Albums of the Week
The Roots
“. . . And Then You Shoot Your Cousin”
★★★
They may play with Jimmy Fallon every weeknight, but the Roots’ albums follow no course other than their own. This one, their 11th, is a dark look at poverty cycles that incorporates everything from blues (the sharp-edged “Black Rock”) to classical (the crisply orchestrated “The Coming”) as well as their home-base hip-hop.
It has an emotional force that strengthens it as a whole, even if you don’t love every part. MC Black Thought inhabits his characters with startling clarity — a sudden line about abortion from one character in “The Dark (Trinity)” made me pause. The Roots always range widely, but they’ve seldom been broader or more effortless.
Coldplay
“Ghost Stories”
★½
Really, what do you expect from Coldplay? Dreamy lullabies and atmospheric guitars, surging piano ballads and Chris Martin’s catlike yowl are present and accounted for on album six. But they only sometimes seem fully utilized — “Always in My Head” and “Midnight” are the type of melancholy they do best.
The problem is that when Martin peps up, he turns almost Riverdance-perky, as on “Ink,” whose chorus of “I love you so much it hurts” gets an upbeat cadence so incongruous, it can induce the giggles. It’s not all his fault: “True Love” has one of the lamest guitar solos ever.
Downloads of the Week
Afrojack feat. Wrabel
“Ten Feet Tall”
★★
If fellow EDM figurehead Avicii can imitate a hoedown, why shouldn’t ascendant Dutch producer Afrojack — on his first album, “Forget the World”— fake a Coldplay song? The high-pitched synth lines are worth your ear time here, far more than the soaring melody or the dumb lyrics.
Grenier & Archie Pelago
“Swoon”
★★★★
“Grenier Meets Archie Pelago” is the lush, melodic, instrumental collaboration between San Francisco laptop electronic producer Dean Grenier and Brooklyn trio Archie Pelago — and the most endlessly listenable album of 2014 so far. “Swoon,” the opener, lays out its bounty: a patiently building groove whose melody crests again and again.
Jolie Holland
“Waiting for the Sun”
★★½
From her sixth solo studio album, “Wine Dark Sea,” Texas-bred singer-songwriter and bandleader Holland offers a slippery, sly, bluesy New Orleans groove — dotted by noisy guitar and unshakable baritone sax — that’s hard to resist. The song’s lyrics and tune are distinctly less compelling than the groove, and take a back seat.
Conor Oberst
“Governor’s Ball”
★½
Oberst used to go by Bright Eyes, among other pseudonyms. But on this track from “Upside Down Mountains,” his fifth self-billed album, the pallid singing voice, overwrought lyrics (in this song he meets “a girl with Klonopin eyes” — woof) and much-ado-about-nothing orchestrations are a nuisance under any name.