(1) Corin Tucker Band, 1,000 Years (Kill Rock Stars). There are strings on the first music to be heard from Tucker since Sleater-Kinney left itself behind in 2006; on “Riley,” which seems to dig down farther with every deep, slowly exhaling breath, all the strings do is emphasize. In moments you might hear Christine McVie in Fleetwood Mac—the clear voice of “Spare Me a Little of Your Love” and “Over My Head”—but the toughness you could miss with McVie remains the motor of Tucker’s music. The trouble can come at any time, and it does, over and over.
(2) Elizabeth Cook, Welder (31 Tiger). Country is not supposed to be this frankly salacious, whether about quaaludes or sex, or the difficulty of telling one from the other—but Cook was probably not raised to become the woman she is, writing and singing about “making love in the disco era,” which somehow summons up the specter of a single act of intercourse lasting at least five years and a joke the singer will be telling for the rest of her life. “My hands were in his mullet,” she laughs, at the time, the guy, and herself, but why not? She bends around the corners of her stories until her voice cracks, and her nostalgia is inseparable from her pride. That’s what anyone might most carry away from this record: you couldn’t find regret with a Geiger counter.
(3) Carlene Carter, “Me and the Wildwood Rose” (YouTube). Her grandmother Maybelle sang it with the Carter Family; her mother, June Carter, sang it. After wonderful records long in the past, a lost career, arrests for heroin, a marriage to Nick Lowe that must seem like someone else’s Hollywood movie, the death of her mother and her stepfather, Johnny Cash, Carlene Carter plays the song as if it’s the home where when you come back knocking it has to let you in.
(4) John Mellencamp, No Better Than This (Rounder). Mellencamp had a ridiculously precious idea: record a set of new songs in the Sun studio in Memphis, where Howlin’ Wolf and Elvis once walked the few square feet as if it were the earth; in the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, a stop on the Underground Railroad; and in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where in 1936 Robert Johnson faced a wall and sang “Cross Road Blues”—and not just put the thing out on CD and vinyl, but do it all in mono.
Slowly, tune by tune, and so imperceptibly that each time you play the album it might seem to shift at a...
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