New and noteworthy

Johnny Anxiety

Joachim Olsen

Stylistically, this album plays like 36 minutes of a free-form pop radio station (remember those?), replete with such formally incongruous elements as relentless hooks (the title cut), late-night experimentation (“Lost in the City”), and welcome blasts from the past (Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell”). Rendering them more or less congruous are Olsen’s nerdy, Auto-Tuned singing and an all-pervasive electronic timbre, characteristics often known for their capacity to annoy but that Olsen embraces as givens, sounding at his most exuberant like a less cerebral They Might Be Giants. He’s at his most exuberant a lot.

Wildernauts 

Peter Stampfel, Eli Smith, Walker Shepard

If you were wondering what Stampfel was going to do for an encore after his five-disc Peter Stampfel’s 20th Century in 100 Songs in 2021, your wait is over. Turns out it’s more of the same gleeful “freak folk” (a label of which he isn’t fond but that’s better than nothing) that he has been making for 61 years. Silly, untutored, and indifferent to social constructs such as genres, he’ll have you thinking that if he can make music, anyone can. As for the dysphonia documented by his 20th Century in 100 Songs’ home stretch, you’ll be glad to know that, thanks to creative therapy, his creaky 85-year-old pipes sound as exhilaratingly weird as ever.

The Illuminate EP

Joel Willoughby

What these five recently rediscovered and partially touched-up songs from the early 2000s illuminate is that Joel Willoughby arrived fully formed—as a singer (imagine Al Stewart without the accent), as a songwriter (prayers that sound like love songs and vice versa), and as someone who understands using the studio as an instrument. Can we finally start calling him “Canada’s best-kept secret” now that everyone knows who Bruce Cockburn is?

Before and After

Neil Young

The key to unlocking this seamlessly sequenced solo-acoustic journey through the obscurer regions of Young’s past is the first two lines of “Homefires”: “I’m not the same man I was awhile ago. / I’ve learned some new things. I hope that it shows.” Notice the “some”—Young isn’t promising revelations. He’s telegraphing the heightened significance that his lyrics take on when he pares his instrumentation down to an afterthought. You can practically hear him weighing his words’ merits as he sings.

Encore

The encyclopedic Discogs website calls Live Duets, the new Tom Jones compilation on the London Calling label, an “unofficial release.” But it’s for sale on Amazon (for around $20), so it’s not exactly a bootleg. What it is, exactly, is two CDs of Jones on his This Is Tom Jones variety show, impressively holding his own from 1969 to 1971 among many of the era’s biggest stars of pop, rock, and soul. Given his image as a Las Vegas Lothario, it’s easy to forget what a powerhouse singer he could be.

Medleys abound, giving short shrift to nuance. And, despite claims of “remastering,” the mono audio is no different than what you’ll hear when you locate the videos on YouTube. But because everyone’s having fun, everyone stays loose, with no one—not the Moody Blues; not Blood, Sweat & Tears; not the Rascals; not Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—seeming too cool for Jones’ school. Come the ’80s, the Art of Noise would rehabilitate Jones for the “in” crowd. Live Duets proves that he’d been there before. —A.O.