New and noteworthy

Synthetic: A Synth Odyssey; Season 3

Rich Aucoin

Rich Aucoin dedicates the penultimate installment of his four-part journey through synthesizer history to the instrument’s role in dance-club culture. So he doles more repetition and beats than he did on A Synth Odyssey: Season 1 or 2 and, with the exception of the catchy “Optigan,” scrimps on melody. What survives is the analogue textures that only the old-school keyboards to which Calgary’s National Music Centre and LA’s Vintage Synthesizer Museum have granted Aucoin access can deliver.

Beethoven Blues: Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 1 

Jon Batiste

The subtitle reveals the following: that this album showcases Jon Batiste at the piano, that Batiste plans to make more like it, and that, because he does plan to make more like it, he must have enjoyed making this one as much as the results suggest. Not only is he at home with both Beethoven’s greatest hits and the blues, but his meandering from one to the other and back feels natural. In other words, he’s not pretentious or hawking a gimmick. And as if to prove that you can’t always judge a disc by its title, the neither-­Beethoven-nor-blues “Dusklight Movement” is the loveliest four minutes and 18 seconds.

The Coward Brothers

The Coward Brothers

This soundtrack to an eponymous audio mockumentary that’s almost funny sometimes (The Rutles it’s not) brings Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett together under their mid-’80s noms de plume for 20 of the loosest, most playful (and in a couple of cases randiest) songs in either artist’s catalog. Call it the Wilbury Effect—legends uniting (or in this case reuniting) to bear one another’s musicianly burdens and experiencing a creative liberation that therefore numbers heretofore untapped humor or goofiness among its payoffs.

Habit of Creature

Neon Horse

The second-person point of view used in all four of these songs positions whichever Horseman is writing the lyrics (Stavesacre’s Mark Salomon? Starflyer 59’s Jason Martin?) to engage in an honesty as brutal as the riffs. Equal parts hard and classic rock (“Nuttin’ There” barrels down an alley strewn with rolling stones, Alice Cooper should cover “Take Us to the Chapel”), the music gives the lie (again) to accusations that Christians don’t know how to rock. In short, Michael Knott would’ve approved. Best title: “I Know That It Can Be Confusing (When It’s All Your Fault).” Best line: “Would it kill ya to die a little to yourself?”

Elvis Costello Alain Benainous/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Encore

If the 97 songs that comprise King of America & Other Realms (UMe), the new six-disc box set devoted to Elvis Costello’s 1986 album King of America and sundry related recordings and events, are way too much of a good thing, the 28 songs on the two-CD condensation aren’t quite enough. So the 59-song digital version would seem to be the way to go. And it is, because what Costello, his co-producer T Bone Burnett, and a band that included the jazz bassist Ray Brown got up to was a pretty good thing indeed. Relatively relaxed and introspective, King of America proved that for Costello there was musical life after new wave (the genre that he’d been saddled with in the U.S.) and that there was life in addition to his longtime band the Attractions. The deluxe version’s extra goodies, whether previously unreleased (most of them) or not (both sides of the Coward Brothers debut single), prove not only that the songs held up live but also that Costello should have included a few during his episode of MTV Unplugged. —A.O.