Album reviews: Son Volt, Joey DeFrancesco, Steve Earle

Son Volt

Union

(Transmit Sound / Thirty Tigers, *** stars)

Jay Farrar is not happy with the state of our country. Union, the ninth Son Volt album, contains titles such as “Truth to Power Blues,” “Lady Liberty,” and “Broadsides,” and it was recorded in part at the Woody Guthrie Center in Oklahoma and the Mother Jones Museum in Illinois. Although the songs include character portraits (of laborers, immigrants, and whistle-blowers) and attacks on corrupt values, many of them are calls to action. “Take a stand now, protest and holler / Desecration of the land for the almighty dollar,” Farrar sings in “The 99” (as the percent that forever waits in the “trickle-down world”). “There must be hope in this hell / And we fiddle while Rome burns,” he sings in “While Rome Burns.”

The last two Son Volt albums have focused on roadhouse country and blues, and Union contains trace elements of those genres, but it mostly sounds like a Son Volt album: a blend of world-weary ballads and rolling rock songs anchored by Farrar’s relaxed baritone. Over his career, Farrar has tended to work changes on similar melodies, but the direct, earnest politics and the well-crafted storytelling keep Union from sounding too familiar. — Steve Klinge

Son Volt plays at 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 1, at the Ardmore Music Hall, 23 E. Lancaster Ave. $25-$39. 610-649-8389, ardmoremusic.com.

Steve Earle & the Dukes

Guy

(New West ***)

In 2009, Steve Earle recorded an album-length tribute to Townes Van Zandt, the deeply melancholy Texas songwriting legend who died in 1997. Van Zandt’s compadre Guy Clark died in 2016, and at a concert in Phoenixville a few months back, Earle explained why he felt the need to also record a Clark tribute album: “I don’t want to run into that [expletive] on the other side wanting to know why I made a record for Townes and didn’t make one for him.”

Sound reasoning, as it turns out that Guy is a much better record than Townes. Van Zandt was a frequently sublime writer whose music could drift toward torpor, and Earle’s versions were rarely thrilling. Clark isn’t quite so revered as a doomed, tragic figure as his running partner, but his songs have greater musical and emotional range, kicking harder with sharp detail and crusty joie de vivre. They’re better suited to the feisty and cantankerous Earle, who, along with his road-tested band the Dukes, is fully engaged, whether singing the sentimental masterpiece “Dublin Blues,” flipping the bird to the big city on “L.A. Freeway,” or digging into the lusty “Rita Ballou.” — Dan DeLuca

Steve Earle & the Dukes play the Ardmore Music Hall, 23 E. Lancaster Ave., Ardmore, on May 6. $42-$60. 610-649-8389. ardmoremusic.com.

Joey DeFrancesco

In the Key of the Universe

(Mack Avenue ****)

Leave it to Philly’s lion of the Hammond B-3 organ to bring soul and innovation to jazz’s most ignored solo instrument. The onetime Miles Davis band member spent 2018 in the company of Van Morrison with several bluesy albums of backing sessions (e.g. The Prophet Speaks), and one where he and Van the Man shared title credit for collaboration a la You’re Driving Me Crazy. After a Christmas gig at South where DeFrancesco & Co. played a heartwarming handful of seasonal classics, the organist finds his head in the clouds and his inner vision focused on the astral planes of free jazz — a unique place to roam, considering his usual guttural grooves of smoldering blue jazz.

With fellow cosmos-dwelling drummer Billy Hart and saxophonist Troy Roberts, DeFrancesco maintains a love of spacious harmony as a composer, and each player solos his rear end off on “Awake and Blissed” and “Inner Being." Funky and free, “It Swung Wide Open” is an aptly titled epic in which Hart gets his chance to shine brightest and bash hardest. Still, nothing is as impressive as the meeting between DeFrancesco’s oozing, open organ tones and the living master of jazz’s spirited saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders. Then there is the match-up between Sanders’ doleful reed sound and DeFrancesco doubling on trumpet and organ on “And So It Is,” where each giant step between them acts like a cross between a dueling lovers’ quarrel and a chattily conversational tea party. —A.D. Amorosi