RECORD REVIEWS

Rodney Crowell

Album: “Close Ties”

Grade: A

Rodney Crowell was headlining a music festival recently, speaking from the stage to a large, admiring audience, when he confessed with a chuckle that songwriter’s block sometimes lasts a decade or more.

At 66, Crowell knows music can be a humbling business, but he has plenty to brag about with “Close Ties.”

It’s his first album in more than three years, which might seem like a decade to Crowell, but the set ranks among his best. His character studies are so sharply drawn they fit comfortably next to autobiographical material such as the closing “Nashville 1972,” an amusing reminiscence of his early career.

The centerpiece is “It Ain’t Over Yet,” a requiem for Crowell’s close friend, the late songwriter Guy Clark. It’s like sharing family secrets, a

nd to underscore the point Crowell recruits for singing assistance Rosanne Cash, who appears on an album with her ex-husband for the first time in more than 20 years. John Paul White serves as a third lead vocalist, and Mickey Raphael’s harp provides a fitting epitaph.

Elsewhere the arrangements also match the creativity of the lyrics. “East Houston Blues” is the raw Texas kind. “Storm Warning” rocks thanks to a swirl of strings and Steuart Smith’s guitar.

“I Don’t Care Anymore” has Crowell convincingly doing Texas rap on the last verse.

From start to finish, there’s no sign of songwriter’s block.

—Steven Wine, Associated Press

Aimee Mann

Album: “Mental Illness”

Grade: B

Aimee Mann plays to an illusory type on “Mental Illness,” a serene album of delicate, mournful songs with characters walking off cliffs, stuck in holes and escaping to amusement parks.

Aiming to write the “saddest, slowest, most acoustic” songs as tongue-in-cheek confirmation of her image as a peddler of gloominess, Mann succeeds — maybe too well.

Pulling the plug on the electric charge of her recent projects, Mann’s classy melodies soothe the heavy emotional themes but, as in a Philip Marlowe film or novel, the darkness rarely dissipates.

The consistency in her depiction of frustrating or failed relationships may well be a plus but, if you happen to be slightly off-center yourself, it could tip you over.

Mercifully, the songs feature mostly acoustic guitar and piano — as well as some billowing string arrangements — but few of the instrumental ornaments which characterized her early solo albums with Jon Brion.

Here they would have only amplified the psychosis and neurosis.

On “Rollercoasters,” such rides and Ferris wheels are tools of escapism, while “Patient Zero” quickly knocks down any illusions of fitting in and succeeding in a new environment.

Mann dresses up “Philly Sinks” in a McCartneyesque tune that tugs you under as “animatronic bloodhounds bark/the wind-up mockingbirds sing” and before you can help it, you’re joined at the hip with tragedy.

And so it goes. You may feel compelled to abandon all hope in the “Mental Illness” inferno. But, oh, those melodies are heavenly.

—Pablo Gorondi, Associated Press