New and noteworthy

Big Sir

Crash Rickshaw

These guys come pounding out of the box so hard, fast, and clean that you could easily forget how long it’s been since they last even tried—blasts away the cobwebs, you might say. So why only four songs after approximately two decades? Say they’re testing the waters. Also, say that each song is a banger that you’ll want to add to your next up-and-at-’em playlist and that the two urging you to kick to the curb whatever “big sir” has you by the algorithm are well worth a ponder.

Far Country

Ellie Holcomb

In response to a challenge by her executive producer (and father) Brown Bannister, Drew Holcomb’s better half puts aside her Americana inclinations and accedes to the kind of Big Pop Sound often used to camouflage shallow songcraft. This time, however, if only by failing to overwhelm the melodies and lyrics, the sound reveals how substantial the songcraft is. Make that the songcraft and the singing. Holcomb’s playing for high emotional (and spiritual) stakes throughout, but she almost always emotes with a smile.

Shekinah

Lothar Kosse

Although he’s an acclaimed worship-and-praise composer in his native Germany, it’s as a fusion-jazz guitarist who can really make his instrument sing that Lothar Kosse is gradually becoming known abroad. One might even say too gradually. What other guitarist do you know who can honor influences such as Jeff Beck, Steve Lukather, Larry Carlton, and Lee Ritenour, repeatedly enlist the enthusiastic services of Abe Laboriel Sr. and Vinnie Colaiuta, and still remain relatively niche 38 years after his debut?

Bob Stanley Presents Liverpool Sunset: The City After Merseybeat 1964–1969

Various artists

I don’t know what’s harder to believe, that “It’s a Crime,” the Kirkbys song that opens this collection, isn’t a long-lost Beatles cut or that none of these groovier-than-­thou songs was a hit in the U.S. Only six of the 24 acts (the Dennisons, Billy Fury, the Swinging Blue Jeans, Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas, the Merseys [aka the Crackers], the Koobas) have a Wikipedia discography detailed enough to be useful, but apparently none of these songs charted in England either, maybe because a lot weren’t singles in the first place. Astonishing. “It’s a Crime” indeed.

Encore

The dates in the title of Bob Stanley Presents Chip Shop Pop: The Sound of Denmark Street 1970–1975 (Ace) might make you think it’s a sequel to Liverpool Sunset: The City After Merseybeat 1964–1969, but it isn’t and in fact couldn’t have been—the British Invasion was over by decade’s end. Instead, Chip Shop Pop celebrates that innocently and exuberantly cheerful brand of pop exemplified by the only one of these 24 songs to chart in the U.S., the Fortunes’ “Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again.”

The Fortunes’ aren’t the only voices that U.S. boomers might find familiar. Both Tony Burrows (“Melanie Makes Me Smile”) and Peter Doyle (“Rusty Hands of Time”) sang on hits too. But hits aren’t what Bob Stanley was put on this earth to compile. And because he wasn’t, we get collections such as this, in which one song after another that sounds too catchy to have missed but somehow did parades past like an AM-radio playlist from the parallel universe of your dreams. —A.O.