Absent Fathers
Justin Townes Earle
Vagrant
Sorrow, betrayal, breaking up and lingering resentment are inexhaustible sources for alt-country songwriter Justin Townes Earle. “These old stories always end up the same/The pain is the price you pay,” he sings in Call Ya Momma, one of the many breakup songs on his sixth studio album, Absent Fathers. It follows closely on his fifth one, Single Mothers, which Earle released in September.
Both were recorded at the same sessions, but Earle ended up grouping the more confident-sounding songs — musically, at least — on Single Mothers. On Absent Fathers, he’s more openly forlorn. The two releases play through like a double album. They start strong, ease back — as the opening songs do on Absent Fathers — pick up again and end with a pensive farewell: the fingerpicked acoustic ballad Looking for a Place to Land.
Through both albums, Earle is accompanied by a bare-bones country band: guitar, bass, drums and, often, a pedal steel guitar that sounds as if it were moaning his few unsung regrets. His voice has some of the grit of his father, Steve Earle, and some of the honeyed Texas melancholy of Lyle Lovett, which comes through most strongly on songs where the drums drop out: pieces like Least I Got the Blues, a spartan swing ballad that has the narrator sullenly surveying how damaged a woman has left him.
The music isn’t pumped up with arena-rock flourishes or computer tricks, and it doesn’t hide bruises and aches. It draws proudly on Southern soul, particularly in When the One You Love Loses Faith in You. The albums aren’t a narrative, but Earle plays a recurring character: A guy who’s no prize himself but who’s wounded anew with each separation. The album’s few requited-love songs, like Day and Night, question themselves; songs that seem upbeat, like the rock boogie Round the Bend, end up with the narrator “by the Dead End sign/Calling my baby saying, ‘Take me back one more time.’” Both albums, particularly Absent Fathers, are a finely tuned wallow in male heartache.
— JON PARELES, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Slurrup
Liam Hayes
Fat Possum
Liam Hayes, either under his own name or as Plush, has spent the last 20 years as a supersensitive listener and responder to a certain kind of 1960s and ‘70s American pop songwriter: Carole King, Curtis Mayfield, Harry Nilsson, Brian Wilson, Todd Rundgren, Burt Bacharach. From them, individually or combined, he internalized a lot: harmonies and phrasing and voice-leading, arrangement and sound.
He’s mostly admired for two categories of album: one exemplified by More You Becomes You (1998), his solo voice-and-piano record, and the other by Fed (2002), deluxe, layered with strings and horns. They both sound like position papers written in insular obsession, knowledgeable and indirectly seductive. They can also — if you tilt your head another way — be perverse and slightly irritating, with mistakes, wobbly tempos, studio chatter and a weedy voice. They depend so much on old pop syntax and awkward detail that even their beautiful moments can leave a bitter aftertaste, as if he were having you on, or sabotaging himself, or both.
Slurrup represents a third category, a simpler one. These songs were written on the guitar, not the piano, and at their best — Outhouse, Fight Magic With Magic — their inspirations might come from Big Star, or the Who, or the Byrds. At their weakest, they suggest ‘60s garage rock as only a set of anonymous mannerisms. The perversity is a little more pronounced here: an aimless instrumental, a short and dull tape-loop piece, a ballad that might serve as a demo to sell as a song to Beck (Greenfield) and a rave-up that seems to challenge Ty Segall, a far more rudimentary songwriter, on his own turf. Still, it’s not bad to hear a simpler record by Hayes, songs matching scrappy material with scrappy affect.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Dedication
Justin Kauflin
Qwest/Jazz Village
Dedication, the new album by Justin Kauflin, broadcasts on at least two frequencies. It’s a declaration of purpose by a diligent young post-bop pianist eager to make his mark in a crowded field. It’s also the fulfillment of a promise, given Kauflin’s role in Keep On Keepin’ On, a moving documentary film about his friendship with the august jazz trumpeter Clark Terry.
The film, likely to be in the running at this year’s Academy Awards, depicts Kauflin as a respectful, humble and unassuming young man, self-doubting at times but as unfazed by the high demands of his art form as he is by his blindness. (He lost his sight at 11.)
What the film also reveals are some uncommon advantages bestowed on Kauflin, first by Terry, a generous mentor, and then by Terry’s former protEgE Quincy Jones, who took the young pianist under his own wing: He signed Kauflin to his management company and took him on tour before producing this album.
So one measure of Kauflin’s achievement with Dedication is that the album — a dozen original tunes, played in quartet, trio and solo formats — quickly makes you forget about its meta-narrative. There are no cameos or distractions, and if it isn’t a distinctive statement, it’s unequivocal in its purpose.
As a pianist, Kauflin, 28, favors a clarity of touch and ideas, rarely spinning into an orbit he can’t control. His writing is also balanced, tempering post-bop intricacies with the assurances of the gospel church. For Clark, a pastoral ballad that had its moment in the film, arrives without fanfare, one of several tributes, including two in polyrhythmic triplet meter: The Professor, for pianist Mulgrew Miller, and B Dub, for drummer Billy Williams.
The trio, with Williams and bassist Christopher Smith, moves with an unstudied grace, while the quartet, featuring Matthew Stevens on guitar, feels like a vehicle for the compositions. Kauflin seems inclined to use both options well.
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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