Partir

Elina Duni

The Albanian-born Duni has a voice like liquid smoke, and on these 12 songs in nine meticulously enunciated languages, it flows and wafts through compositions both copyrighted and traditional, the universality of inevitable loss their common theme. On most of them she accompanies herself, sparsely, on piano or acoustic guitar. “Lamma Bada Yatathanna,” however, unfolds to what sounds like a looped recording of waves before yielding to a Middle Eastern frame drum. She also sings a cappella (“Kanga e Kurbetit,” “Schönster Abestärn”). English translations are included. Haunting.

Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John

Juliana Hatfield

Left holding tickets to an Olivia Newton-John show that was canceled when its star’s cancer returned, Juliana Hatfield decided to risk her 1990s-alternative-rock cred and record this unironic tribute to her heroine. She ticks every Newton-John box—the country-pop, the pop, Grease, and “Physical.” Best of all, she unearths the wonderful “Suspended in Time,” a non-single from the Xanadu soundtrack perfectly suited to the rough-edged guitars and punched-up drums that Hatfield as a ’90s-alternative rocker can’t help preferring.

It’s All About Love

Maceo Parker

The ever-funky saxophonist and above-average soul singer celebrates turning 75 with an album of seven songs, each with “love” or a derivative thereof in its title. Actually, cut seven’s a cheat (official title: “A Bushel and a Peck”). But while its Broadway pedigree makes it an anomaly amid songs popularized by Stevie Wonder, Wilson Pickett, Johnnie Taylor, and Stephen Stills, it’s the kind of anomaly that Parker’s old boss, James Brown, might’ve relished. For that matter, Parker’s swinging backup combo, the WDR Big Band, is too.

The Essential Billy Swan

Billy Swan

The subtitle that this two-disc set bears on Amazon and other websites, The Monument & Epic Years, is missing from the cover. But it’s important. For it’s the inclusion of five of Swan’s pre-country-rock-breakthrough Monument singles circa 1966 and 1967, when he was grooming himself or being groomed to give Gene Pitney a run for his money, that separates this compilation from the overcrowded Swan-compilation pack. And that’s not all: His country-rock breakthrough, “I Can Help,” appears in both single and album versions.

ENCORE

Last October, Fire Records bundled together the first four albums by the Jazz Butcher—a band, not a he—and titled the box The Wasted Years. Spanning 1983 to 1986, the collection may as well have constituted new music. As freewheeling as the indie ’80s were, Pat Fish’s whimsically eclectic lyrics and his band’s chameleonlike adaptability wheeled too freely for the overground, restricting the Jazz Butcher’s airplay to college radio in the United States and whatever its equivalent was in the group’s native England.

Now Fire has rereleased albums five through eight as The Violent Years. What it documents is that, from 1988 to 1991, Fish and his fluctuating supporting cast focused their considerable energies without sacrificing the sense that they might’ve really been three or four different bands masquerading under one name, each specializing in a groovy kind of cool. From parodic pop and paisley jangle to faux Henry Mancini and cockeyed soul, little was beyond them. —A.O.