Souvenir

Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors

“California” could’ve been written and recorded 40 years ago, when Holcomb’s vocal twin Keith Carradine sang “I’m Easy” onto the charts and the Laurel Canyon sound had ripened into a sunny alternative to disco. Forty years ago, however, it wasn’t Christians like Holcomb who were writing such songs. They also weren’t singing lyrics like “Do you trust me, baby, with your body? / Mine is yours to keep” (about marriage) or “Whether or not you pray, / black or white, straight or gay, / you still deserve the love of your neighbors.”

Mental Illness

Aimee Mann

The mental illness to which this somber album’s title refers isn’t the clinical kind but the kind that people mean when they say that insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. “So once more around the track” (“Simple Fix”), “Round and round till you lose yourself in the air” (“Rollercoasters”)—Mann’s characters follow circular paths when they’re not dead-ending altogether. Her plaintive alto, acoustic instrumentation, and lyrics (empathetic and sympathetic by turns) brighten, or at least illuminate, the corners in which they live.

My Worship Live

Judith Sephuma

How does this live, South African black-gospel worship album differ from its North American counterparts? First, it was recorded in a studio, so it doesn’t depend on a congregation for its exuberance. Second, it’s not exuberant. Rather, the songs end as slowly as they start, relying on gradually rising and falling dynamics for their sense of development. Third, it’s lead-sung by a classically trained jazz singer who sings in three languages and has no living North American counterpart where vocal beauty, power, and control are concerned.

The Last Rider

Ron Sexsmith

Sexsmith returns with 15 more wistful, meticulously crafted pop songs, imbuing them from his co-producer’s chair with unassuming vibrancy and singing them, as usual, in a voice that invites neither pity nor parody. And if his recurring references to worries and dreams don’t amount to a theme, they’re motific enough to keep randomness at bay. What keeps perfection at bay: a refrain that goes “If your dreams are bigger than your worries, / you’ll never have to worry ’bout your dreams” and another in which he mispronounces “err.”

Encore

In most respects, Rumer’s This Girl’s in Love: A Bacharach & David Songbook (East West) is both a typical Rumer album and a typical Burt Bacharach–Hal David tribute. The British vocalist has specialized throughout her seven-year solo career in covering soft-pop standards or in singing would-be soft-pop standards of her own, and Bacharach-David tributes, given the refined tastes of performers who’d even consider such undertakings, tend to be—like this one—classy affairs.

What makes This Girl’s in Love special is that Bacharach himself has given it his seal of approval by singing the first verse of the title track. Sounding not one day younger than his 88 years, he emotes with a creakiness at stark odds with Rumer’s honey-smooth delivery. It’s a touching several moments, reminding listeners not only that Bacharach is old enough to be Rumer’s grandfather but also that, although life is short, art is long. —A.O.