Moody music is where it’s at

Born in the 60’s

Kid Loco

The title refers both to Kid Loco and to 10 of the 11 songs that he has selected for hip-hop reimagining. (The gospel blues “When the Train Comes Along” was born a lot earlier.) Of the six known best to deep divers, Sonny Boy Williamson II’s “Help Me” and the Stooges’ “Little Doll” undergo the biggest facelifts. Of the five that the Kid’s generational cohorts can sing in their sleep, the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones” sounds the most like new music. The Turtles’ “Happy Together” is too cute by half, but the misheard lyrics of “My Girl” (“I got amounts of May”) and the misremembered lyrics of “Suspicious Minds” (too many to quote) will, as they used to say in the ’60s, create a disturbance in your mind.

Life Between Islands— Soundsystem Culture: Black Musical Expression in the UK 1973-2006

Various artists

The key term in this compilation’s title is soundsystem, shorthand for the Jamaican DJ culture that spawned ska, reggae, lovers rock, dub, dubstep, breakbeat, jungle, and drums-and-bass, forms of “black musical expression” characterized by throbbing bass and catch-you-off-guard syncopation. Representative tracks from each genre appear chronologically shuffled because stylistic evolution isn’t the point. None tick every box, but Harmony Black’s “Don’t Let It Go to Your Head” tries. Highlight: Asher Senator’s rhythmically clattery “One Bible,” which exhorts anyone within earshot to read the Scriptures daily.

Brightside

Lumineers

“Reprise,” this album’s final song, exemplifies the kind of moody, glossily produced, lo-fi folk-pop currently in vogue among programmers of opening-credits music for the average suspense-drama miniseries. It also represents an appropriate conclusion for a record that begins chipper and darkens slowly over the course of the 30 minutes it takes to play out. The reason for this trajectory just might have something to do with Wesley Schulz’s and Jeremiah Fraites’ having reached the ages (39 and 36) at which anniversaries of one’s birth become mixed blessings, hence a song called “Birthday” whose peppy musical gift wrap conceals references to screams that get ignored and a house that burns to the ground.

Psalms

Nathan Salsburg

This 38-minute act of musical devotion contains one venerable Jewish air (“Eili, Eili”), one Medieval poem set to music (an English translation of Judah Halevi’s “O You Who Sleep”), and “fragments” of nine psalms sung in Hebrew. Inspired in part by Jonathan Harkham and David Asher Brook’s Darkcho, Salsburg takes that album’s “mystical Hasidic music” as a starting point and modernizes it ever so slightly, taking special care to preserve the delicacy and beauty. Accompanists include Brook, Joan Shelley, Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy), and Spencer Tweedy. Leonard Cohen, who could’ve come up with the melody for “Psalm 42,” would’ve loved it.

Encore

For the last 40 years of his life, Burke Shelley, the leader, main songwriter, and only permanent member of the Welsh hard-rock band Budgie, was a Christian, having converted after coming across a second-hand King James Bible and reading it through. By that time, Budgie as a recording act had pretty much run its course, releasing only one studio album after 1982. But both that record (You’re All Living in Cuckooland, 2006) and its immediate predecessor, Deliver Us From Evil, evinced a worldview rooted in Shelley’s faith, about which he remained vocal until his death in January at 71.

Because Budgie antedated most of the groups whose sounds it could be said to resemble, it’s more accurate to say that Shelley and his frequently shifting birds of a feather influenced them than the other way around. But, for reference’s sake, here’s a roll call: Grand Funk Railroad, AC/DC, Rush, Motörhead, Blue Öyster Cult, and Foreigner. For better or for worse, we will not hear their like again. —A.O.