Playful, and serious, sounds

Lanmou Lanmou

Dowdelin

Led by David Kiledjian (keyboards, bass, sax, guitar, percussion) and Olivya Victorin (vocals, songwriting), this France-based quartet sets (mostly) Haitian-Creole lyrics to tightly wound R&B melodies and rhythms that wouldn’t sound out of place as recess chants on an Afro-Caribbean playground. Typically, the songs begin with a few measures of electronica glazed with percussion, whereupon the bass kicks the sound into three dimensions, followed by the singing of Haitian Creole lyrics that, plugged into a translator, yield approximate English such as “The walls are tapping into our time to fall” and “When one loves oneself, one prefers to be silent / and stay the same.” There’s nothing approximate about the hooks.

Untidy Soul

Samm Henshaw

Seven years after his first EP, this 28-year-old son of a South London Nigerian preacher man finally releases his first full-length album, and it’s a doozy. Between playfully identifying chicken wings as a prerequisite for a good date (“Chicken Wings”) and seriously identifying his “source of joy” as “being in His presence” (“Joy”), Henshaw covers an impressive amount of soul-music ground. Programmed as it is without interruption, the songs play like 42 ad-free minutes of high-quality urban radio. Not every cut deserves heavy rotation, but two that do, the love songs “8.16” and “Loved by You,” would’ve given Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and the Commodores a run for their respective money back in the day.

The Highest in the Land

Jazz Butcher

The most salient characteristics of Pat Fish’s swan song: forebodings of his fatal heart attack (“My time ain’t long,” he sings in “Time”), uncharacteristically subdued tempos, two Dylan references (the marrying-Isis line in “Never Give Up,” the “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” melody rechristened “Running on Fumes”), uncharacteristic profanity (three songs), a pledge to read the Bible and the Koran (the title cut), a curious equating of Brexit with “political correctness gone mad” (“Sebastian’s Medication”), and, finally, the whispered “Goodnight” that brings the last song on the last album that Fish will ever record to a close.

Silver Sash

Wovenhand

The music gallops and drones like the soundtrack to a Spaghetti Western in which the cowboys have been replaced by medieval Crusaders. The lyrics fly like sparks struck from an anvil by a hammer-­wielding evangelist—the opening song actually begins with David Eugene Edwards intoning “Every head bowed / Every eye closed / See that hand I / Raise that hand.” And probably thanks to Edwards’ new collaborator Chuck French, at least two songs (“Dead Dead Beat” and “Omaha”) will delight fans of the Stooges.

Encore

Shortly after the death of Pat Fish last October, the UK’s Fire Records released Dr Cholmondley Repents: A-Sides, B-Sides and Seasides, a four-disc overview of Fish’s longtime band and alter ego, the Jazz Butcher. Not quite comprehensive (it omits the recordings that he made for the Shock and Sky labels), the box nevertheless demonstrates simultaneously what made Fish and Co. one of the alternative-era’s most ­popular cult acts and what kept them from breaking through to the mainstream.

Clever, sarcastic, hilarious, and—occasionally—infuriating, Fish brought a manic sense of fun to a 1980s (and later a 1990s) indie-rock scene susceptible to becoming too self-important or too esoteric for its own good. He often seemed to write and sing about subjects simply because they afforded him as good a reason as any to go on a whimsical jag. But he could swerve into profundity. In the otherwise silly “The Devil Is My Friend,” the approach of Easter is all that’s needed to send Satan packing. —A.O.