The Chieftains Featuring Ry Cooder

SAN PATRICIO

Hear Music

Leave it to the Chieftains to find an Irish diaspora in Mexico and spin off some musical hybrids. On “San Patricio” the Chieftains — who established themselves as strict Celtic traditionalists before turning to globe-spanning fusions — collaborate with Ry Cooder and many Mexican-American and Mexican musicians, embellishing Mexican styles with trilling, skirling pipes and tin whistle.

The San Patricios were soldiers, many of them recent Irish immigrants, who left the U.S. Army and joined Mexico during the Mexican-American War in 1846-48. Their reasons, still debated, may have included mistreatment in the U.S. military, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant bigotry and the promise of better pay and land grants from Mexico. They were defeated and captured, and many were hanged as deserters by the United States. But they are celebrated in Mexico and Ireland. A Mexican band of pipers, Banda de Gaitas de Batallon de San Patricio, was formed to commemorate them and appears on “San Patricio.”

Although the history is contentious, the album’s songs about the San Patricios are unequivocal. “History will absolve us,” Cooder sings (and wrote) in “The Sands of Mexico.” In “March to Battle,” written by the Chieftains’ piper, Paddy Maloney, with words by Brendan Graham, the narration from Liam Neeson calls the soldiers “a brave and gallant band” who “died for freedom.” (It also claims the San Patricios had “but one demand: to see the Yankees safely home across the Rio Grande.” Actually, they inflicted severe casualties on U.S. troops.) The music of “San Patricio” seesaws between Celtic and Mexican styles. It’s most Irish in “Lullaby for the Dead,” a mournful air sung by Moya Brennan of Clannad, and in “Sailing to Mexico,” a hearty modal waltz that also features the Spanish piper Carlos Nunez, from Galicia.

But for most of the album, the Chieftains genially play host to the Mexican-rooted musicians, who have been maintaining traditions — bolero, ranchera, mariachi and regional varieties of the Mexican son — as the Chieftains did in Ireland.

The Chieftains join their guests by racing alongside them, tootling and trilling the melodies on whistle or pipes. They share the beat, tapping it on the bodhran, and slip in counterpoint from fiddle or Celtic harp. But they don’t try to make their collaborators sound Irish. Like the San Patricios, but with a happier outcome, they put Mexico first.

— Jon Pareles,

The New York Times

Titus Andronicus

THE MONITOR

XL Recordings

“I never wanted to change the world/ but I’m looking for a new New Jersey/ because tramps like us, baby we were born to die,” Patrick Stickles declares, deftly merging Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen on Titus Andronicus’ second album, “The Monitor.”

The shredded vocals, buzz-saw guitars, and defiant attitude signify punk rock. But the northern New Jersey band favors messy excess over concision. “The Monitor” is epic — 65 minutes, with half of its 10 songs surpassing seven minutes — and exhilarating, with unflagging energy and momentum.

Named after the Civil War ironclad, “The Monitor” is full of battle-cry choruses (“The enemy is everywhere!”), but Stickles is just as likely to turn to self-recriminations and make “You will always be a loser” a cathartic sing-along. Like Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, he’s an impressive writer skilled in metaphor and multilayered narrative. Other reference points, direct and indirect, include the Pogues, Fugazi, the Hold Steady and Bob Dylan. Titus Andronicus knows history, but would rather recontextualize it than simply repeat it.

— Steve Klinge,

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Jimi Hendrix

VALLEYS OF NEPTUNE

Sony Records

Sort of the guitar god’s last official studio album, “Neptune” collects 12 unreleased tracks, most of which were laid down in 1969 for the follow-up to “Electric Ladyland.” It’s primarily an Experience show, though Band of Gypsies bassist Billy Cox subbed for a fed-up Noel Redding on a few cuts.

Not as elaborately spacey as “Ladyland” (though the title song tries to go there), this collection has more of a back-to-the-blues basics vibe, especially on “Hear My Train A Comin’,” an extended version of “Red House” and Elmore James’ “Bleeding Heart.” There are also redos of the classics “Stone Free” and “Fire,” both sounding slightly stripped down from earlier incarnations.

A couple of instrumentals, including a nearly seven-minute take on Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” don’t reach for the thermonuclear sonics that defined previous Hendrix studio efforts; what they do evoke is the guitarist’s love for his axe, and the wide variety of sounds he could, often playfully, coax out of it.

— Bob Strauss,

Los Angeles Daily News

Ken Peplowski

NOIR BLUE

Capri Records

The clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Ken Peplowski has a vaunted reputation in one specific corner of the jazz universe: He’s the guy you call for a Benny Goodman tribute, or for any number of cruises and picnics in a traditional vein. That’s a matter of taste, but also of typecasting. Like a handful of his peers, Peplowski, 50, has broader interests than his conservative profile would suggest.

And yet he absolutely owns that profile, with an offhanded authority that speaks to his rightness for the part. His excellent new album, “Noir Blue,” features three songs by Billy Strayhorn, and one apiece by the comparable Great American Songbook touchstones Berlin, Carmichael and Kern. And two of the album’s three originals — by Peplowski’s pianist, Shelly Berg, and his drummer, Joe La Barbera — fit easily in the mix.

The album avoids any hint of starchy obligation or misty nostalgia. Peplowski attacks these songs eagerly, as if tearing them out of their shrink wrap. His clarinet playing is, as always, sprightly and controlled, expressive but never shrill. On “Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies,” one of the Strayhorn tunes (jointly credited to Duke Ellington), he adopts a sensuous croon; on “Multicolored Blue,” also by Strayhorn, he opts for sly languor. The band, with Berg, La Barbera and the bassist Jay Leonhart, matches his high degree of enthusiasm and meets his high level of expertise.

That applies no less to the tracks featuring Peplowski on tenor saxophone, an instrument he plays with sportive grace, nodding obliquely at Ben Webster and Lester Young. On “Love Locked Out,” a Ray Noble ballad, he shows his debonair side; on Kern’s “Nobody Else but Me,” he begins with an assertive chorus backed only by La Barbera.

Then there’s the closer, “Little Dogs,” the only piece composed by Peplowski. Inspired by the free-jazz patriarch Ornette Coleman, it’s a blues of indeterminate tonality, eliciting open-ended playing across the board. That it doesn’t sound at all incongruent means, among other things, that Peplowski and his band have been doing their job.

— Nate Chinen, The New York Times

Pavement

QUARANTINE THE PAST: THE BEST OF PAVEMENT

Matador Records

Pavement was an influential yet commercially insignificant band that defined a generation of indie rockers in the 1990s.

That’s not a bad thing when it comes to music for music’s sake, considering leader Stephen Malkmus’ surreal, occasionally brilliant way with words and his band’s overall charm. But it does make Pavement’s first greatest-hits album and this year’s reunion tour feel like a premature cash-in.

Pavement was as inconsistent as it was beloved during its run in the ’90s. This 23-track compilation is a nice, if unnecessary, reminder of the band’s scratched-up genius.

— John Wenzel

The Denver Post