New and noteworthy

Synthetic: A Synth Odyssey, Season 4 

Rich Aucoin

Until 2020, the Nova Scotian electro-popster Rich Aucoin was best known for his interactive “Space Cowboy” shows and for making albums synced to classic children’s films. When COVID laid waste to the former, he began an analog-synthesizer “odyssey” that’s only now coming to an end, and it’s doing so not with a whimper but a bang. Edgier and more beat driven than its predecessors, it’s the audio equivalent of a popular amusement park’s must-ride roller coaster.

Rainy Sunday Afternoon

The Divine Comedy

Neil Hannon could have titled this album Ecclesiastes, so vividly do its songs illustrate that all is, or at least tends toward, vanity. That Hannon puts this sentiment across with a twinkle in his eye and a twinkle in his music helps the medicine go down—there’s latent hope in the childhood Christmas memories of “All the Pretty Lights,” and you can waltz to the Kafkaesque “The Man Who Turned Into a Chair.” But medicine the album remains. “One day I will be nothing,” Hannon sings. “Think how funny that will feel. / For we, the living, / death is the Achilles heel.”

Reconstruction

Lecrae

Before you listen to any of these 19 songs, watch the hourlong testimony that Lecrae taped earlier this year for the YouTube channel Delafé Testimonies. Not only will what the 46-year-old rapper has to say put his widely documented ups and downs into context, but it will also make clear what that context is. This album’s title cut identifies it as the return to a “firm foundation,” a return that the other cuts flesh out from multiple perspectives. Which one you’ll find most compelling is hard to say. I’m partial to the one involving a shout-out to the books of Lois Tverberg.

Saving Grace

Robert Plant with Suzi Dian

Not to throw shade at Alison Krauss, with whom this album’s top-billed singer has etched some noteworthy performances, but what Suzi Dian is bringing out in Robert Plant is special. Whether she or anyone else in Saving Grace (Plant’s band’s name as well as this album’s title) is responsible for this all-covers project’s gospel motif (“Soul of a Man,” “Higher Rock,” “Gospel Plow”) has not been disclosed. But whoever convinced Plant to transform the Low Anthem’s “Ticket Taker” from an understated murmur into a misty-mountain folk song for the ages was doing yeoman’s service.

Encore

Why does the cover of the Sinfonia of London’s new Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady (Chandos) proclaim “World Première Complete Recording” when the original Broadway cast version of the musical topped the charts 69 years ago? Because no ensemble has heretofore recorded everything that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe composed for their adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. The 1956 recording ran to 54 minutes, the 1964 film soundtrack to 75. This one runs to 130.

John Wilson, the Sinfonia’s artistic director, has taken great pains to ensure that every facet—from an all-British cast to the live-in-the-studio recording to the 109-page libretto containing the entire script—is top-notch. The libretto also contains this accurate assessment of the show: “Its core strength lies in the rare indivisibility of its book, music, and lyrics,” writes the theater critic David Benedict. “This is a coherent, winning drama set up in dialogue and dramatised through vivid, perfectly characterized song.” —A.O.