Cass McCombs – Tip Of The Sphere CD/LP+MP3 (ANTI-)
Tip Of The Sphere follows 2016’s Mangy Love, which was named a “Best Rock Album Of The Year” by Pitchfork. While most of McCombs albums have been pieced together in different studios over an extended period, Tip Of The Sphere was recorded quickly and with a strong sense of purpose at Shahzad Ismaily’s Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn. This new approach for McCombs brought his songs a raw immediacy and a special balance of compassion and experimentation with the intent of making a more consistent statement. The rock songs have more fervor, the ballads are more beautiful, the explorations more confident; the sounds of jazz and Latin music creep in through the back window. The thematic centerpiece, “Sleeping Volcanoes,” is a rousing, rock and roll number that uses a distinct lyrical approach to intensify the narrative. On the main refrain, a key phrase of the song is repeated continuously and taken through its possible meanings, almost like a jazz musician repeating a musical phrase through key and chord changes. As described by McCombs, “Sleeping Volcanoes” is about “people passing each other on the sidewalk unaware of the emotional volatility they are brushing past, like a sleeping volcano that could erupt at any moment.”

Mercury Rev – Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited CD/LP (Partisan)
Mercury Rev’s tribute To Bobbie Gentry’s 1968 album, The Delta Sweete, features guest contributions by Hope Sandoval, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab), Phoebe Bridgers, Margo Price, Rachel Goswell (Slowdive), Beth Orton, Marissa Nadler, Vashti Bunyan, Kaela Sinclair, Susanne Sundfør & Carice van Houten. In October, 1967, while Gentry’s debut album Ode To Billie Joe was still in the Top Five, she began recording The Delta Sweete, a connected set of a dozen songs that extended the narrative dynamics of that single with personal reflection and set her folk-siren charisma in a richer frame of dream-state orchestration, swamp-rock guitars and big-city-R&B horns. But the album – released in March 1968, only three months after Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and right as The Byrds came to Nashville to cut Sweetheart Of The Rodeo – was too soon in its precedence. The Delta Sweete, the first country-rock opera, was ignored on arrival, not even cracking Billboard’s Top 100. It was as if Billie Joe had risen out of the Tallahatchie River and thrown that record off the bridge instead. This reimagined version of Delta Sweete is her long-delayed justice – Mercury Rev’s committed and an affectionate resurrection of an album that anticipated by three decades their own pivotal expedition through transcendental America, 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. 

Panda Bear – Buoys CD/LP+MP3 (Domino)
From the opening minutes of Buoys, Noah Lennox’s sixth solo album as Panda Bear resembles something both wholly new and intimately familiar to fans and followers of the musician and Animal Collective member’s body of work. Lennox’s bright, sincere voice is still front-and-center, along with his beatific approach to melodic structure and vocal phrasing – but there’s miles of space surrounding it, a guitar and a few textured samples here and there fleshing out Buoys‘ dubby sparseness. The off-white loveliness of his 2011 LP Tomboy is recalled, as well as the sampledelia of 2007’s landmark Person Pitch – but Buoys otherwise represents a surprising and intimately pleasurable new direction for an artist who’s embraced not repeating oneself as its own creative ethos.

Jessica Pratt – Quiet Signs CD/LP (Mexican Summer)
Jessica Pratt is not a loud performer. She does not have to be. In a club of a few hundred, even the bar staff are known to go quiet while she’s on stage. Her third album, Quiet Signs, feels like a distillation of this power. The album leads off with “Opening Night”, a nod to Gena Rowlands’ harrowing, brilliant performance in the John Cassavetes film of the same name. It’s also an emblem of where this spare, mysterious collection of songs falls in the course of Pratt’s career. Her first album fully recorded in a professional studio setting, Quiet Signs finds Pratt’s songwriting and accompanying guitar work refined – more distinct and direct. Songs like “Fare Thee Well” and “Poly Blue” retain glimmers of Oyola’s hazy day afternoon spells, yet delicate flute, strings sustained by organ arrangements, and rehearsal room piano now gesture towards the lush chamber pop and longing of The Left Banke. On the album’s first single, “This Time Around”, Pratt hits on a profound, late-night clarity over just a couple of deep chords, evoking Caetano Veloso’s casual seaside brilliance. And before the curtain drops on Quiet Signs, Pratt provides a show-stopping closer, “Aeroplane”.

Mavis Staples – Live In London CD/2xLP+MP3 (ANTI-)
Recorded at London’s Union Chapel (which Mavis Staples calls “the best place in the world to sing”) and produced by the singer herself, Live In London reveals that Mavis retains astonishing power after seventy years as a performer, and that while her repertoire continues to expand, her philosophy is unchanged since her days in the groundbreaking family group, the Staple Singers. For this project, Staples – who is still on the road almost 200 nights a year – welcomed the spontaneity and vulnerability of recording live. The album captures the spirit and energy, the commitment and intensity, that she brings to the stage every night. Ironically, her last live record – 2008’s Hope At The Hideout – was cut against the background of her fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama’s historic election, while the new album inevitably addresses the horrors of the Donald Trump era. Mixed in with these new songs (and “Let’s Do It Again”, which she notes is “the only secular song that the Staple Singers ever recorded”) are a few selections chosen just to bring the funk – Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That” and “Slippery People” by Talking Heads.

Yak – The Pursuit Of Momentary Happiness CD/LP (Third Man)
Few albums in rock ‘n’ roll history have seen its creator’s obsession veer so close to self-destruction, as London trio Yak’s The Pursuit Of Momentary Happiness. For singer, guitarist and driving force Oli Burslem, making his band’s second album became about pursuing his artistic vision at the expense of all else, including his own financial security and mental health. Who else these days invests every single penny available to them into recording, to the point where they become homeless? The result is a rare white-knuckle ride of an album in which his extreme commitment pulsates through every moment – much like Spiritualized’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space and Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker, both of whose creators had a part to play in its genesis – ranging from the gonzo-fuzz chaos of tracks like “Blinded By The Lies” through to the Roy Orbison-inspired heartbreak of “Words Fail Me”.

Front Line Assembly – Wake Up The Coma CD/LP (Metropolis)
New album from electro-industrial act. A fearless leading force, Front Line Assembly provides surprising new elements, such as a cover of Falco’s “Amadeus” (feat. Jimmy Urine), & contributions from Robert Görl (DAF), Nick Holmes (Paradise Lost), & Chris Connelly (Revolting Cocks, Cocksure).

Said The Whale – Cascadia CD/LP+MP3 (Arts & Crafts)
The Vancouver trio’s sixth album is a big-hearted blend of indie rock and atmospheric folk.

Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch – An Attempt To Draw Aside The Veil CD/LP (Sacred Bones)
Experimental lute player Jozef Van Wissem and acclaimed film director and musician Jim Jarmusch have a working relationship that dates back to 2006, when they ran into each other on the street in New York City and quickly struck up a friendship. The mostly instrumental An Attempt To Draw Aside The Veil finds much of its power in minimalism. Van Wissem’s unadorned lute traces the outlines of subdued electronics and ominous guitar drones laid down by Jarmusch. It’s a subtle album, and repeat listens reveal vast depths in its dark corners.

Xiu Xiu – Girl With A Basket Of Fruit CD/LP+MP3 (Polyvinyl)
“Xiu Xiu’s new album is imbued with the agitation, tension, sorrow and anger that has permeated the daily lives of so many over the last few years. ‘Scisssssssors’ charges back into the band’s eccentric discomfort. The drums move frenzied and tribal over frontman Jamie Stewart’s possessed mutterings. It all sounds like a dark, experimental ritual.” – Stereogum.

John Carpenter – Halloween [Original Soundtrack/Reissue/1979] LP (Sacred Bones)
For the first time, Sacred Bones Records is making the formerly mail-order exclusive art edition of John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies’s Halloween soundtrack available to indie retail. This edition features deluxe packaging with unique art by Chris Bilheimer, as well as a massive foldout poster and is pressed on ‘blood puddle’ colored vinyl (clear vinyl with inset red puddle).

Kevin Morby – Harlem River Dub (Peaking Lights Remix) 12” (Woodsist)
Two extended Harlem River Dub remixes by Aaron Coyes aka Peaking Lights.

NEXT WEEK’S NEW RELEASES
PIROSHKA (Miki from Lush!) – Brickbat CD/LP
YANN TIERSEN – All CD/LP
CZARFACE – Meets Ghostface CD/LP/CASS
LADYTRON – Self-Titled CD/LP
PINEGROVE – Skylight CD/LP
HOMESHAKE – Helium CD/LP
TEDESCHI TRUCKS BAND – Signs CD/LP
RYAN BINGHAM – American Love Song CD/LP
COPELAND – Blushing CD/LP
ROBERT ELLIS – Texas Piano Man CD/LP
ROSIE FLORES – Simple Case Of The Blues CD/LP
HAYES CARLL –  What It Is CD/LP
JACKIE GREENE – The Dig Years CD
HOOVERPHONIC – Night Before LP
DURAND JONES & THE INDICATIONS – Don’t You Know 7″
HOT WATER MUSIC – LP reissues