The whirlwind of attention surrounding twenty-six-year-old Matthew Miller -- better known as the reggae newcomer Matisyahu -- can partly be attributed to the fact that the world has never seen a Hasidic Jew rocking payos side-locks and the mike with equal devotion. Youth, his major-label debut, arrives amid numerous high-profile slots at reggae festivals and a cameo on P.O.D.'s recent track "Roots in Stereo."
Much of the time, Matisyahu sounds like the former Phish-following high school dropout from White Plains, New York, that he is. His voice is nimble but reedy, his choruses generally given over to starchy platitudes like "You can't sew a stitch with one hand while you're taking it apart." His band plays one-drop roots reggae like a group of Jam Cruise vets, turning up the heat for the sizzling dancehall of "Jerusalem," where Matis pledges, "If I forget you/Then my right hand forgets what it's supposed to do," before quoting Matthew Wilder's 1983 cornball hit "Break My Stride."
"Shalom/Salaam" is a beautiful nylon-string guitar and beatbox interlude, and "What I'm Fighting For" is an acoustic number that wouldn't earn a subway busker two bits. The immensely likable and uplifting "Unique Is My Dove" finds Matis pledging "one woman for me" in a surprising, soulful croon. "WP" (which stands for White Plains) is the most lyrically attractive track: Matis speaks directly about how his teenage frustrations found an outlet rhyming on the playground.
"King Without a Crown," the track that spun on alt-rock radio and got last year's Live at Stubb's album selling, is rerecorded here as the album closer. It's still by far Matisyahu's best, catchiest song, his high, wordless wail commanding the spirit's attention, before he cries, "I want Moshiach now!" -- the album's most forthright expression of his Lubavitch faith. While Youth is certainly worth a listen, the most exceptional thing about Matisyahu remains the most circumstantial. (PETER RELIC)
Juvenile Reality Check (UTP/Atlantic)
With a decade of party-hearty bounce hits like "Back Dat Azz Up" to his name, New Orleans native Juvenile hardly qualifies as a pointedly political rapper. But while finishing Reality Check, the hurricanes hit, and the 'Nolia boy wrote "Get Ya Hustle On," a rallying cry for everybody who "need a check from FEMA" after they "lost everything in Katrina." Juve hasn't turned into Chuck D (on "Hustle," he tells refugees to sling drugs to recoup their losses), but the fire in this enraged Cajun's gut results in a fierce, focused album. The Cool- and Dre-produced "Rodeo" (already a video smash) revisits Juve's long-held pro-stripper sentiments, while "Addicted" is a restraining order disguised as a smoothed-out ballad; Juvenile snarls, "So what you got my name tattooed on your body!" as Brian McKnight croons, "You're just addicted to what the dick did." "Animal" is a reunion jam with Cash Money producer Mannie Fresh, where Juve flows over tumbledown bass bumps and a stutter-step bounce beat. On tracks like these, at least, the Crescent City is alive and well. (PETER RELIC)
David Gilmour On an Island (Columbia)
When Pink Floyd played Live 8 last summer, it was the band's first appearance in more than two decades with Roger Waters, who masterminded Floyd classics like Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. That show briefly rekindled hopes for a new album from the reunited lineup, but fans will have to settle instead for On an Island, the third solo album -- and the first studio recordings in twelve years -- from Floyd singer-guitarist David Gilmour, who became the group's de facto leader when Waters split in 1985.
On an Island suffers from the tendencies that plague all of Floyd's post-Waters works: It's a crawling headphones record that puts germs of ideas -- leaden riffs, astral soundscapes, hazy psychedelia -- where fully realized songs ought to go. To its credit, it's more inviting than the band's last two studio albums, 1987's A Momentary Lapse of Reason and 1994's song-doctored The Division Bell. Where those records mixed slick adult rock, heavy atmospherics and stodgy ruminations on interpersonal miscommunication and the fall of communism, Island merely feels like the night thoughts of a studio pro. Also, it's warmer: Slow-burners like "The Blue" are bong-ready reveries full of art-house orchestrations and impressionistic patter about moonlight and rippling water. Two sturdy rockers -- "Take a Breath" and the slyly catchy "This Heaven" -- show off Gilmour's still-vital, melodically fluid guitar work, but it's telling that one of On an Island's most arresting moments is also its simplest: the acoustic charmer "Smile," one of the rare songs free of interstellar murk and the omnipresent vocal reverb. The same isn't true of the title track, on which David Crosby and Graham Nash's supporting harmonies are processed into oblivion. Gilmour sounds like his own man here, but you wish he had someone -- anyone -- to push him beyond these new adventures in tedium. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)
Van Morrison Pay the Devil (Lost Highway)
How polished is Van Morrison's brand of musical mysticism? On last year's Magic Time, he sang a list of smutty British films and made it sound like cosmic wisdom. After forty years of astral moods, Morrison seems to have realized that his talent for elevating the everyday into the profound would serve him well in country music. So when he sings "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It," he finds the same fertile territory that Hank Williams Sr. did, balancing between a quotidian complaint and Sisyphean dread. Pay the Devil, Morrison's squintillionth album, contains twelve covers of classic country songs, from "Things Have Gone to Pieces" to "Your Cheatin' Heart," and three new compositions that work well right beside them. The album is pleasant but uninspiring, perhaps because Morrison's whiskey voice matches up so easily with these bourbon-soaked songs. While Morrison does nothing discreditable with this material, he also finds nothing new in it. (GAVIN EDWARDS)
Kris Kristofferson This Old Road (New West)
Much like Johnny Cash's American recordings, This Old Road finds sixty-nine-year-old Kris Kristofferson stripped to his essential palette of voice, guitar and harmonica for one of the finest albums in his storied career. With a voice like bubbling tar paper and a heart full of thanks for his blessed life (the title track calls for "one more rainbow for the road"), Kristofferson taps into a timeless trove of country-blues melodies. "Final Attraction" name-checks Roger Miller, June Carter and Shel Silverstein among those who sought redemption in the power of song, and on "The Show Goes On" he spryly remembers hootenannies of yore when "the sweetest thing you ever heard was the singing of 'The Speckled Bird.' " Over rudimentary fingerpicking, "In the News" takes a stand against "the billion-dollar bombing of a nation on its knees," until the singer deigns to hear the voice of God declare, "Not in my name, not on my ground, I want nothing but the ending of the war/No more killing, or it's over, and the mystery won't matter anymore." Thirty-five years after winning a Grammy for "Help Me Make It Through the Night," Kristofferson has made an album to help us through our own dark times. (PETER RELIC)
Goldfrapp Supernature (Mute)
Over the course of three albums, Alison Goldfrapp has combined dance-floor savvy, raw sex appeal and style to make both club kids and rock fans swoon. Sex and style step to the forefront of her British electronica duo's new album: Supernature uses thick, panty-peeling dance beats and outer-space keyboard effects to create a world of raunchy atmospheres: coked-out disco floors, opium dens, S&M clubs and animal-skin-upholstered bedroom lairs. "Number One" is the coquettish feel-good single; on "Oh La La," Ms. Goldfrapp makes like Debbie Harry, breathing, "Switch me on/Turn me up/I want to touch you/You're just made for love" over a strutting synth. The addled romp "Ride a White Horse" finds Goldfrapp vamping like a New Wave Marlene Dietrich to the groove of a four-to-the-floor techno line. And the cabaret tune "Satin Chic" gets a twist with electric player piano and a twitchy percussive stomp so evil it makes your skin crawl. Toxic and delicious, Supernature will make you do bad things -- and like it. (LAUREN GITLIN)
The Little Willies The Little Willies (Milking Bull)
The Little Willies are a loose, expert country band featuring Norah Jones and four fun-loving buddies. Mixing classic covers and sturdy originals, their debut has the same easy charm and command of pre-rock pop as Jones' albums, only with less depth and more pedal steel. Lightly rollicking versions of Fred Rose's "Roly Poly" and Kris Kristofferson's "Best of All Possible Worlds" reflect the band's roots entertaining bargoers in downtown New York. The slower stuff -- like the tear-stained ballad "Easy As the Rain," featuring perfect harmonies from Jones and her co-vocalist, Richard Julian -- is modestly gorgeous. For Jones especially, the record is a mix of showing off and goofing off: On Willie Nelson's "Gotta Get Drunk," she sings in a swooping, grit-specked drawl that makes you wonder why there's no Patsy Cline here, and on "Lou Reed," the Little Willies work up some gently soused Western swing while sending the Velvet Underground legend on a cow-tipping spree. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)
Stereolab Fab Four Suture (Too Pure/Beggars)
Stereolab are the art-pop equivalent of Busta Rhymes -- i.e., Nineties luminaries who've been coasting for a while now. Their tenth album adds six new songs to six singles released last year, but for the most part, Fab Four Suture is just another plush collage of technicolor lounge balladry, cheesy Eurojazz and Laetitia Sadier's chanteuse-y politico observations, with the gurgly keyboards pulling more weight than the half-baked tunes. Where Stereolab once made brainy easy-listening with a strong pleasure principle, Suture often just vagues out: "Eye of the Volcano" strings together eerie psych rock, skittery disco and barely intelligible cooing about the bourgeois with the scarcest of hooks, and "Kyberneticka Babicka Part 1" is an organ-fueled reverie that bubbles over for four and a half minutes. Brighter cuts like "Whisper Pitch" are entrancing in a Magic Eye kind of way, and "Interlock" works up suave funk; but even longtime fans will have to wonder what the point is. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)
The Wood Brothers Ways Not to Lose (Blue Note)
Oliver Wood, the lead singer and guitarist of the Wood Brothers, lives at the junction of Mose Allison's metaphysical blues and Jack Johnson's wise-surfer beatitude. Ways Not to Lose is a loose reimagining of American roots styles, with rhythmic sensibility drawn from the jamsphere (bassist Chris Wood, Oliver's younger brother, is the anchor of Medeski, Martin and Wood) and earthy, acoustic original songs (most written by Oliver) spiced with a shot of hipster irreverence and delivered in a pinched whine. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but these songs work on at least a couple of levels: The flip, easygoing party music on Lose disguises sneakily deep inquiries into what it means to be alive, struggle with temptation ("When your faith is gone, give it one more day"), and every once in a while seek some truth. (TOM MOON)
Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti-)
Neko Case turned up forty years or so too late to be one of the great country voices of the Fifties -- hearts break whenever she hits one of those seraphic high notes. The songs on her fourth studio album, though, are vastly weirder than her precursors': You'll find evocative story fragments about profound alienation written in the dense language of contemporary poetry ("the sledge of tectonic fever"); chorusless rambles with one long free-form verse; oblique songs about songs that suggest she's been studying her New Pornographers bandmate Dan Bejar's stuff; and folk-song lines about John the Baptist. But from her luscious, aching croon, and her ensemble's solemn high-mesa twang and groove (the crew includes members of Calexico and the Band's Garth Hudson), you'd never guess she wasn't covering Patsy Cline standards. (DOUGLAS WOLK)
Mudhoney Under a Billion Suns (Sub Pop)
With their ninth album, these proto-grunge Seattle-ites toss in political rants ("Hard on for War"), horns ("I Saw the Light") and a handful of snappier tunes ("On the Move"), but mostly they deliver a bluesy sprawl full of meaty punk riffs and Stooges-schooled abandon that still outpaces less-inspired slop-rock bands. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)
Buzzcocks Flat-Pack Philosophy (Cooking Vinyl)
These pioneering Brit punks use the devices of their heyday on their seventh studio album -- wry romanticism, guitars that set buzz-saw spills against power-pop crunch and keening Anglo harmonies -- without enough of the nervous hooks that made them so invigorating. "I've Had Enough" is a rave-up almost worthy of Singles Going Steady, but much of Flat-Pack Philosophy is mired in a muddle. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)