Slacker divas and pop's midlife crisis

In each album, you hear an artist finding effective ways to keep moving. These aren't really going-back-to-the-roots records per se. By the end of The Greatest, Memphis soul is a red herring, and Comfort of Strangers doesn't try to summon Orton's folk heroes. Rather, both artists do something smarter and more basic: they put their trust in a coherent band sound, the most fundamental and sometimes the most overlooked quality of good pop. And in both, that reflects a maturity worth waiting for.