New Recordings

Rave on Buddy Holly

(Hear Music ***1/2)

nolead ends Music supervisor Randall Poster reeled in a whale of a lineup for Rave on Buddy Holly, an uncommonly good tribute album to the Lubbock, Texas, wonder who left behind a songbook of staggering quality when he died in a plane crash in 1959 at age 22. The Black Keys, Cee Lo Green, Patti Smith, John Doe, Justin Towne Earle, My Morning Jacket, Nick Lowe, Florence and the Machine - the list goes on. More to the point, pretty much every interpretation - from Fiona Apple and Jon Brion's "Everyday" to Kid Rock's "Well All Right" - tweaks the original arrangement just enough while retaining Holly's essential innocence. The only real misstep is Paul McCartney's take on "It's So Easy," which kicks up an impressive "Why Don't We Do It in the Road"-style ruckus before losing focus on a strangely unhinged spoken interlude.

- Dan DeLuca

nolead begins Shabazz Palaces
nolead ends nolead begins Black Up
nolead ends nolead begins (Sub Pop ***)

nolead ends Ishmael Butler has several names, among which is Palaceer Lazaro. He also used to play Butterfly in the groovy '90s crew Digable Planets. I'm at a loss with Butler/Lazaro's music as Shabazz Palaces. I like Black Up for the very thing that keeps me from loving it: His moaning, time-stretched beats and chorus-free rapping are hip-hop soaked in bleach, battery acid and vinegar. Black Up's uncommercial quality recalls Company Flow and Antipop Consortium but from a more Afrocentric place (see title), and his prolix song titles and mystical album art echo Digable peers P.M. Dawn. You can use the word dubstep in the same sentence. Butler's agile rapping is full of axioms like "deception is the truest act," and occasionally a squelchy melody resolves. But I wish I loved it.

- Dan Weiss

nolead begins Jolie Holland
nolead ends nolead begins Pint of Blood
nolead ends nolead begins (Anti ***1/2)

nolead ends Jolie Holland slurs and slides through her songs. She retains the drawl from her Texas youth, and she sounds like an old soul. Her first albums drew on early 20th-century styles - parlor songs, blues, country - but Pint of Blood, her fifth, is less specifically time- and genre-bound than her past work.

Holland has said Neil Young's Zuma was an inspiration for this one, and that's evident in the loose, electric grooves of "Gold and Yellow" and "All Those Girls," and the dark, conflicted themes throughout the CD. "Only an angel sent from up above / can tell me if you're the devil or the one I should love," she sings in "The Devil's Sake," one of several songs with a jazzy, Billie Holiday-like subtlety. Pint of Blood is spooky and haunted - and spellbinding.

- Steve Klinge

nolead begins The Book of Mormon
nolead ends nolead begins Cast Recording
nolead ends nolead begins (Ghostlight ***1/2)

nolead ends nolead begins Music from Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
nolead ends nolead begins Cast Recording
nolead ends nolead begins (Interscope ***)

nolead ends Two toasts of the Great White Way just released their cast recordings. Both productions come from upstart Broadway newcomers, each dangerous for different reasons.

South Park's razor-sharp satirists Trey Parker and Matt Stone, along with Avenue Q coauthor Robert Lopez, wrote the music, book and lyrics for the Tony-winning Mormon. It lampoons organized religion and big Broadway shtick while showing love for those same musical forms and missionaries who blaze trails into uncharted lands. Mormon is engagingly lyrical, melodically contagious, and surprisingly not mean-spirited, even in songs such as "Hasa Diga Eebowai," which curses the Almighty in Ugandan obscenities.

By now the destructive pitfalls of Spider-Man's months of previews are the stuff of legend. Luckily, little of that mess translates to the show's songs, penned by Bono and The Edge and produced by U2's longtime collaborator Steve Lillywhite. Don't expect Achtung Baby. The music is more atmospheric than melodic, and features stabs at snappy jazz and schmaltzy cabaret. The lyrics tell an origin story similar to Spider-Man, the celebrated first Spidey flick. Although in "Picture This," the composers perform their usual angst-ridden brand of bruised rock, Reeve Carney, who sings the lead role of Spidey, takes command throughout and avoids doing a lame Bono impersonation.

- A.D. Amorosi

Texas Songbook

(Bismeaux ***1/2)

nolead ends These days Gary Nicholson is a Nashville cat, a much-sought-after writer and player who collaborates with Delbert McClinton and many others inside and out of the Music City mainstream. For his latest solo album, however, Nicholson has returned to his native Texas, and what a delightful homecoming it is.

Texas Songbook features 13 stellar Nicholson originals. His take on the boogie-fried "Same Kind of Crazy" stands up to the earlier recordings by cowriter McClinton, George Strait, and Del McCoury. So do "Fallin' and Flyin'," sung by Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, and the Guy Clark cowrite "Sometimes You Write the Song," the title song of Clark's most recent album. There's also the Western swing of "Talkin' Texan," the border-flavored "Live, Laugh, Love," and the gospel blues of "Bless 'Em All."

"Listen to Willie" is not the first tribute to Willie Nelson, but it is one of the best. The verses cleverly string together lines from the Texas icon's songs as Nelson's longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, provides some authentic Willie flavor. It's just one more reason to listen to Gary.

- Nick Cristiano

Songs of Mirth and Melancholy

(Marsalis Music ***1/2)

nolead ends Saxophonist Branford Marsalis has done duet recordings with just his father, pianist Ellis Marsalis, and fellow New Orleans native, crooner Harry Connick Jr. Here the tenor and soprano saxophonist takes up with Joey Calderazzo, the pianist of his quartet since 1998, for a session that is surprisingly sublime.

Marsalis and Calderazzo sound classical in the best jazz sense: handsome melodies creating beauty and lots of free space for interaction.

Calderazzo, who wrote four of the tunes, can still get New Orleans-drenched, as he does on the old-time funk of "One Way." His "La Valse Kendall" is rich and darkly fanciful, while Marsalis, who runs the Marsalis Music label, delivers some gorgeous melodies on "The Bard Lachrymose" and "Precious," along with his outsize playing.

This is a sweet outing. There isn't a hint of showing off. The takes are stately and reflective.

- Karl Stark

Thomas Gould, electric violin; Aurora Orchestra, Nicholas Collon cond.

(Decca ***1/2)

nolead ends By now, composer Muhly has a large enough discography that you listen to his CDs ready for anything. By now, he also has a large enough output that you know not everything he does is substantial. This collection of recent works for chamber orchestra reflects both.

The title piece, Seeing Is Believing, is a violin concerto of sorts and is major Muhly. It's hugely inventive, showing him drawing from many different kinds of music: Naturally, there's minimalism, but also recurring gestures that are somewhere between bird calls and some of the more obsessive wind writing in Strauss' Salome. As the title suggests, much of it is infused with an inviting sense of wonder.

Other works include the punchier Step Team, an intricate, more frankly minimalist work that resembles the music of Michael Torke, plus three of Muhly's own arrangements of Elizabethan English music by Byrd and Gibbons - all pleasantly diverting, even if adapting these vocal works to instrumental forces waters down their rhetoric.

- David Patrick Stearns