Notable CDs

DeMarco obviously has a sense of humor. The title and brevity of this follow-up to his critically acclaimed Salad Days not only highlight the necessity of staying visible in these what-have-you-done-for-me-lately times but also satirize that necessity. And he makes the most of his joke: Another One sounds like an EP recorded by John Lennon and George Harrison in chill-out mode. If he’d included some instrumentals from the Bandcamp-only Some Other Ones, he might’ve even sounded like The Beatles.

Pageant Material

In “Dime Store Cowgirl,” Musgraves walks back the more transgressive elements of Same Trailer Different Park, blaming them on her having gotten “too big for [her] britches” and assuring her fan base that you can’t take the country out of the girl. Elsewhere, she’s up to her former tricks, eventually concluding that she’s just a live-and-let-live libertarian. She wants, in other words, to have her biscuits and eat them too. Until she figures out how, she’ll settle for matching witty lyrics to even wittier hooks.

The West African Blues Project

The only overtly blues song is “Lolambe,” which does as much for John Lee Hooker’s legacy as ZZ Top’s “La Grange” and maybe more. The rest is World Music pure and simple, except that even at its purest it’s seldom that simple, not when the warrior song “Kayre” makes fighting sound like fun. Ramon Goose is a British guitarist enamored of the bottleneck, Modou Touré a multilingual Senegalese singer, guitarist, and percussionist. They make beautiful music together. The purest and simplest proof: “We Walk in the Sahara.”

Truancy: The Very Best of Pete Townshend

What mainly distinguishes this compilation from Townshend’s 1996 best-of, with which it shares six cuts, is the word “very” in the title. What keeps Townshend from using the term “greatest hits” is that only two of these songs made the Top 40. What kept the others off the charts is their never having been released as singles or their lack of hooks. What the three Ronnie Lane duets prove is that Townshend is a born collaborator. What makes Townshend think that the two new tracks belong? Hubris.

Spotlight

Because Pete Townshend took his Who rock operas seriously, and because he was young enough when he composed them to keep his pretensions from morphing into delusions of grandeur, both Tommy and Quadrophenia have aged rather well. The latest proof is that they’ve just been redone in non-rock versions, neither of which embarrasses itself.

Pete Townshend’s Classic Quadrophenia (Deutsche Grammophon) features London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the operatic tenor of Alfie Boe (with cameos by Phil Daniels and Billy Idol). Tommy: A Bluegrass Opry (Compass) features Springfield, Mo.’s Hillbenders. Each recording does justice to, and even subtly enriches, Townshend’s melodies, and the plots (or concepts) don’t sound any more confused (Quadrophenia) or silly (Tommy, about a traumatized male Helen Keller with a Messianic complex) than they ever have.

But something is lacking, namely, what put the “rock” in the operas in the first place: the mad drummer Keith Moon, dead nearly 37 years, and more missed now than ever.