No Glory

The Eagle Rock Gospel Singers

These youthful rootsmongers sing, play, and write—about the gospel, in case their name isn’t clear enough—with energy and conviction, achieving freshness by shuffling musical and verbal tropes like veterans. They also shuffle lead singers, spelling a guy (or guys) who wouldn’t sound out of place leading worship at a Sunday-evening seeker service with a gal (or gals) who wouldn’t sound out of place fronting a jug band. Would that they’d shuffle another fast song or two into this program’s second half. It drags a little.

Home Counties

Saint Etienne

Listen closely and you’ll notice a level of attention to studio trickery on par with anything available on albums selling a million or more copies. The difference is that Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley, and Pete Wiggs deploy their studio tricks in the service of something more than going platinum. On this album, that “something” includes wistfully sweet melodies and cinematic segues deployed in the service of lyrics that embody the consciousness streams of British suburbanites at a level of pop sophistication that grows rarer by the day.

Revival

Third Day

Kudos to these Southern gospel-rockers not only for celebrating their 25th anniversary with new material but also for putting their hearts into it. The upfront lyrics are as simple as the romping-stomping rhythms, which are as simple as Mark Lee’s and Trevor Morgan’s chunky electric-guitar riffs, Scotty Wilbanks’ fat organ fills, and Mac Powell’s husky baritone singing. And just when it seems that “no surprises” must’ve been stenciled on the studio walls, up pop the Oak Ridge Boys to help take Paul Simon to church.

Big Things and Little Things

Truckstop Honeymoon

Other than the song wherein they posit their moral superiority to Sam Brownback, this husband-and-wife duo get by on their hillbilly vibe and their droll snapshots of life lived in or near “The Ugly Part of Town” (a title). At their most fetching, the cleverness morphs into laughs, at least for listeners old enough to remember record players and to get “Got a seven-year-old daughter just picked up a guitar, / played me something by the White Stripes. / I don’t even know who they are.”

ENCORE

The title of The Essential Pointer Sisters, which RCA/Legacy snuck out just before Christmas, is, like that of many albums in The Essential series, a misnomer. How essential can a collection be when it excludes its subjects’ first and second Top 20 hits (“Yes We Can Can” and “How Long [Betcha Got a Chick on the Side]” respectively)? In other words, despite spreading 36 cuts across two discs and unearthing some interesting obscurities along the way, this collection still misses the Pointers’ essence.

More than any other female hit machine of the pre-disco, disco, and post-disco (i.e., MTV) eras, the Sisters made going with the flow seem both possible and desirable if not always in that order. No matter how one remembers them now, 12 years after June’s death quashed any comeback hopes, their essential recordings remain worth preserving. As things stand, at least several of the Pointers’ 13 other compilations do the job more efficiently. —A.O.