T Bone Burnett

A funny thing happened to T Bone Burnett on his way through Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, three cool albums with the Alpha Band and his stellar '80s/'90s roots-rock solo career. Somewhere along the line Burnett became one of the industry's most gifted and intuitive producers. Given his track record (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Elvis Costello's King of America, Walk the Line, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' exquisite Raising Sand, among dozens of others), it's hardly a mystery as to why Burnett shunned performance for nearly a decade and a half. In 2006, Burnett finally re-entered the studio for The True False Identity, a quirky and enigmatic album that showed influences from the broad spectrum of artists under his production tutelage. Burnett's latest release, Tooth of Crime, seems to have more links to the album he released before his 14-year hiatus, namely 1992's The Criminal Under My Own Hat. Tooth of Crime is a handful of songs that Burnett wrote to accompany the 1996 musical staging of a 1972 Sam Shepherd play of the same name; he's spent the past dozen years hammering on those songs, finishing others and writing new ones to fashion an actual album format.

The result is a jazzy film-noir soundtrack as envisioned by a musical cabal of Tom Waits, Van Dyke Parks, Nick Cave and a rotating cast of '50s R&B greats. Tooth of Crime's opener, "Anything I Say Can and Will Be Used Against You," sounds like Waits updating an unearthed Screamin' Jay Hawkins track ("People tell me I look like hell, well, I am hell/I got a torture chamber orchestra in a delirium hotel..."), which is followed by the atmospheric and mesmerizing "Dope Island," a seductive duet with Burnett's ex-wife, pop chanteuse Sam Phillips. Guitarist Marc Ribot slinks and swaggers through Burnett's intricate arrangements, lurching with murderous intent on "Swizzle Stick" while finding the dark romantic heart of the Roy Orbison co-written "Kill Zone." While it's a shame Burnett deferred his own work for so long, The True False Identity and now Tooth of Crime are strong evidence that he should shoehorn more studio time into his busy and lucrative production schedule. — Brian Baker

Pomegranates
Everything Is Alive (Lujo)

Pomegranates' debut EP last year had that "I think I know this band" sound. Its warm and shuffling take on indie pop was catchy and bouncing, but its characteristics were all too familiar. Luckily, the same cannot be said for Everything Is Alive. On LP number one we see a young band taking some large and fulfilling musical steps that are sure to move them from forgotten mix member to that band you're dying to hear more from. Whether tapping into the keyboard-spiced frivolity of contemporaries like Wolf Parade and Vampire Weekend or paying homage to quirky '90s indie rock, Pomegranates have found a sound that suits them perfectly.

While the band's debut was loose and often prone to detours, Everything Is Alive succeeds because of its succinct nature. Sure, there are still moments of experimentation, like the African-inspired percussive outro to "Thunder Island," but most of the songs here no longer have the indie prefix overshadowing the word "pop." "In the Kitchen" is a spacious, jittery dose of nervous excitement, while "The Uncanny Terrace Treeclimber" manages to mix dance-punk with the multi-instrumental rock of the Arcade Fire. Let's just say if indie pop had a most-improved-player award, I know who it would go to. — Matt Whelihan

Steve Winwood
Nine Lives (Columbia)

Steve Winwood doesn't need to justify his musical resume any more than Donald Trump needs to have his parking stub validated. From teenage pop sensation with the Spencer Davis Group to iconic frontman with Traffic to co-architect of the supergroup with Blind Faith to multi-platinum solo superstar, every musical endeavor Winwood has helmed over the past five decades has managed to alter the very fabric of rock 'n' roll. That's an impressive run by any yardstick. On Nine Lives, Winwood's latest solo album, he touches nearly every musical phase he has championed and challenged since he began playing guitar in his father's band at age 9.

There are wisps of the raw rock energy of his youth, undercurrents of the folk/jazz exploration that influenced a generation and the smoothly soaring pop that made Winwood a household name. Nine Lives starts with the slow acoustic blues boil of "I'm Not Drowning," a groove-driven Delta pop shuffle that serves as a reminder of the teenage Winwood's role as an in-demand backing player for blues trailblazers like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf on their British tours in the '60s. "Fly" and "Raging City" are more reminiscent of Winwood's more recent polished pop solo work but at the same time offer plenty of the slinky jazz/folk that he perfected with Traffic in the late '60s and early '70s. The album's centerpiece is the nearly eight-minute "Dirty City," a propulsive pop number that channels Traffic's smoky Low Spark of High Heeled Boys era while turning guitar legend Eric Clapton loose on a long, blistering and exquisite six- string solo. With Nine Lives, Winwood establishes a new benchmark in a career that is casually littered with evolutionary brilliance by tapping into the essence of every musical success he's ever achieved. — BB

Tommy Jay
Tall Tales of Trauma (Columbus Discount Records)

Mostly known for his work with Columbus proto-punk outfits Mike Rep and the Quotas, True Believers, and much later, Ego Summit, the hush-toned genius of Tommy Jay is now getting its due with the reissue of his long-deleted 1986 retrospective. Culled from various late-night basement excursions dated as early as 1974, Tall Tales of Trauma captures the dysphoric spook of folk-psych rurality so perfectly that it could be used as proxy for the whole 1970s-early '80s outsider/private-press genre. Recorded in Harrisburg and Timberlake, Ohio, Jay and his fellow cowtown cohorts Mike "Rep" Hummel and Nudge Squidfish wallow in the ghostly murk of these regions, as loner musings on Vietnam, unrequited love and serial murder are fused with jangly, must've-heard-this-before campfire melodies that haunt the psyche like the scent of charred autumn leaves and schwag weed. Admittedly inspired by the wrist-cutting bombast of Lou Reed's Berlin album, Tall Tales effectively strips those Bob Ezrin-orchestral coke-drips and summons a more disheveled strain of ghoulish ambience.

Polarizing in its sequencing and sonic versatility, the album opens sometime in 1980 with the warbling Beefheartian funk-bunk of "Last Hurrah," a suicide rollick that menacingly tinkers with the Atari keyboard blips of Pere Ubu and Tyranny and Mutation-era Blue Oyster Cult. The conga-pulsating truck-stop raga of "Tough Luck Roy" follows, recalling the stormy down-and-out mooncalf vibes of Springsteen's Nebraska, apt with Jay's parched Alan Vega-esque vocal moans. It then segues into the album's centerpiece, 1974's "I Was There," an atmospheric garage meditation on Vietnam and the hazy monotony of life in Nowheresville, Ohio. Melancholic in its interplay between the sky-soaring 12-string guitar style suggestive of '67 Roger McGuinn and the zonked barn-fuzz riffs that cooked heavily in an era of countless DIY Crazy Horse knockoffs, "I Was There" is a stunning outside-of-time epic that, like the posthumously "proto" works of Modern Lovers and Simply Saucer, may have changed the course of underground history had it been released in its proper context. This track alone is reason enough to buy the LP. — Steve Newton