Archive for the What We’re Into – Recent Interest Category

Tragic love, drug abuse, science fiction, and Americana: Blitzen Trapper managed to squeeze all that, and more, into their rock opera, Wild and Reckless, which was produced for the stage in their hometown of Portland, Ore., earlier this year. But that wasn’t enough for frontman Eric Earley and crew. Taking seven of the songs from the play and fleshing them out with five new numbers, they assembled an album of the same name.

The 22-year-old songwriter Julien Baker sees this not so much as an impossibility as a challenge to reconcile, daring her to make music in which she turns herself inside out. Her songs are sparse, internally focused, and radically intimate. “I know that you don’t understand, ’cause you don’t believe what you don’t see,” she sings on “Shadowboxing,” a particularly arresting song off her new album, Turn Out the Lights. Baker’s songs are relentlessly sad but bleakly hopeful, if only for the reason that, if we are listening to them,

For starters, the entire set comprises originals. And there are no guest musicians — only two banjos, Washburn’s voice, and percussion sounds (feet tapping in the floor or a board). Everything that made the record had to be able to be reproduced in a live setting. It features the pair performing on seven different banjos, ranging from a ukulele banjo to an upright bass banjo, with an emphasis on three-finger and clawhammer styles. The few adaptations of traditional tunes include a stunning version of Clarence Ashley’s “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains,” alchemically transformed

On his new album, “Colors,” Beck delivers a perfect pop statement. This is by far his most conventionally mainstream album to date, working with the modern-pop template and elevating it in the process. Singles “Dreams,” ”Wow” and “Up All Night” have all been floating around a while now, so this shift should not come as a surprise. The record had been on the shelf for quite some time. Beck initially wanted to release this closer to his triumphant 2014 album “Morning Phase,” which got a lot of attention at the Grammys when it won album of the year.

M.C. Taylor has always been a songwriter unafraid to mark the starkest contrasts of human emotion. In an interview with The Washington Post last November, Taylor described his last record Heart Like a Levee as a “reflecting pool” for people to view their own emotions in his words and music. This symbolic depiction of audience participation provides a deeper understanding of Taylor’s process and his grasp on his craft.

On “Concrete and Gold” Foo Fighters reflect the entire timeline of the classic-rock format; there are clear homages to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, glam, thrash and grunge. But the band has a new producer, Greg Kurstin, who has collaborated with Adele, Pink and Beck. And with him, Foo Fighters now shuffle genres, even within songs, more suddenly and whimsically — more digitally — than ever. Previous albums have presented studio-enhanced versions of the band onstage, while on “Concrete and Gold,” Foo Fighters can switch configurations

As rock superstars fade from the glare of fame into the shrouds of nostalgia, a few find ways to keep connecting. It’s not easy: Talent is critical but more important is honesty. This is especially true when the end of one’s path comes into view, when that road no longer stretches past the horizon but stops somewhere short of there. When Gregg Allman recorded Southern Blood, he could see what lay ahead. Knowing that this was his farewell statement, he crafted it meticulously all the way up to the end of his journey,

“Queens of the Stone Age” always sounded like the best glam-band name ever, and while Josh Homme’s free-ranging heavy rock hypnotists were never quite that, they come as close as ever on Villains. “I was born in the desert May 17, in ’73” Homme declares on the opener, “Feet Don’t Fail Me” – which is true, in fact. It also happens to be a date near glam’s peak, and the echo of Rick Derringer’s spangled ’73 top-40 anthem “Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo” is probably no accident, either.

Ray Wylie Hubbard is an iconoclast of the highest order. Early on, Jerry Jeff Walker recorded his song “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother”, which was enough to give him lifetime membership in the outlaw country club. Not much later, he was associated with “progressive country”, particularly for his early years with his band the Cowboy Twinkies, who were mixing hard rock and outlaw country elements long before anyone had even thought of mentioning those two