<\/p>\n
As you can probably tell, I\u2019m still playing catch up from the summer here.\u00a0It was a better summer than it got credit for.<\/p>\n
Brother Ali, \u201cMysterious Things\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Ali\u2019s preacherly cadence rubs guilty consciences the wrong way, but lyrically he remains as honestly introspective as you could ask of a rap moralist, revisiting past relationships with insight and prickly acceptance. Throughout his latest, Satisfied Soul<\/em>, Ali is provided with fittingly soulful Ant beats, few as hooky as the bluesy guitar lick here.\u00a0<\/p>\n Crush Scene, \u201cPrice of Being Cool\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n That \u201cJolene\u201d cover last year wasn\u2019t misleading\u2014Crush Scene goes even countrier on this latest single, with some rollicking piano and a brash sax accompaniment like something out of a Huey Smith song. A new direction for the band? Possibly. Though when I spoke to them for this year\u2019s Poised to Pop<\/a>, they promised some genre-jumping in the near future, so don’t be too quick to pin them down.<\/p>\n Dylan Hicks & Small Screens, \u201cMoth and Rust\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n On Hicks\u2019s latest, Avian Field Recordings<\/em>, his band continues to sprawl musically, in directions both planned and improvisational. But there are also miniature vignettes like this one, in which a down-on-his-luck fellow goes to the carnival alone, loses a bunch of games on the midway, and brings down Biblical wrath upon the carnies, quoting Matthew 5:45 and 6:19, as down-on-their-luck fellows will do.<\/p>\n Sophie Hiroko, \u201cAshes\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n This Duluth singer-songwriter calls her style \u201ctender bubble grunge,\u201d though way back when (before she was born) we\u2019d have just called it alt-rock. The lead single from her July album, To the Core, <\/em>expresses stinging regret without succumbing to torpor, an ideal mood to match a lyric like, \u201cMy hands are soaked in sorrows and my tongue is soaked in gin.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Runo Plum, \u201cHalfway up the Lawn”<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Tuneful, breathy-voiced bedroom-pop gals are all the rage these days. (Well, \u201crage\u201d seems like the wrong word, but you know what I mean.) Hailing from what one British profiler called \u201cthe Minnesota wilderness,\u201d Plum is among the breathier of the lot, but the guitar hook here allows her to keep her bearings. Her debut album, Patching<\/em>, is due in November.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hayes Carll, \u201cProgress of Man (Bitcoin and Cattle)\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Carll opens his heart up wide on his latest, We’re Only Human<\/em>, and the title track is genuinely inspirational in its modest way. I of course prefer him at his more sardonic, as on this rambling examination of how our only human excess is murdering the planet, and I admit I can’t resist the way he rhymes \u201cDolores\u201d\/\u201drainforest\u201d\/\u201ddivor-ess.\u201d Dig that fiddle too.<\/p>\n Tyler Childers, \u201cOneida\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Snipe Hunter<\/em>? As good an album as they say, and picking a fave track is tricky. The one where Tyler swears if he ever gets rabies he\u2019s gonna bite you? The one where he warns that \u201cKoala bears get livid when they don’t get eucalyptus\/Most of ’em carry syphilis\/Or chlamydia what’s the difference\u201d? Both obvious winners. But I\u2019ll go instead with the most tender, in which the singer courts an older woman who namedrops old movies (I bet some are even from the 20th century) and who looks back to a time \u201cback when the radio spoke to her heart.\u201d<\/p>\n Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, \u201cNew Threats From the Soul\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n I was cool on Davis at first. His pose seemed a little too self-consciously slack for a guy who clearly wrote so carefully, and those David Berman comparisons weren\u2019t doing him any favors either. But this bummed rather than depressed\u00a0eulogy for a relationship he shouldn’t have jettisoned earns its nine-minute run time. “I lie entrenched in my own ignorance and drenched from my head to my toes”? Eh, if you say so. “She had… the kind of smile to get a violent one-or-two-time felon employed”? That’s more like it.<\/p>\nNon-Local Picks<\/h2>\n