Albums of the Week
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
“Give the People What They Want”
★★★
Sharon Jones was diagnosed with cancer before this album was supposed to come out last summer. So its appearance — ahead of Jones & the Dap-Kings’ first new slate of live shows starting at the Beacon Theatre next month — is good news in more ways than one. Having begun by mimicking late-’60s James Brown, the Dap-Kings have mastered most of that decade’s soul moves: “Retreat!” sounds like the Supremes at their most dramatic, while “Making Up and Breaking Up” calls to mind Hugh Masekela’s “Grazing in the Grass.” The songwriting isn’t quite as classic as the arrangements, though.
Rosanne Cash
“The River & the Thread”
★★★
Rosanne Cash is a rarity — a singer-songwriter whose carefully composed lyrics, slow-burning and tasteful music and literary air draw the listener in rather than adding up to a stone-cold bore. On her 13th album, Cash and her co-producer (and husband) John Leventhal concoct a rich, dark blend of organ, tremolo-laden (trembling) guitar and cloudy string arrangements (particularly effective on “The Long Way Home,” though they’re a bit prim on “Night School”) that are embedded in Cash’s snapshots of the South. In the haunting “Etta’s Tune,” she sings about leaving the South behind and burning up the road behind her as she does.
Downloads of the Week
The Dead Weather
“Open Up (That’s Enough)”
★★
Jack White’s band with Kills singer Alison Mosshart has been on a break for the past few years, but this stand-alone single (the first of a series that will be collected in an album in 2015) brings them back, and in full theatrical pomp. The song’s dramatic, but it doesn’t really call you back.
Common
“War”
★★★
Rapper-actor Common teases the forthcoming “Nobody Smiling” (no date yet) with this appropriately stern track about teen-gang warfare in Chicago — one of the song’s victims is a 3-year-old — over producer No I.D.’s woozy, battle-movie horn loops. The falsetto cries of “We are at war!” at the end are silly, though.
Tensnake feat. Nile Rodgers & Fiora
“Love Sublime”
★★½
A German house DJ-producer whose “Coma Cat” was one of the biggest and best club hits of 2010, Tensnake previews his March album, “Glow,” with another bubbly cut heavily reminiscent of synthy ’80s R&B. Instead of zipping along like his dance tracks, this one’s an ingratiating mid-tempo number.
Jennifer Nettles
“That Girl”
★★
The female half of the hit-making country duo Sugarland, Nettles sings the title track of her solo debut — a confession of cheating — to the woman with whose guy she ended up. The mellow, flamenco- flavored backing track, with prominent electric piano, suits her voice, but the song is pretty standard stuff.
The Crystal Method feat. Dia Frampton
“Over It”
★
When this Vegas-gone-LA duo broke out in the mid-’90s, they made pretty good Chemical Brothers-style dance tracks. Now they’re aping Skrillex-style dubstep bass blasts pretty badly, and the dumb, sexist video — watch scantily clad women food-fight while dudes in suits leer at them! — makes the whole thing even worse.