SELENA GOMEZ

SELENA GOMEZ

Album: “Stars Dance” (Hollywood Records)

Grade: C+

Apparently, Selena Gomez wasn’t quite ready to leave the neon-splattered emotional hellscape of “Spring Breakers” just yet. The first sounds one hears on her sassy new album are an oxygen-sucking sub-bass, trap snares and a note to her fellow party nihilists that she only parties this hard on her birthday (and every day is her birthday). It’s almost as good as having shorts in every color.

“Stars Dance” is exactly the kind of album one makes in 2013 if you want to keep the pop sugar of the Disney ’tween cabal but mix in some broken glass and a club bathroom nosebleed. Its productions are rooted in today’s pop-EDM default mode, but as that stuff goes, “Slow Down” is pretty capable, and the bhangra- appropriating “Come & Get It” is guilelessly silly enough to work.

—August Brown, Los Angeles Times

GOGOL BORDELLO

Album: “Pura Vida Con-spiracy” (Casa Gogol/ATO)

Grade: D

Those devoted enough to buy the compact disc version of Gogol Bordello’s new album, “Pura Vida Conspiracy,” in order to parse singer Eugene Hutz’s lyrics will notice a typographical choice that captures the band’s essence. The lyrics to their dozen-song album are WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS.

It’s as if Hutz, the Ukrainian- born singer and bon vivant whose legendary vocal urgency has thrilled the festival circuit for nearly 15 years, wanted you to even more fully absorb the importance of the message.

Hutz is nothing if not a Type-A personality, one who barrels his way through “Pura Vida Conspiracy” with joyous abandon. This isn’t news: He and his traveling, multiethnic band of accordion, brass, guitar and percussion aces have long traded in musical exclamation points.

“Pure Vida,” though, overwhelms as often as it inspires. Like a boisterous, long-winded guest taking over a dinner party, the tone, righteous though it may be, suggests someone who needs to be pulled aside and asked to take it down a notch or five.

—Randall Roberts, Los Angeles Times

Guy Clark

Album: “My Favorite Picture of You” (Dualtone)

Grade: A

On the cover of the album “My Favorite Picture of You,” veteran singer-songwriter Guy Clark holds an old Polaroid snapshot of his wife, Susanna, who died in 2012.

The photo captures a fierce look on Susanna Clark’s face, her arms crossed. As the title song explains, she was upset and considering leaving because of her husband’s behavior. The song is a tribute, in Clark’s concisely poetic fashion, as he notes lovingly in his sweetly gruff voice that his wife was “a stand-up angel who won’t back down.”

That blunt autobiography, and the masculine sentimentality it contains, encapsulates Clark’s distinctive gifts. A legend among fans of acoustic music steeped in country, folk and blues, the 71-year-old Clark hasn’t been the most prolific recording artist over a nearly 40-year recording career. But he is among the most consistent, setting the bar for raw-boned, open-hearted, slow-rolling narratives.

Clark continues that streak on “My Favorite Picture of You.”

—Michael McCall, Associated Press