record reviews

August 12, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS

Album: “Cut the World” (Secretly Canadian)

Grade: A

If Antony Hegarty had a dime for every goose bump he’s raised with his emotive voice, he could pay off the national debt. His haunting, expressive cry gets the backing of the Danish National Chamber Orchestra on his new album “Cut the World,” which was recorded live in Copenhagen, Denmark. On it, songs from Antony & the Johnsons’ four previous albums are gloriously worked over to spine-tingling effect. “You Are My Sister,” “I Fell in Love With a Dead Boy” and “Kiss My Name” all shimmer magnificently in the orchestral light. “Another World” — Hegarty’s conservationist plea to save the planet while we still can — is so profound here, listeners may actually take up its cause. Antony’s voice has always had the power to move mountains. On “Cut,” it moves something altogether more impressive: people.

— Brian McManus, Philadephia Inquirer

JANKA NABAY AND THE BUBU GANG

Album: “En Yay Sah” (Luaka Bop)

Grade: A-

Bubu originated in Sierra Leone as a communal music, built on percussion and bamboo flutes, to accompany processions during Ramadan. In the ’90’s, Ahmed Janka Nabay revived bubu as a popular, political and cultural force. After emigrating, Nabay spent a few recent years in Philadelphia; he’s now based in Washington, D.C., although on “En Yay Sah,” he is accompanied by members of mostly Brooklyn-based indie bands.

This is hyperkinetic, propulsive music, with Nabay’s gruff voice intertwined with serpentine guitar lines and Boshra Al-Saadi’s sweet-voiced responses, and with electric percussion and keyboards that often scan as modern rather than traditional. At times, it sounds a bit like Konono No. 1’s “Congotronics”; at other times, one hears traces of Jamaican dub or Fela’s Afrobeat. Nabay sings mostly in Krio or Temne; the lyrics often address the troubles in Sierra Leone, but the music is built for dance parties and celebrations.

— Steve Klinge, Philadephia Inquirer

THE GASLIGHT ANTHEM

Album: “Handwritten” (Mercury)

Grade: B

The openers on the Gaslight Anthem’s major-label debut are a starter kit in both loving and hating the earnest Jersey rockers. “45” finally makes room for the careening riffage that Brian Fallon’s songwriting always lacked, and climaxes with his best singing ever. But “Handwritten” flaunts the uneasy rhyme of “forgiven” and “handwritten” pronounced with the portentous syntax of the Verve Pipe. Fallon’s blocky tunes used to tend toward the latter, mistaking E Street lore for a daytime soap. Luckily, his best album is more in line with “45”—now he worries about putting “too much blood on the page” — and after some early “sha-la-la” losers comes the dynamite: “Keepsake,” “Biloxi Parish,” the wonderful “Desire.” The deluxe edition adds “Blue Dahlia” and a fine Nirvana cover. There’s even a tasteful ballad closer.

— Dan Weiss, Philadephia Inquirer

HANK WILLIAMS JR.

Album: “Old School, New Rules” (Bocephus)

Grade: C

Last year, if you’ll recall, Hank Williams Jr. lost his longtime gig on ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” after making an analogy involving Hitler and President Obama. Bocephus doesn’t go quite that far here, but he still fills “Old School, New Rules” with noxiously reactionary and dim-witted rantings.

“Hey, Barack, pack your bags,” Williams sings on “Takin’ Back the Country,” which includes the refrain “Don’t tread on me.” He complains about “the United Socialist States of America” in “Keep the Change” and warns that “We Don’t Apologize for America.” (It’s sad to hear Merle Haggard join in on the latter, even if it does include a bit of his old hit “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” In his twilight years, the country immortal has taken on more thoughtful and less belligerent views in matters like these.)

It’s a shame Williams lets his worst traits run free here because he really is a talented musician who has done a lot of fine work, and the music here smokes the pants off most commercial country. His pungently bluesy take on his father’s “You Win Again” is an inspired reworking, and “I’m Gonna Get Drunk and Play Hank Williams” (with Brad Paisley) is an irresistible honky-tonker. Of his originals, though, best of all is “That Ain’t Good,” a scorching country-rocker and workingman’s lament that skirts partisanship — and is all the more powerful for it.

— Nick Cristiano, Philadephia Inquirer

SHOSTAKOVICH

Album: “Symphony No. 4 and Orango” Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting (Deutsche Grammophon, two discs)

Grade: A

Once thought to be an unruly anomaly in Shostakovich’s output, the “Symphony No. 4” emerges more and more as the summation of an era, one that also includes his increasingly performed early opera The Nose, as well as recently discovered unfinished works, such as “Orango,” a satire about a mythical half-ape, half-human being displayed in Moscow early in the Stalin era. The symphony and the “Orango” prologue (the only part that’s finished) make a revealing pair in conjunction with deeply insightful notes from director Peter Sellars (who staged “Orango” in its LA premiere) that explicate the symphony’s many quotations of previous works. He calls the symphony a graveyard for music that might never be heard again.

The symphony is given a beautifully paced performance that achieves, more than most, a strong sense of through line despite a deeply fractured musical narrative. Though many passages that earned the symphony its reputation for raucousness are downplayed to serve the long-term trajectory, every episode fully makes its points in this performance. As for “Orango,” Shostakovich wrote some pretty crazy satirical works, but none that spiral so far over the top as this. Imagine Offenbach on crack — and then some. Esa-Pekka Salonen and his Los Angeles cast perform the piece with a confidence that suggests they could have written it.

— David Patrick Stearns, Philadephia Inquirer

REDD KROSS

Album: “Researching the Blues” (Merge)

Grade: B

It’s odd to think of Los Angeles punk band Redd Kross as a legacy act, considering its bassist Steven McDonald learned his instrument at age 11, shortly before he and older brother Jeff, 15, opened for Black Flag in the early ’80s. But over three decades later, here they are, delivering the kind of fuzzed-out melodies and explosive girl-group harmonies that at their 1980s prime propelled them to near-stardom.

Had the brothers not made the crucial, and, in hindsight, career-destroying decision to commit to Atlantic Records in the post-Nirvana signing frenzy, Redd Kross might have been huge. Their new album, “Researching the Blues,” offers ample evidence that it’s not too late. The record features 10 urgent, insistent rock ’n’ roll gems, and only occasionall reveals any hint of the musical crow’s-feet or outdated outfits of rock ’n’ roll elder statesmen.

As on their classic work, “Researching the Blues” focuses on melodies and harmonies. The infectious hand-clap-and-maraca driven “One of the Good Ones” features a primal Bo Diddley rhythm that makes it feel eternal. And “Stay Away From Downtown” is as furious a rock song as anything coming out of the fledgling hard-core punk revival — and might prompt those Angelenos headed east on Sunset toward Chinatown to think twice.

— Randall Roberts, McClatchy Newspapers

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Album: “122 BPM: The Birth of House Music” (Still Records)

Grade: B

This compilation and album-length mixtape from Still Music’s Jerome Derradji tells of the invention of a new dance music template — one forged in the Chicago black middle class by kids influenced by the ’80s New Wave movement. “122 BPM: The Birth of House Music” is compiled from the vaults of Mitchbal and Chicago Connection records (a father-and-son label combo at the center of the genre’s birth and inspired by Berry Gordy), a three-CD set that is both an expertly curated historical document and a total party record.

Derradji’s well-paced album mix best approximates the feel of the era’s house clubs, but the individual tracks show the seeds of a sound to come. The sweet pianos and soul vocals of Mitchbal & the Housemaster’s “When I Hear the Music”; the lascivious city-noir of Z Factor’s “[I Like to Do It in] Fast Cars”—all these things are in the DNA of nearly every track on top-40 and dance festivals around the world. It proves that house music is specific and nuanced, but also, that house music is everything today.

— August Brown, McClatchy Newspapers