Music releases: Alejandro Escovedo

REAL ANIMAL

Back Porch Records

Alejandro Escovedo can be a pensive, cryptic, death-haunted songwriter, as his recent albums attest. But every so often he prefers to blast some basic rock, and that’s what he does on his ninth studio album, “Real Animal.”

Escovedo looks back on his punk-rocking 1970s youth, when he was a founder of a San Francisco punk band, the Nuns, and then of what was called a “cow-punk” band, Rank and File. This time his songwriting embraces bluntness. “It’s 1978/ We know we’re not in tune/ We know we’ll never be great,” he sings in “Nuns Song.”

Escovedo, 57, isn’t trying to erase the decades between his past and present. Mortality is still on his mind in songs like the harmonica-hooting “People (We’re Only Gonna Live So Long),” which observes, “We still got time/ But never quite as much as we think.”

The album has some hard-riffing two-chord guitar stomps, but it’s not wedded to a punk sound. “Real Animal” was produced by Tony Visconti, who worked on David Bowie’s best ‘70s albums, and it has tracks that knowingly look back, like the “Ashes to Ashes” homage in “Golden Bear.”

Elsewhere it uses Escovedo’s own preferred configuration: a rock band augmented by a string quintet.

— Jon Pareles

The New York Times