The New Pornographers, "Together" (Matador)
It must be fun to attend a recording session with The New Pornographers. Chances are you'll be tossed an instrument and have the time of your life.
A.C. Newman's eight-piece outfit (with eight others helping here) is a pop orchestra without the pretension, and "Together" finds them at their peak. The melding of Newman's voice with Neko Case and Kathryn Calder is endlessly inventive, weaving in and out of the nervous-sounding rhythm that is the band's calling card. The first four songs are what the Electric Light Orchestra meant to achieve but never quite did.
Pretty good considering it's next to impossible to figure what they're talking about lyrically. We're still looking for the translation for: "Silhouette tell me a tall tale, go, shout it out. Silhouette shout from the top. Sweet talk, sweet talk."
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The New Pornographers will perform at the Rialto Theatre on July 21 with The Dodos and singer-songwriter Imaad Wasif.
Court Yard Hounds, "Court Yard Hounds" (Columbia)
This Dixie Chicks hiatus side project - sans Chicks singer Natalie Maines and fronted by sisters Emily Robison and Martie Maguire - has people talking. The Chicks haven't released anything in exactly four years, and in the time since the excellent "Taking the Long Way," Robison endured a divorce from country singer Charlie Robison and took to songwriting.
Her plan to sell the songs to other artists was thwarted by her sister Maguire, who demanded that she sing the songs - and the Court Yard Hounds were born. This debut record shows potential for the Hounds, who have plenty of experience writing and singing together.
The record is soaked in pop-rooted folk, best seen in the Jakob Dylan duet "See You in the Spring," an emotive track that gives Robison room to show off her plain, if studied, vocals. "Skyline" is a meditatively sweet folk-pop song. And the banjo-guided "It Didn't Make a Sound" is a good-times jam with FM potential.
Josh Ritter, "So Runs the World Away" (Pytheas)
Josh Ritter is one of the most compelling songwriters creating music today. But was there any way Ritter could have properly followed up the genius of 2007's "The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter?"
The short answer is no. "Historical Conquests" is one of those career-defining records that penetrates the mainstream with artful melodies, honest sentiment and winking lyrics. And so we've been looking forward to "So Runs the World Away," which is a fine, though not great, Ritter record.
Ritter has said these songs are "more detailed and feel as if they were painted in oil on large canvasses." And while the charmingly dark "Rattling Locks" is smartly mysterious and the chiming "Change of Time" is affably diggable, the record isn't as grabbing as "Historical Conquests." He set an impossibly high standard for himself. That said, "Another New World" is a more solid song, as seen via the craft of songwriting, than most other tracks that have been released in 2010.
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