New and noteworthy

Caddy

Caddy

Caddy is the Norwegian one-man-band Tom Dahl, a childhood photo of whom, seated behind a drum kit against a backdrop of Kiss posters, constitutes this album’s cover art. It’s misleading, though, in that Dahl the adult deals in clean-burning, high-energy power pop instead of the sleazy glam rock beloved of Dahl the boy. And speaking of misleading, even “clean-burning” and “high-­energy” fail to capture how thoroughly Dahl has revved up the power-pop basics: irresistible hooks, precision attack, sugary yet gritty sonics—they’re all here, and in dollops.

Everything’s Better

The 1910 Chainsaw Company

In case you’re wondering, this quartet’s name is a riff on that of the 1910 Fruitgum Company, a late-’60s bubblegum act that scored three catchy Top-5s. All 10 of the songs on this album are catchier. They’re also more stylistic diverse. While “sunshine pop” might do as an umbrella term, it doesn’t encompass the Everly Brothers homage “Hitchin’ a Ride,” the mad garage-rock stomp “Band Aid,” or the way that “Baby Blue” (not a Badfinger homage) slowly then rapidly unspools to bring the album to a loose and very rambunctious end.

Another Mississippi Sunday Morning 

Parchman Prison Prayer

This album picks up where 2023’s Some Mississippi Sunday Morning left off, with 13 additional informal, untutored, mostly a cappella, and totally gospel vocal performances by inmates at the maximum-security Mississippi State Penitentiary. Yes, the men doing the singing (or rapping or speaking) deserve incarceration, and, yes, their crimes were most likely heinous. But they’re still human, ministering to them is a condition of being a sheep and not a goat, and the redemption audible in their voices can break your heart.

Déjame Dormir

Starflyer 59

The title, Spanish for “Let me sleep,” tells you half of what you need to know about the second new Starflyer 59 album in six months: It’s literally instrumental lullaby music. What it doesn’t tell you is who’s making the sounds (besides Jason Martin presumably) or that the nine songs aren’t new compositions but chestnuts from the extensive Starflyer oeuvre. What the name of the label on which it appears sort of tells you—assuming that “Velvet Blue” makes you think of Blue Velvet or its recently deceased director—is that there’s as much eeriness as beauty afloat in the album’s 33 minutes.

Ringo Starr Associated Press / Photo by Jae C. Hong

Encore

“Ringo Starr Charts the First No. 1 Album of His Solo Career,” screamed a Jan. 23 Forbes headline. Alas, the details regarding the album in question, Look Up (Roccabella), are more modest: The only charts that it has topped (take note if you want to know what the music’s like) are Americana and country in the U.K. Still, as the Mop Top with the spottiest track record (gaze on his discography on Wikipedia and despair) and an 84-year-old to boot, Starr’s being No. 1 anywhere merits an attaboy.

He couldn’t have done so, however, without a lot of help from his friends—most notably T Bone Burnett, who wrote nine of the 11 songs and produced 10, and whose Rolodex no doubt helped in the enlisting of Alison Krauss, Larkin Poe, Greg Leisz, Colin Linden, and David Mansfield, to name just five. Then there’s the title cut, which is as close to an outright gospel song as Burnett has written in decades: “No matter where you place in the human race / There is mercy, there is grace.” Especially cool coming from a Beatle. —A.O.