Turn Off the News, Build a Garden

Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real

This album starts out shuffling the country-rock deck with so much aplomb, skill, and imagination that its utter collapse somewhere around the three-quarter mark comes more as a shock than a disappointment, though it’s that too. Neither the shock nor the disappointment, incidentally, has anything to do with how seldom Lukas sounds anything like his famous father Willie (two songs tops). It has to do with how precisely the last five songs sound like the work of five different and not particularly skillful or imaginative bands.

Ride Me Back Home

Willie Nelson

On his last several releases, Nelson has included at least one song about death or its approach, and this album—his best of the 2010s, its cover of Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” notwithstanding—has two, “One More Song to Write” and “Come On Time” (which should be punctuated “Come On, Time”). The former may be a standard someday. It’s the latter, however, that feels alive right now. Who else but an ornery old cuss would dare Time to hurry up and get things over with?

Beyond the Door

Redd Kross

Nearly 40 years after their debut, Jeff and Steve McDonald have hit upon the perfect Redd Kross theme song: “The Party Underground.” The underground, after all, is where they remain despite their best efforts to break out, and a party is what they sound like, especially with drummers like their current one, Dale Crover (think Keith Moon meets Glen Sobel), to galvanize their demolition-derby guitars and power-pop hooks. Undeniable and irresistible proof that they know they’re not getting any younger: “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’?”

Oh By the Way … It’s Natalie Sweet

Natalie Sweet

Natalie Sweet has done Ramones fans a big favor. As a singer she’s no Joey, and as a guitarist Morten Henriksen’s no Johnny, but the lyrics are right up at least one of Joey’s and Dee Dee’s alleys (the one not leading to the psycho ward), and the sped-up-bubblegum-as-battering-ram attack that facilitates the squeezing of 13 songs into 31 minutes definitely has the spirit. It’s just too bad that, for reasons entirely beyond Sweet’s control, Tommy Erdelyi couldn’t have done the final mix.

ENCORE

For a Grammy-winning producer and a singer-songwriter-musician whose solo career turns 35 this year, Charlie Peacock seems surprisingly blasé about publicity. If not for Facebook, you might never know that so far this year he has released two excellent, MP3-only EPs (well, sort of), the 23-minute Souled-Out Fellowship of Friends & Funk and the 31-minute Lil’ Willie. They’re as different from each other as both are from his 40-minute 2018 jazz outing When Light Flashes Help Is on the Way.

On Souled-Out, Peacock alternates between sleek R&B balladry and crisp Minneapolis funk, soliciting vocals from such “friends” as his son Sam Ashworth, his daughter-in-law Ruby Amanfu, Jason Eskridge, and Jonathan Winstead. On Lil’ Willie, Peacock marries gentle, Americana-based pop to terse, relationship-based lyrics. “You’re like a movie done right—you never go on too long” is a perfect simile for the era of overstuffed Hollywood blockbusters. —A.O.