Arthur Buck

Arthur Buck

The Arthur is Joseph, the seldom boring singer-songwriter-visual-artist. The Buck is Peter, the guitarist without whom R.E.M. might never have taken the underground overground. And if this collaboration isn’t the strongest musical statement that either has ever made, neither is it anywhere close to their weakest. As the programmed drums seem to emerge from the acoustic-electric-guitar mesh, the lyrics seem to emerge from the hooks. They also resonate on more than one level even when they’re calling for another American revolution.

Game Day

Peter Holsapple

The Holsapple album that this one most recalls is Like This, which he recorded 34 years ago as the leader of the dB’s. Both find him up to his elbows in the power-pop basics, distorting them until they conform to the needs of the songs, each of which is about someone or something so specific that you feel as if you know him, her, or it or at least that you should. “Inventory” is especially recommended to anyone tempted to lay up treasures for himself upon earth.

The Tree of Forgiveness

John Prine

Prine has survived cancer twice, and he chuckles in the face of death. The down-home, seen-through-a-glass-darkly impressions of the afterlife in the rollicking “When I Get to Heaven” are no more irreverent than those in the old National Review cartoon in which one haloed cloud dweller offers another a cigarette and says, “It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Considered from another angle, it balances “God Only Knows” (not the Beach Boys’), which immediately precedes it and isn’t funny (or irreverent) at all.

Imitation Wood Grain & Other Folk Songs

Ben Vaughn

One significant difference between these “folk” songs and the rock ’n’ roll songs that Vaughn recorded for Restless circa 1985 to ’90 is that these feature Vaughn and only Vaughn—his aw-shucks voice, his carefree nostalgia, his acoustic guitar, and, on two songs, trumpet imitations courtesy of his breath and lips. Another is that he’s not as insightful as he used to be. But he’s still funny. “Echo Chamber Blues” has coffee-house-crowd-favorite written all over it. The rest would certainly do for a campfire.

ENCORE

One can learn a lot about Circus of Life (Echo Hill), the first Kinky Friedman album of original material in decades and the most subdued Kinky Friedman album ever, from what its creator recently said about it in an interview: “There’s just no chance that you can write 12 great songs in your 70s.” It’s not a risky assessment. Going 12 for 12 is hard under any conditions. Still, it would be interesting to know what Friedman means by “great.”

Does he mean clever enough to turn holding Willie Nelson in the “highest” regard into a double entendre? Or does he simply mean anything less sentimental than the song about him and his guitar or the song about a kitten named after a fighter plane? My guess is that he means “Jesus in Pajamas,” which he adapted from the pages of his own life—and, whether he knows it or not, from the last dozen verses of Matthew 25. —A.O.