Two decades after “Loveless,” My Bloody Valentine has finally reunited for a new album “m b v” (inset). (
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Albums of the Week
My Bloody Valentine
“m b v”
★★★ 1/2
WHO takes 22 years to finish a third album? Irish studio wizard Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, that’s who. But he finally dropped “m b v” — the endlessly awaited follow-up to 1991’s “Loveless” — on the band’s Web site Saturday night, generating a traffic surge that crashed the server.
The man behind the amazing guitar layers of “Loveless” wasn’t likely to top that album, no matter what he did. So, smartly, he’s simply made a very good album in the same basic style: hushed, sweetly melodic rock songs drenched in delicious six-string distortion. Tracks such as “Only Tomorrow” and “If I Am” (both sung by guitarist-singer Bilinda Butcher) are more sighs than statements — only with enough sonic heft to level a house.
Tim McGraw
“Two Lanes of Freedom”
★★
ON his 12th album, the Nashville superstar is as professional as ever — and the results are predictably mixed. Tim McGraw sounds best at his liveliest, as on “Mexicoma,” the latest of country music’s south-of-the-border fantasias (see also Toby Keith’s “Stays in Mexico”). And most of the mid-tempo stuff — which is most of the album — is OK, too.
But OK is all it is, from the weepy “Friend of a Friend” to the roll call of classic country titles that makes up the lyrics of “Nashville Without You.” And sometimes it’s worse, as with the dumb machismo of “Truck Yeah.”
Downloads of the Week
Jim James
“A New Life”
★★ 1/2
HERE’S a switch. Jim James is the leader of jammy rockers My Morning Jacket, but on this lead single from his first solo album, “Regions of Light and Sound of God,” he goes for a lighter, almost ’50s vibe, with hand claps and strutting baritone sax underpinning his delicate falsetto.
Coheed and Cambria
“Dark Side of Me”
★ 1/2
ROCKLAND County’s biggest prog-rock band goes for a subdued power ballad for this single off their seventh album, “The Afterman: Descension,” which like all their albums is part of a single, ongoing science-fiction mega-story. Too bad it sounds like something Bruno Mars might have thrown out as “too edgy.”
Josh Groban
“Brave”
★
THE lead single off popera star Josh Groban’s sixth album, “All That Echoes,” is so stirring it’s tedious. “Brave” sounds like a four-minute Olympics ad minus the visuals, its unctuously uplifting lyrics (“Look into the storm and feel the raaaaiiin!”) little more than orchestrated Oprah-like platitudes.
Richard Thompson
“Salford Sunday”
★★
VETERAN British folk-rock icon Thompson — whose “Electric” is his 14th solo album since 1972 — is always basically likable, but he can be a bit stolid. That’s the case with “Salford Sunday” — the six-string hook is sprightly, the singing upbeat but pained, the song ultimately forgettable.