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Julien Baker’s new album has a grand, full-band sound and bracing honesty | Review

The Hold Steady and jazz great William Parker also have new albums of note.

Julien Baker's 'Little Oblivions'
Julien Baker's 'Little Oblivions'Read moreMatadoe Records

Julien Baker

Little Oblivions

(Matador *** 1/2)

Julien Baker commands attention on stage with just the sound of her voice and guitar. She’s expert at holding audiences rapt with unadorned, emotionally fraught songs that turn noisy concert halls into hushed, hallowed spaces.

In some ways, Little Oblivions, the 25-year-old Memphis songwriter’s third album, which is self-produced, feels like a departure from that approach.

The arrangements are fleshed out, with a grand, full-band sound she created playing most instruments herself. Her engineer, Calvin Lauber, also chipped in, and Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, Baker’s bandmates in indie supergroup boygenius, contribute backup vocals.

But while the bigger sound offers Baker a barrier she could hide behind, she has no interest in shielding herself. The opening of the first song, “Hardline,” makes plain there’s extraordinary confessional music ahead in which the singer will not be going easy on herself for choices she’s made.

“Blacked out on a weekday; is there something that I’m trying to avoid?” she sings, as the music swells. “Start asking for forgiveness in advance for all the future things I will destroy.”

Little Oblivions explores themes of addiction, its consequences, and recovery. But Baker doesn’t do easy moralizing here. Both life and the music — which draws on Baker’s experience in punk bands — get messy. “Bloodshot” and “Relative Fiction” achieve a rare beauty. The songs are all the more harrowing because they confront demons once thought safely locked away.

Dan DeLuca

The Hold Steady

Open Door Policy

(Positive Jams / Thirty Tigers ***)

Eighteen years into their career, the Hold Steady aren’t seeking to win new converts. But Open Door Policy does work some slight changes into their rousing bar-band anthems of bad decisions and flawed redemption.

They bring in a horn section to drive several tracks, including the highlights “Family Farm” and “Unpleasant Breakfast,” and they back off their standard gigantic riffs in favor of more medium-tempo story songs with more nuanced arrangements. Not that Open Door Policy is mellow: It’s still loud, dense with words, triple guitars, and Franz Nicolay’s florid piano.

So many words! Nearly 4,000 of them on the 44-minute album, and the voluble Craig Finn still has elaborate stories to declaim in his talk-singing voice.

Recorded pre-pandemic, it’s a more cohesive album than the 2019 return-to-form collection Thrashing Thru the Passion, full of characters in unfulfilling jobs and dysfunctional relationships making poor pharmacological choices.

Finn is a master of the telling detail, often alliterative: a ringtone that plays Van Halen’s “Eruption,” a penthouse “with the windowpane walls,” “the grackles at the snack bar waging war for popcorn and potato chips.” He treats his messy characters with empathy while the band celebrates them with rock-and-roll.

— Steve Klinge

William Parker

Migration of Silence Into and out of the Tone World

(AUM Fidelity, ****)

Bassist William Parker is revered as a cornerstone of free jazz, an improviser with a vast palette and expansive imagination who has been an integral member of projects led by such icons as Cecil Taylor and David S. Ware. But that five-decade history only comprises one part of Parker’s prolific and stunningly diverse output.

He’s also a bandleader, a poet, a political activist, and a community organizer who cofounded New York’s Vision Festival, an annual celebration of avant-garde jazz. His new 10-CD box set shifts the focus to Parker, the composer.

Despite what the ambitious scale and the “Music of William Parker” subtitle might suggest, this is not a career retrospective. The set represents 10 hours of new music, each disc centered on a different ensemble, theme, and repertoire.

While the music on Migration of Silence is typical of Parker in its challenging experimentalism and space for daring free improvisation, what’s most striking is how accessible this music is for any listener with a sense of adventure and curiosity.

Much of it is song-based, however abstractly the word “song” might be interpreted. Funk grooves and chamber music, folk tunes and global traditions all cross streams in fascinating and unexpected ways.

One album features solo pieces written for the Japanese pianist Eri Yamamoto, another a string quartet. One full set is dedicated to classic Italian filmmakers like Fellini and Antonioni, another the freedom fighters of Mexico, with whom Parker aligns his own creative iconoclasm.

All of it reveals the work of a musical thinker with boundless curiosity, whose instincts embrace diverse influences and audiences in hopes of a better tomorrow.

Shaun Brady