnE-yArDs tunes twist and turn, with splatters of guitar and bleats of horns, and Garbus’ voice leaps and gallops through singsong melodies, so “w h o k i l l” is deliciously difficult to pin down. Fans of Dirty Projectors, Bjork (at her most experimental), and Yoko Ono take note: Here’s a new avant-pop contender.

—Steve Klinge

TRACY NELSON

Album: “Victim of the Blues”

Grade: B

Tracy Nelson’s 1964 debut was titled “Deep Are the Roots,” and the singer who once led Mother Earth has been plumbing those roots ever since, excelling at both country and blues.

Nelson comes by the title of her new album honestly. The tapes for it were one of the few things saved when her Tennessee farmhouse burned down. What they reveal is that she still possesses magnificent skills as an interpreter: With her distinctive touch of vibrato, she combines roof-raising power with deep-soul expressiveness, putting her own stamp on this vintage material.

She romps through Jimmy Reed’s “Shoot My Baby” (with Marcia Ball) and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Howlin’ for My Baby” (with Angela Strehli). She slows it down for a pungent acoustic take on the Ma Rainey title track, indulges in some gospel- flavored sermonizing with Joe Tex’s “The Love You Save [May Be Your Own],” and concludes with a soaring, bring-down-the-house rendition of Irma Thomas’ “Without Love [There Is Nothing]” that puts a fitting exclamation point on this tour de force.

—Nick Cristiano