New and noteworthy

Like Unto Lambs

Luxury

If it’s hard to believe that 30 years have passed since this on-again, off-again band made its Tooth & Nail debut, it’s even harder to believe that it may be peaking now, with three of its members having become Orthodox priests. More of the opener’s psychedelically furry energy would be nice, but the melancholy mellow cuts power down with purpose, especially “One of Those Things/The Temple,” a song that puts crucial questions to the trans movement.

Inner Adult

Terre Roche

With the death of Maggie in 2017, a Roches reunion became officially impossible, so news of this album by the sister whose voice made “West Virginia” and Robert Fripp’s “Mary” into minor classics was welcome indeed. And her voice is still up to the task, giving shape and life to quizzical lyrics that seem as determined by the first exact rhyme to pop into her head as by anything else. “Can We Keep ’Em Dad?,” about adopting strays, has “classic Roches” paw-printed all over it. As for the words that she didn’t write (“A New Serenity Prayer”), those come from the LGBT-friendly Jesuit priest James Martin. Surprisingly (and refreshingly), they’re everyone friendly.

Clancy

Twenty One Pilots

The best parts of this final installment of the Pilots’ Trench saga can be enjoyed whether you’re familiar with or care about its convoluted, dystopian plot or not. “Next Semester” infuses its energetic electronics with midsong tempo shifts and good ol’-fashioned “ooh-oohs” that connect it to healthy pop traditions antedating the duo’s nerd-pop synthetics. “Vignette” has some soul (although “zombies of which I’ve become” is unnecessarily ungrammatical), “Lavish” an eerie charm that heightens its satirical lyrics. “Navigating” could make the Pet Shop Boys jealous. Not a triumph exactly, but better than skeptics would expect.

Santa Cruz

Pedro the Lion

If you care as much about David Bazan, his fraught Pentecostal upbringing, and his loss of faith as Bazan himself does, you’ll find his latest Pedro the Lion recording (Bazan on synth and drums, Erik Walters on guitar) as fascinating, challenging, and troubling as anything else in his oeuvre and maybe more so. Lest anyone conclude from the prayerful opening track that he’s considering reentering the fold, he clearly articulates an F-word in “Teacher’s Pet.” And lest anyone think that he’s happy about his place on the faith-doubt continuum, there’s an almost all-pervasive sense of gloom. In other words, most of the melodies could be catchier and most of the beats livelier. The same could be said of Pet Sounds.

Encore

For whatever reason (the recent fourth anniversary of his death?), the vault scourers at Omnivore Records and the digital curators at UMG have simultaneously decided to re-present more obscure music from the Little Richard discography. Neither effort will likely find itself up for a Best Historical Album Grammy, but both shed light on what the whooping piano pounder (aka the Architect of Rock and Roll) could do when he wasn’t simply whooping or pounding pianos.

UMG’s streaming-only The Soul of Little Richard compiles a dozen deep cuts from his first three albums (1956–58) and two singles plus three more deep cuts from the mid-’60s (by which time Richard had been British Invasioned out to pasture).

Omnivore’s multiformat Right Now! restores to circulation a spirited 50-year-old quickie for which its star received a tour-fronting $10,000 advance ($67,000 in 2024). The latter contains some piano pounding and whooping. Both albums prove that the man could really sing. —A.O.