Beautiful Scars by Merry Clayton: Contemporary black-gospel recordings, even those by relatively big names, don’t always boast the highest production values. But when you see the Motown imprimatur, you know that no expense has been spared. Clayton’s name is as relatively big as names come (she achieved instant stardom as the guest belter on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”), but there’s nothing relative about the size of her voice or the sincerity of her belief. Whether covering the Soul Stirrers or singing faith-based survivor anthems written for her by Diane Warren, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, or Terry Young (of Bob Dylan’s Saved fame), she’s even more convincing than Aretha Franklin in a Baptist church.

Forever Only Idaho by Harrison Lemke: Lemke may not agree (musicians, who can figure ’em?), but this concept album “about the Coeur d’Alene High School graduating class of 2006 in 2018” is not only his best album so far but also his best album by far. His figures of speech remain fresh (trucks that barrel down highways “like pain down a nerve,” not bad), his eye for detail sharp (a sunset “going to pieces in the lake,” nice). And while he hasn’t abandoned his perfectionism-forestalling lo-fi aesthetics, his hooks and instrumentation (neither of which has ever been richer) meet them halfway and sometimes more. So what that he borrows his catchiest riff from Lou Reed? It’s not as if Reed’s going to be using it anymore.

Four Seasons by Frank Roberscheuten Hiptett: The recipe is simple but not simplistic: Begin by setting the tone for each section with an elegantly swinging reeds-piano-bass-drums jazz rendition of one of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concerti, follow it with an assortment of Roberscheuten originals, throw in a few seasonally appropriate standards (“It Might As Well Be Spring,” “Autumn in New York,” “Winter Moon”), let Shaunette Hildabrand (whose voice pleasantly evokes the Big Band era) write lyrics for and sing on five numbers, and, voilà, instant thematic unity. So why no “Summertime”? Probably because it has already been recorded over 1,100 times—and because making it swing would’ve taxed even this combo’s considerable talents.

Sundial by Carl Verheyen: You’d never guess from this solo outing that Verheyen had ever played guitar in any incarnation of Supertramp. The high-octane rock-fusion instrumental “Kaningie” and the quiet mellow-jazz instrumental “Sundial Slight Return” aside, the focus is on Verheyen the pop singer-songwriter/interpreter. And for a 67-year-old, he sure sounds a lot like a guy in his 30s. Blue-eyed soul (an unnecessarily hurried sprint through the Rascals’ “People Got To Be Free”) and blue-eyed blues (“Clawhammer Man”) are beyond him, but his version of “Michelle’s Song” is so winsomely spot-on that the question of why Elton John never released it as a single looms larger than it has at any other point in the last 50 years.

Encore

Unlike Frank Rober­­scheuten’s Four Seasons, the American composer Robert Paterson’s The Four Seasons bypasses Vivaldi altogether in favor of art-song-for-Pierrot-ensemble settings of season-based verse by a Who’s Who (and sometimes a Who’s That?) of 20th- and 21st-century poets. The liner booklet of the American Modern Ensemble’s new world-premiere recording, in containing all 21 texts, could practically double as a mini–Norton’s Anthology.

But what makes the recording an example of a form-and-content marriage made in heaven is the music. Paterson obviously put as much care into crafting melodies that analogize their respective poems’ images, rhythms, moods, and themes as he did into selecting the poems themselves. Most impressively of all, the melodies free the classically trained singers (one per season naturally) to enunciate intelligibly and intelligently enough to render the reproduced texts (almost) superfluous. —A.O.