New Recordings

Breakout

(Disney **)

Robert Hazard's about to get a lot richer. That's thanks to Miley Cyrus, the Disney tween money-printing princess who, on her second album under her own name, has recorded the Philadelphia rocker's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," which already did quite handsomely by Hazard with Cyndi Lauper's iconic 1984 hit version. In Cyrus' hands, "Girls" isn't a feminist rallying cry so much as a call for help from a super-earning, overworked 15-year-old who just wants to be, you know, normal. A similar theme is explored in the annoyed fuzz-rocker "Fly on the Wall," in which Cyrus just wishes peeping paparazzi types would mind their own beeswax.

More globally conscious is the well-meaning but frankly terrible "Wake Up America," in which Cyrus leads a fist-pumping campaign for green awareness while admitting "I don't know what all this means." It's a tricky business to transition to the almost-grown-up world without leaving a 10-year-old fan base behind, and

Breakout

stumbles trying to balance Avril-lite pop punkers with saccharine ballads like "Goodbye." That "if you text it, I'll delete it," line in the kiss-off first single, "7 Things," is pretty cute, though.

- Dan DeLuca

Object 47

(Pink Flag ***1/2)

Formed during the clamor of Brit punk's first wave (its 1977 debut,

Pink Flag

, came months after the Sex Pistols'

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols

), Wire has never made things easy. Ominous vocalists/songwriters Colin Newman and Graham Lewis, guitarist Bruce Gilbert, and drummer Robert Grey leapt from sharded art punk (

Chairs Missing

) to noir electronics (

154

) to irked industrial (

The Ideal Copy

) to aggressive skronk (

Send

) during the band's stop 'n' start career. But two things they've never done are record without Gilbert and create gorgeously celebratory pop.

Wire starts this new adventure with its most chipper track, "One of Us," a speeding, hummable tune with an epically melodic bass, an impassioned Newman vocal and one of its most spiteful lyrics in "one of us will live to rue the day we met each other." Neither the catty catchphrases nor the contagious choruses end there. While Newman provides warm crunching guitar sounds, Lewis' rueful voice picks through the Dadaist lyrics and tipsy melody of "Are You Ready?" with oddball tenderness. Wire does big rock with dense layers ("Perspex Icon"). Wire does lean funk with colorful choruses ("Hard Currency") while maintaining its patented looming, distanced, cool demeanor.

Wire may sound warmer than ever, but you'll never hear them sweat.

- A.D. Amorosi

Singles 06-07

(In The Red ***)

Reatard has all the makings of a punk hero: dropped out of high school to make music at 15, released 7-inch records like subscription magazines, and adopted an unforgettable stage name hoping to class himself with Johnny Rotten. That aptitude for doing as he pleases - be it posing in blood-drenched skivvies for an album cover or photographing his own puke for his blog - won him a deal with Matador.

This CD of vinyl-only singles is jumpy enough to make you believe he'd punch an audience member in the face after any one. But the songwriting is out of reach, spirited, and not very memorable. Compare the Go-Betweens cover ("Don't Let Him Come Back") to everything else and only the catchy "Hammer I Miss You" quite stands up. Maybe he's saving it for the real album.

- Dan Weiss

Partie Traumatic

(Columbia **)

Letdown of the season:

Partie Traumatic

, the awfully titled debut by Jacksonville, Fla., quintet Black Kids, was supposed to be a giddy dance-floor delight that would put the bomp in 1980s Morrissey and The Cure revivalism. That's what last year's terrific

Wizard of Ahhs

EP would have led you to believe, and the standard that the shined-up version of the absolutely fabulous single "I'm Not Going to Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You" lived up to. But the best songs on this disappointing

Partie

- along with "Boyfriend," "Hurricane Jane," and "I've Underestimated My Charm (Again)" - were on

Wizard

, and singer Reggie Youngblood seems to have run short of ideas before he really got started. Another case of a blog buzz band being rushed to market before being ready for the big time.

- D.D.

Pinetop Perkins and Friends

(Telarc ***1/2)

At 95, Pinetop Perkins doesn't have a lot of blues-playing friends who approach his age. Only the 82-year-old B.B. King, who cuts it up with Pinetop on the latter's tribute to their native state, "Down in Mississippi," comes close to the great piano man here.

The other guests, including Eric Clapton and Jimmie Vaughan, are decades younger. Pinetop, however, has no trouble keeping up. The selections are sometimes overly familiar ("Got My Mojo Workin'," "Sweet Home Chicago"), but the Muddy Waters sideman is in sharp, nimble-fingered form. Spry on the boogies and soulful on the ballads, he shows how a master can keep even well-worn material sounding fresh.

- Nick Cristiano

Pay Me No Mind

(NorthernBlues ***)

At the other end of the age spectrum from the 95-year-old Pinetop Perkins is this group that also hails from Mississippi. The Homemade Jamz Blues Band consists of the three Perry siblings: singer-guitarist Ryan, 16; bassist Kyle, 14; and drummer Taya, 9. Their ages and the fact that Ryan and Kyle play homemade guitars made of auto mufflers may seem to peg the band as just a novelty. Forget it: These kids know the blues.

Pay Me No Mind

bristles with real juke-joint energy and grit, as the Perrys live up to the tradition of Pinetop, Muddy and B.B. All but one of the songs was written by the youngsters' father, Renaud, who also plays harmonica on four tracks. They cover the usual blues territory, but Ryan delivers these tales of hard times and woman trouble with the command of someone who's already been there. Makes you wonder how good he'll be when he really has been.

- N.C.

The New Crystal Silence

(Concord ***1/2)

Thirty-six years ago, vibraphonist Gary Burton and keyboardist Chick Corea made a startling duo recording on Munich-based ECM called

Crystal Silence

.

Here they reprise that gathering on a two-disc set, one where they're accompanied by the Sydney Symphony, and the other

mano a mano

, the way it started in the early 1970s.

The orchestral CD meanders a bit with some indulgent modernism. But overall, it represents a fabulous marriage between soloists and orchestra. The tunes, all by Corea, are set to large, Gershwin-esque soundscapes by Tim Garland that magnify the power of the soloists. The originals make for strong tunes, and the interplay with the orchestra keeps bursting to the fore.

The duo recording are intense. Their considerable chemistry gets distilled and bounced around in a personal way. Corea uses different registers and accompanies so vividly that the set sounds bigger than a duo. Burton, too, is a soloing whirlwind who just rocks in the space allotted to him and seems to inspire Corea to higher gears.

"Señor Mouse," which was on the original

Crystal Silence

, starts in an Asian frame of mind before it steams Latin without losing its opening inflections.

- Karl Stark

Alone Together

(Pirouet ***)

It is a cool and sophisticated sound that trumpeter Tim Hagans projects on this quartet recording. Made in Munich in 2006 with German drummer Jochen Ruckert, this stylish session features four tunes by the pianist, Marc Copland, a Philly native who is also a frequent jazz presence in Europe. Copland's tunes are full of dark queries that put out introspective beauty.

Hagans, who lives in Lower Bucks County, fills out the set with three standards, including the title track, which gets a sober reading. His solo, though, is obliquely handsome. And the quality of the set with bassist Drew Gress is high. It isn't blunt, but this session unfolds its pleasures at a leisurely pace.

- K.S.

Dallas Symphony Orchestra,
Zweden conducting

(Dallas Symphony Orchestra, ***)

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Zweden conducting

(LPO ***1/2)

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra may have struck gold with its new music director, the little-known (at least in America) Dutch conductor Jaap Van Zweden. He became concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra at age 18, but has since turned to conducting, and has already recorded all the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies. The Dallas Symphony's own issue of Beethoven's fifth and seventh symphonies (available on the orchestra's Web site,

» READ MORE: www.dallassymphony.com

) show him on yet another level.

You still hear Zweden's natural affinity for the historically informed performance that's so evident in his Philips-label recordings with the Residentie Orchestra, but now it's melded with the Dallas Symphony's more muscular sound and secure playing.

Usually conductors slow the tempo to accommodate the bigger sound of modern instruments, but Zweden's Dallas performance of the

Symphony No. 7

is considerably faster than his with the Dutch orchestra. Though we shouldn't start whispering "not since Carlos Kleiber," you definitely want to keep an ear or two on him.

That said, this live London Philharmonic Mahler recording, while perfectly good, is strangely indistinctive in ways that just aren't like him. Maybe a good performance was lost in the Royal Festival Hall acoustics?

- David Patrick Stearns

Trio Wanderer and Pascal Moragues

(Harmonia Mundi, ****)

Hebrides Ensemble

(Linn ***1/2)

Gould Piano Trio and Robert Plane

(Chandos ****)

Any new recording of Messiaen's great chamber music work, written when the composer was in a German POW camp in World War II, is an occasion, but three? Because the piece's performance history is still in a state of play (no pun intended), these three recordings have different things to say, the Trio Wanderer disc going furthest to capture the music's explosive fervor. The performance is abrasive and confrontational, played very much as an angry product of war, but also as the dawn of a new world of musical language that Messiaen and his contemporaries would go on to form after the war.

The Hebrides Ensemble taps into Messiaen's more cerebral side in a performance that's phrased and blended with great refinement and precision, always observing what points of reference the composer was considering (you hear lots of Bach here) but never with a detachment that takes you away from the music.

The Gould Trio focuses more on the music's fantastical side, so much that the piece has rarely seemed more mercurial and less cogent. The approach is gutsy but also maddening when the individual instruments always seem to be running away from one another. All three discs also include the composer's 1932

Theme and Variations

for violin and piano - a nice companion piece, showing the composer's personality almost fully formed and breaking down conventional formalities while only in his early 20s.

- D.P.S.