Blackberry Smoke

“HOLDING ALL THE ROSES”

Legged Records

Blackberry Smoke is one of the most acclaimed Southern rock bands in recent memory. They’ve acted as a successful headlining act across the American countryside and have even performed for Zac Brown Band, ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and other legendary names. It’s not necessarily a big surprise, then, that ardent followers of the band have been looking forward to the release of their fourth studio album, “Holding All the Roses,” which — perhaps appropriately — is named after an analogy meaning “you’re the winner.”

Aurally, this is the band’s most cohesively rock-ready work to date, unafraid of embracing Southern rock standards to influence their sound more directly than in the past. From the starting moments of lead single and album opener “Let Me Help You (Find the Door)” and its humorously gratifying anti-mainstream sentimentality, through the slow-burning, album-closing torch song “Fire in the Hole,” the LP holds up amazingly well.

On the overall, Blackberry Smoke have elevated to greater heights with the release of “Holding All the Roses.” If there were a modern Southern rock band closer to breaking the mold on popular rock radio, it would be them. “Holding All the Roses,” with its sleek yet “real” feeling, trailblazing attitude, production, and its honorable hearkening back to traditional Southern sounds, is top-notch listening from top to bottom.

— Jonathan Frahm,

PopMatters

Father John Misty

“I LOVE YOU, HONEYBEAR”

Sub Pop Records

Father John Misty hates himself. Loves hating himself. Hates loving himself. Saying he loves himself might be a stretch too far.

“I Love You Honeybear” is his second album of drowsy, arched-eyebrow, storytelling soft rock — better than the first, because the contradictions run deeper. This time he’s in love, and he’s fighting hard to hold on to his cynicism, even as it’s melting. “I brought my mother’s depression/You’ve got your father’s scorn and wayward aunt’s schizophrenia,” he moans on the title track, reporting not on the union of star-crossed lovers but of two people whose flaws hold them together.

Father John Misty is Josh Tillman, who for many thankless years toiled as J. Tillman, releasing dour solo albums, and then for some of those years also toiled a little less thanklessly as the drummer of Fleet Foxes. All of which only proves that you can never tell what’s lurking under the surface.

The new album goes on much like the title track —songs served at lounge tempo and temperature with Randy Newman verve and refracted in a broken mirror. Even its misfires are indulgent and intriguing.

On “Bored in the USA,” he muses over people’s perceptions of commitment, wondering if anyone (else?) thinks, “Oh good, the stranger’s body’s still here, our arrangement hasn’t changed/Now I’ve got a lifetime to consider all the ways/I grow more disappointing to you as my beauty warps and fades.” This warped, lovely album suggests that a true longtime partnership isn’t two people who love each despite their flaws, but of two people accepting decay and choosing to ride it out nonetheless. ON TOUR: May 22 — McMenamins Crystal Ballroom, Portland; www.crystalballroompdx.com.

— Jon Caramanica,

New York Times

Rudresh Mahanthappa

“BIRD CALLS”

Act Music

“This album is not a tribute to Charlie Parker,” alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa writes in the liner notes to “Bird Calls.” That’s about 50 percent disputable, or, to put it another way, just true enough that he could have made the album without any reference to Parker, in its titles or otherwise.

The pieces on “Bird Calls” — a strong new record by a strong new quintet — are not versions of Charlie Parker songs. Nor are they new melodies based on their chord changes — a process that is such a normal part of jazz that it doesn’t need any explanation when other people do it on their records.

Rather, those pieces include traces of a Parker composition or solo. Some of those traces are pretty far inside a song, folded into a compositional and improvising language that sounds native to Mahanthappa, played in a bright tone, with long, hard gusts of breath, and sometimes given tiny ornaments adapted from Indian music.

One of the most explicit, “Talin Is Thinking,” uses a seven-note sequence you might recognize as the opening of “Parker’s Mood” — but it also suggests, in various little parts, some of the chordal movement of Henry Threadgill’s “Gateway” and the drone-dirge atmosphere of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” Some tracks use melodic material squeezed and stripped of its original rhythmic coding, so you hear a Parker song differently, as a set of intervals.

That Mahanthappa went to the trouble of listing his sources makes the record, inevitably, a game. But the extent to which it’s more than a game is how quickly you cease to care about the connections. The album’s premise neatly erases itself, which proves something important: that Parker as sound or energy or strategy may be all-important for Mahanthappa, but the copyrightable or memorizable parts of his music are beside the point.

So you’re released to concentrate on the meshing tenacity of the rhythm section, with drummer Rudy Royston, bassist François Moutin, pianist Matt Mitchell and 20-year old trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, who all meet the demands of this music but also individually establish their own sounds within the group.

—Ben Ratliff,

New York Times

Rhiannon Giddens

“TOMORROW IS MY TURN”

Nonesuch Records

With her superb debut, “Tomorrow Is My Turn,” Carolina Chocolate Drops founding member Rhiannon Giddens’ light shines with the dazzling brilliance of a genuine star. The 11 songs she and producer T-Bone Burnett picked for the album are stylistically diverse, covering blues, folk, country, gospel and jazz. Giddens, of African American, European American, and Native American background, weaves together the various strands of American vernacular music into an all-in-one tapestry that also is a musical autobiography.

Who says you can’t have Dolly Parton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe on the same album? “Tomorrow Is My Turn” covers material recorded by these and other women, famous and obscure. The album’s feminism isn’t accidental; Giddens says that she picked songs that were “all by women or interpreted by women.”

On every track, Giddens’ singing is a wonder. She can dirty up a vocal line with blue notes and growls, sing with crystalline purity, rock out and soothe. Burnett’s production is adroit but unobtrusive, and the musicians he recruited sound like a real band, not hired hands: fiddler Gabe Witcher; bassists Paul Kowert and Dennis Crouch; percussionist Jack Ashford from Motown’s renowned Funk Brothers and drummer Jay Bellerose; guitarist Colin Linden, and Tata Vega on backup vocals. Everything works on “Tomorrow is My Turn,” an album that heralds the arrival of a major American artist. ON TOUR: May 19 — Aladdin Theater, Portland; www.aladdin-theater.com.

— George de Stefano,

PopMatters