Notable CDs

Adele is like Susan Boyle without Asperger’s, with all that that distinction implies. She has a big, attention-grabbing voice, but she’s its master instead of its servant. She’s only as good as the material that her producers supply, but she makes sure that it’s original, even if she has to help out with the writing. And she has a guaranteed audience of millions that will buy whatever she releases, but with each release she sounds less concerned with pleasing that audience than with making it even bigger.

Beach Boys’ Party! Uncovered and Unplugged

The year was 1965, Pet Sounds was still half a year from being finished, and never again would the members of America’s Band sound as innocent as they did when they recorded these versions of mostly other people’s hits in full goof-off mode, secure in the knowledge that the world was their clambake. They didn’t yet have that much hair to let down, but what they had they did. And this overdub-free, 2½-hour edition of what resulted is great sing-along fun.

No One Deserves You

The halcyon days that this Aussie quartet evokes are nothing less than the ’80s heyday of college radio, when post-punk, mainstream-indifferent twenty-somethings with or without something to say ruled MTV and catchiness was its own reward. What keeps Crayon Fields from sounding retro is their attention to sonic detail. Only 21st-century technology could do justice to the auroras of sound that transform this album’s lesser cuts into legitimate pleasures and its greater cuts into legitimate thrills. Nota bene: The greater cuts outnumber the lesser.

Hello I Feel the Same

No, Karen Peris’ enunciation hasn’t improved. And, given that she’s been eliding consonants and syllables for over 25 years now, it’s probably time to quit hoping that she’ll ever do otherwise. So consider her voice a kind of flute, the ghostliness of which is entirely appropriate to the haunted melodies that she and her husband Don use acoustic instruments to suggest. The lyrics, meanwhile, are available at Bandcamp. They confirm that Karen addresses “beautiful Francis” in “Washington Field Trip” but not whether he’s the saint or the pope.

Spotlight

Jeff Lynne first attempted to revive the Electric Light Orchestra brand in 2001 with Zoom, an album that felt cautious even by ELO’s meticulous standards and overcautious by the high-jinks-friendly standards of Lynne’s other post-Move band, the Traveling Wilburys. His latest attempt, Alone in the Universe (Columbia), fares better in this regard because it sounds more relaxed and has sharper hooks: Lynne no longer sounds as if he’s merely trying to avoid melodic missteps.

Still, the album feels lightweight. One reason is that the standard, 10-track edition runs to only 32 minutes. Another is that echoes of past ELO glories resound (compare “Love and Rain,” for instance, with “Showdown”). Yet another is that Lynne sings nearly every vocal part and plays nearly every instrument himself. A nonperfectionist like Prince can make such control-freakishness exciting. Lynne, however, would’ve probably been better off hiring an orchestra and a choir to provide some good old-fashioned bombast. —A.O.