A Lee Ann Womack
The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone
ATO
Exiting Nashville's major label system was the best thing ever to happen to Lee Ann Womack's music. The Texas country singer's commercial clout peaked with her wedding song/prom theme mega-hit "I Hope You Dance" in 2000. After 2008's Call Me Crazy, she took a six-year break before returning to her roots on 2014's terrific The Way I'm Livin', released on the bluegrassy Sugar Hill label.
Now with indie power player ATO Records, The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone continues to dig into that fertile ground, applying her formidable voice to a set of unvarnished country songs produced by her husband, Frank Liddell. The 14-song blue mood piece includes seven she co-wrote, covers of George Jones and Harlan Howard, two well-chosen songs by rising country tunesmith Brent Cobb, and the near miraculous feat of making the storied murder ballad "Long Black Veil" sound fresh.
And maybe best of all -- along with the black-and-white cover shot of Womack puffing out cigarette smoke -- is Adam Wright and Jay Knowles' title track, which deromanticizes honky-tonk tropes about lonesome trains and walking the floor with a lyric about how heartache songs never get old.
Hot tracks: "Long Black Veil," "The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone," Howard's aching "He Called Me Baby"
-- DAN DELUCA
The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)
A Husker Du
Savage Young Du
The Numero Group
Finally, the wildly influential power punk trio from St. Paul, Minn., is getting a proper early career look-back with this remastered collection of 69 demos, live tracks and rarities on three CDs from its nascent years, including its debut studio album, Everything Falls Apart, and an alternate version of the hardcore, aptly named live document Land Speed Record.
No, this doesn't include the band's seminal recordings from its prolific '80s run on SST or anything from its two Warner Bros. albums -- 1986's Candy Apple Grey or 1987's swan song opus Warehouse: Songs and Stories. But what we do get is an in-depth look at a band raging through its infancy, besieged with ideas yet firmly in control. Songwriters Bob Mould and Grant Hart rant authoritatively about politics, sexual confusion, frustration, apathy and their growing discomfort with the macho rigidity of the hardcore scene.
Early demos like "Do You Remember" sound like the results of an amphetamine binge. The live cuts, paroxysms of barely contained fury, reveal the band's wild, bruising attack. But tracks like Hart's "Can't See You Anymore" and the funny, entomologically based toss-off "Insects Rule the World" already hint at the more melodic side of punk chaos that Husker Du would develop brilliantly on records such as Flip Your Wig and New Day Rising (the jangly "Industrial Grocery Store" even sounds a bit like their later cover of The Mary Tyler Moore Show's "Love Is All Around").
Savage Young Du is made even more poignant in light of the Sept. 13 death at age 56 of singer-drummer Hart, who founded the band in 1979 with singer-guitarist Mould and bassist Greg Norton. Their split in 1988 was one of rock's more acrimonious and bitter and their SST catalog apparently remains in legal limbo, but here's hoping that maybe someday the rest of Husker Du's career gets the kind of vital and loving treatment given to these early songs.
Hot tracks: "Statues," "Real World," "Everything Falls Apart," "It's Not Funny Anymore," "Gravity," "In a Free Land," "Data Control"
--SEAN CLANCY
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
A- Kelela
Take Me Apart
Warp
Since her outlandish 2013 Cut 4 Me mixtape, D.C. native Kelela has been discussed in the same breath as Bjork, Solange (both are fans) and Frank Ocean, especially when it comes to smartly confessional, experimental electronic soul. Without relying on conventional rhythm, melody, meter or structure, Kelela became a sensation of next-level genre-babbling, a vibe she doubles down on, hard, for her full-album debut, Take Me Apart.
With her brawny vocals and an oddly phrased and hungry take on breakups, makeups and forthcoming romance, Kelela is ready to take no prisoners. The jungle-electro of her terrorizing title track is both immensely sexual and potently psychological in its principal provocation of desire: "Don't say you're in love, baby, until you learn to take me apart." While nerve-scrapping songs such as "S.O.S." and "Better" follow a similar brain/body dialogue and tone, an aptly titled "Truth or Dare" finds its synaptic gap sensuality (and reality) espoused in robotic nu-funk beeps and boings.
Still, it is "Turn to Dust" that is most stirring in that it toys with soul's age-old conventions (a shimmering arrangement of subtle string sounds produced by Arca) while imagining love's hole-in-the-heart (and head) distance in language that's crisp, frank, and emotive. That's a tradition worth keeping and twisting, and Kelela does so brilliantly.
Hot tracks: "Take Me Apart," "Turn to Dust," "Truth or Dare," "Better"
-- A.D. AMOROSI
The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)
Style on 11/28/2017