New and noteworthy

As We Are Now

Jimmy Greene

The first of this album’s musical highlights occurs halfway through the opening track, “Praises,” when Greene and his tenor sax achieve the kind of squealin’ feelin’ that bebop fans live for. The highest emotional highlights occur throughout the title track in snippets of interviews that Greene, his wife, and his son have given in the wake of Greene’s daughter’s death at Sandy Hook. “It’s our intention,” goes one, “to humanize the face of gun violence in a moment in history where all too often we focus on everything but our shared humanity.”

Songs for Emily: The Album

Marcus Hummon

Hummon isn’t the only composer turning Emily Dickinson poems into music, but he’s one of the few not turning them into art song. Pop-Americana is more his style. If you’re familiar with the Songs for Emily EP that he released last year, you already know six of these 10 cuts. But you’ll want to hear the four new ones—“Letter to the World,” “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed,” “Slant,” and “Sabbath”—because they’re cut from the same cloth. Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems. Can Songs for Emily: The Box be far behind?

Somos Los Straitjackets

Los Straitjackets

Performing as Nick Lowe’s backing band may have raised Los Straitjackets’ profile, but it hasn’t changed their fondness for lucha libre masks or their sound: They still create songs that will have music-trivia buffs guessing “Ventures” or “Shadows.” To tell the difference, listen to the production (neither Nokie Edwards nor Hank Marvin had the technology available to Eddie Angel and Greg Townson) and for classic pop melodies once removed. If either the Shadows or the Ventures had wanted to cover “Stay” (cf. Townson’s “Bumper Car”) or “Moon River” (cf. Angel’s “Catalina Farewell”), they’d have done so straight up.

XX: Twenty Years of Silence

WATIV

The jazz pianist (well, that’s one thing he is) William A. Thompson IV is so experimentally inclined that even this album, arguably his most accessible, might strike many as too “out there.” But this time he provides aural ways in even more helpful than his Bandcamp liner notes—the Romantic-period classical echoes of the first 45 seconds of “Computer Riot,” for example, and the romantic mainstream jazz of “122-60.” Even the Steve Reichian speech-to-music numbers aren’t prohibitive, not with source material as familiar as a radio preacher (“Speaking in Tongues”) and Walt Whitman (“Dirge for Two Veterans”).

Encore

By the time that Sony launched the Now That’s What I Call Music! series in the U.S. in 1998, it had already been releasing such compilations in the U.K. for 15 years. And, between the two countries, you’d think that the series had just about run its course. But with the four-CD, 72-cut Now That’s What I Call an Era: The Albums 1980>1984, Essential Tracks From Iconic Albums (40 cuts on vinyl), the U.K. series turns a corner. No more overexposed hits—underexposed deep cuts now get their due.

As you might expect, the song selection has a British bias (R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, Pretenders, Donna Summer, and Paul Simon appear only once). But many of the albums from which the choices were made should’ve been bigger in the U.S. than they were anyway, so U.S. fans should be grateful to hear what they’ve been missing. And if the era’s (and the U.K.’s) predilection for splashy synths and Bowie-meets-blue-eyed-soul vocals begins to wear, the abundance of hooks that time forgot is compensation. —A.O.