New and noteworthy

Broken Hearted Blue

Jenny Don’t & the Spurs

Jenny Don’t writes, emotes, and looks like a Grand Ole Opry hopeful. The Spurs play and look like rock ’n’ rollers who think they’re Opry hopefuls. Yet neither the ’70s-­redolent term “country rock” nor the ’80s-redolent term “cowpunk” is nuanced enough for what they do. You’d have to go all the way back to Link Wray and surf rock, for example, to identify the pedigree of the instrumental “Sidewinder.” The other nine songs have words, none more illustrative than those on which Don’t goes out: “I’ve got a fire that burns in me.”

Church

Cory Henry

Cory Henry released his first live gospel album, The Revival, when he was still a keyboardist in the jazz-funk collective Snarky Puppy. It was mostly a Hammond B3 organ affair. This time, he’s just one part of a tight, roof-shaking combo intent on recreating Henry’s experiences at his “family church,” Brooklyn’s Unity Temple Church of God in Christ. A Who’s Who of gospel and non-gospel singers and musicians star-stud the program, but it’s the combo that brings the energy and Henry who’s stoking the engine.

Live at Orangefield: Be Just and Fear Not

Van Morrison

This 79-minute document conflates three shows that Morrison performed a decade ago at the school he attended as a teen. And, simply put, it’s the most rewarding of his post–It’s Too Late To Stop Now live discs, democratically offering up highlights from practically every phase of his musical and philosophical-religious journeys up to that point. He and the sometimes-foregrounded background singers are in strong voice, the band goes with the various flows, and all three Persons of the Trinity get named in “In the Garden” before Morrison substitutes “Holy guardian angel” for “Holy Ghost.” Too bad that song has to fade out to fit on a CD. The ­limitations of technology strike again.

Here in the Pitch

Jessica Pratt

Album four marks a shift for Jessica Pratt, who heretofore made music that in its instrumentation (acoustic guitar only) and melodies (and the way that Pratt sang them) hearkened back to halcyon coffeehouse days. Her decision now to use percussion (on seven songs); Mellotrons (on five); and a keyboard, a bossa nova rhythm, or a Bacharach chord change here or there doesn’t make her sound like a sellout. Rather, it makes her sound as if she’s hearkening back to ’60s girl-pop with an ear toward doing it better than anyone thought possible at the time.

Johnny Cash Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Encore

In 1993, at one of his lowest professional ebbs, Johnny Cash recorded demos of songs that he’d written over the years, hoping that they’d lead to a career-resuscitating album. Instead, the producer Rick Rubin came along and helped Cash make the altogether different career-resuscitating American Recordings. Now, John Carter Cash (Johnny’s son) and the engineer David Ferguson have added fresh instrumentation to those 1993 demos and released them under the title Songwriter (Mercury Nashville/UMe).

The results hold up. The lyrics, which in three songs explore literal or metaphorical soldiers and otherwise run the gamut from the Second Coming of Christ to laundromat double entendres, have a relaxed spontaneity in keeping with their nimble melodies (including the one that Cash borrowed from Joe South). And the new overdubs mesh. But, as with all things Man in Black, it’s the voice that does the making or breaking. And in 1993, Cash still sang and sounded like a tree with very deep roots. —A.O.