Train

“CALIFORNIA 37”

Columbia Records

No one tries harder than Train. Unfortunately, all that strain and effort shows up in unattractive ways throughout the “Hey, Soul Sister” band’s new album “California 37.”

It’s one gimmick after another on “California 37,” which kicks off with a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” rip-off “This’ll Be My Year” and never really recovers. (“I stopped believin’, though Journey told me, ‘Don’t’,” Pat Monahan sings, presumably with a straight face.)

Sometimes, the cutesiness works, as it does in the first single “Drive By” and “Bruises,” but usually it falls flat, as in the flamenco-tinged “50 Ways to Say Goodbye” and the morbid “You Can Finally Meet My Mom.”

Loudon Wainwright III

“OLDER THAN MY OLD MAN NOW”

2nd Story Sound Records

Four decades ago, at the dawn of the singer-songwriter movement, Loudon Wainwright III had the mixed blessing of being touted as the latest “new Dylan” in the media assembly line of supposed successors to the great man. But Wainwright, a natural clown with a facetious self-mocking humor, soon escaped the curse by claiming his own niche as his generation’s most honest singing comedian.

The autobiographical “Older Than My Old Man Now” is a gleefully morbid summing-up of his life in which he ponders childhood, family history, aging and death with an attitude of incredulity that he should be 65 and turning out songs like “My Meds” and “I Remember Sex.” If his power as a folk-pop humorist using rhymed couplets is undiminished and his bratty delivery pretty much the same as on his 1973 hit “Dead Skunk,” his wit can go only so far to camouflage the lurking despair in lines like, “It’s the 21st century and I’m downright old/ My seeds are spent and my loins are cold,” from “The Here and the Now.”

The music is a tuneful, generally upbeat potpourri of folk, folk-blues and jug band styles in which the usual lineup of friends and relatives found at a Wainwright concert show up to sing and play. The communal cheer only sharpens the gallows humor.

Jason Mraz

“LOVE IS A FOUR LETTER WORD”

Atlantic Records

With his fourth studio album, “Love Is a Four Letter Word,” Jason Mraz successfully makes the transition from being simply clever to being deep. On his early albums, the singer-songwriter seemed far more concerned with words than melodies, more interested in playing around than conveying emotion.

That’s all different now. Mraz, perhaps buoyed by his record-setting smash “I’m Yours,” is now writing his own rules. The album’s first single, “I Won’t Give Up,” is a beautiful, slow, acoustic ballad that unfolds at its own emotional pace, with no Mraz-ian wordplay, only lyrics carefully chosen for maximum impact. He can still turn a phrase, as he does in the poignant “Frank D. Fixer,” a song about his self-sufficient grandfather, and he is still attracted to the island-tinged lilt of “I’m Yours,” which is a bit more pronounced here on “The Freedom Song” and “Living in the Moment.”

What Mraz does on the gorgeous “Be Honest,” though, is a whole new level for him. With the help of Inara George, it floats between the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love?” and the lush Brazilian pop of Caetano Veloso. The same goes for “Everything Is Sound,” a deceptively simple ballad that grows into a grand sing-along.

While “I’m Yours” established Mraz as a hit maker, “Love Is a Four Letter Word” should establish him as a bona fide artist.

Future

“PLUTO”

Epic Records

In the last couple of years no Atlanta rapper has been more potent, with more regularity, than Future, who has released a steady slew of strip-club anthems and tough-talk boasts.

He has a natural, and sometimes unusual, instinct for melody that gives these songs additional resonance.

“Pluto,” Future’s major-label debut, begins with bombastic spoken word from Big Rube, then segues into “Parachute,” a collaboration with R. Kelly. Up against Kelly’s clarion lechery, Future’s voice is decayed, diseased, astral. Some artists use digital effects to mask weaknesses; Future uses them to create intriguing frictions.

This accessible, smart and unlikely album continues in much the same way: straightforward conceit, oddball approach. Rarely is Future’s wordplay more important than the song’s melody or the sonic approach he takes to the vocals. On “Tony Montana,” one of Future’s hits from last year, he sounds aggrieved; not even the addition of a Drake verse makes it any less ominous.

Most striking, amid the fantastic, brawny boasting of “Same Damn Time” and the woozy swamplike drug ode “I’m Trippin,” Future turns out to be a master of moody sentiment. In several places here he serrates his voice, sounding almost on the verge of tears, for several different reasons. On “Truth Gonna Hurt You,” which has some of the laid-back funk of mid-’90s Outkast, it’s letting a woman down.

Of all the possible Futures, the most potent and revealing is the odd one.

Spiritualized

“SWEET HEART, SWEET LIGHT”

Fat Possum Records

There’s so much uncertainty in rock right now. It’s turned into lightweight, flexible material; it’s almost apologizing for itself. It’s mostly become a question, or a proposal. It’s renting space. It can seem as if it might go away one day, when its basic imperatives are forgotten, and it’s no longer a music about fear, innocence, power, naive hope and ineptness.

Jason Pierce will be all right if that happens. Pierce, who goes by J Spaceman, the central and only continuous member of Spiritualized, seems to know exactly what he’s doing with rock, or exactly what rock is doing with him. He specializes in two things: big, clear melodies, like those in rounds or old nursery rhymes, rendered prettily and tenderly; and the-artist-is-only-a-vessel music: drones, repetition, chants, rendered through dense layering of sound and guitar spasms in a single chord.

Sometimes, in “Sweet Heart, Sweet Light,” Spiritualized’s seventh album in 20 years, he puts both tendencies together. The album as a whole sounds as if it comes from a willful or natural ignoring. It’s grandiose — slouchy, broody, mock-churchy, self-pitying.