Shopping List: The New and the Recommended
Canadians lose their religion, Americans lament Katrina, zealotry.
The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible (Merge)
The sequel to this big Canadian band's 2004 indie-rock hit Funeral was recorded in a small Quebec church and sounds like it. Bandleader Win Butler belts out joyous despair in a voice pitched halfway between David Byrne and Bruce Springsteen as the chamber punks pull out the organ stops on an album that illuminates irreverent theological musings with strings, horns, synthesizers, and passion.
Wynton Marsalis, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary (Blue Note)
The trumpeter's honey tones and his band's sublimely swinging give-and-take camouflage Plantation's stinging social indictments. Singer Jennifer Sanon condemns homelessness ("Find Me"), greed ("Super Capitalism"), and racism in a deceptive purr. And the bandleader rails against gangster rap and pleads for leadership in his own counter-rap, "Where Y'All At."
Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Calling (Zoe/Rounder)
The personal and political dovetail in Carpenter's deeply emotional folk-rock. She frets over zealots of every stripe in the title track before deciding that "We're All Right" over big beats and blazing guitars in the next. "Houston" laments the Southern masses displaced by Hurricane Katrina and concludes optimistically with "Bright Morning Star."
Otis Taylor, Definition of a Circle (Telarc)
Otis Taylor embeds his gruff voice in spare yet artfully arranged guitars, banjos, mandolins, and horns on maybe the best blues album you'll hear all year. Taylor's songwriting personas include a deported Mexican cowboy, an African-American shocked by TV images of Katrina's aftermath, a father soothing a bi-racial child, and a man who covets his neighbor's wife and land.
Ry Cooder, My Name Is Buddy (Nonesuch)
The guitarist-producer stirs up a dustbowl's worth of retro folk, blues, and country music on this clever concept album concerning a hitchhiking feline's American odyssey. Pete Seeger adds banjo to "J. Edgar," and more than a little working-class rabble is roused along the way.