KELLY CLARKSON
“Piece by Piece” (19/RCA)
Kelly Clarkson has thrived as a nice girl with a big voice and a grudge. Her career-defining hits have been good-riddance songs like “Since U Been Gone” and “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” the messy reconciliation of “My Life Would Suck Without You,” and confessions of trauma and struggle like “Because of You.” The versatile voice that made Ms. Clarkson the first winner of “American Idol,” can sail through just about any arrangement: rock, ballad, arena-country and, most often at the moment, anthems pumped with dance beats. She and her producers generally make each tune a buildup that climbs to pop peaks as its righteous anger rises. But now that Ms. Clarkson, 32, is married with an 8-month-old daughter, she has to look past current romance for something to get riled about, and the effort shows on her new album, “Piece by Piece.”
The music is huge and glossy, a technical tour de force. It’s a product of the current pop-industrial complex; the album’s main producer, Greg Kurstin, also works with Pink and Katy Perry, and Ms. Clarkson draws material from widely recorded songwriters like Sia Furler and Matthew Koma. While the credits list some physical instruments, and orchestras are on call, they are shielded within electronic fortresses of reverb, synthetic tones, whooshing effects and programmed drums. Ms. Clarkson also deploys armies of voices, most of them her own, in songs like “Invincible,” a Furler collaboration that proclaims “I am invincible/No I ain’t a scared little girl no more.” Every song aims for the monumental, a strategy that’s competitive for radio play but wearying over the course of a whole album.
Ms. Clarkson is still combative. In the single “Heartbeat Song,” which moves from new-wave verses to a shimmering, blasting electronic chorus, Ms. Clarkson sings about finding happiness, but grudgingly: “You’re a different, different kind of fun/I’m so used to feeling numb.” In Mr. Koma’s “Someone,” which pulsates like a trance track, she makes a non-apology apology for saying “things I wish I didn’t really mean/Sorry I’m not sorry.” A gospely chorus appears in “I Had a Dream” — one of the three songs on the album she wrote with Mr. Kurstin — amid cranky, backhanded advice: “It’s too bad you can’t see what you’re worth/Spreading your legs ’stead of using your words.”
The album’s most accusatory song, also written by Ms. Clarkson and Mr. Kurstin, is its title track, a U2-style anthem that contrasts the unselfish love of her husband with bitter thoughts about her father. “Piece by piece he restored my faith/That a man can be kind and a father could stay.” There’s vulnerability there — no wonder Ms. Clarkson’s publishing company is named Songs for My Shrink — but the music rises quickly to bombast, triumphal and glamorous but remote. JON PARELES
SANNHET
“Revisionist” (The Flenser)
In guitar music, as with movies and sports, there’s always room for another victory narrative. It’s hard to tire of watching someone vanquish an oppressor, score a goal, or in the case of the Brooklyn band Sannhet, follow a crescendo to the breaking point.
Perhaps that’s because any musical surge — volume, density, tempo — neutralizes the question of newness. The surge, as motion or sensation, is fundamental to music and nature. It can’t ever be new. What’s always new is how your nervous system reacts each time to the surge — how you’re performing it each time within yourself. That’s good for Sannhet, whose second album is called “Revisionist”: an odd title for music built on so much from the past.
Sannhet is an instrumental trio — guitar, bass, drums, no vocals. It’s got the blasting volume and palpitating drum patterns of European black metal, the overwhelming density of Glenn Branca’s multi-guitar symphonies, and the slow, determined development of a lot of bands from the last 25 years, instrumental or not, that have been called post-rock or post-metal — Slint, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Isis.
And Sannhet has a curious combination of physical and disembodied sounds. The shove in the music comes from the drummer Christopher Todd, who plays with heavy hands and detailed fills, and the bassist AJ Annunziata, whose patterns lock in with Mr. Todd’s kick-drum. The ghostliness comes from the guitarist John Refano. He floods the mix with volume, but the reverb and digital effects round off the edges of his attack, as if his chords are sounded by an unseen force. In these songs, many layers of guitar form dissonant harmonies; sections grow and vary, never fully returning to where they started. Sometimes they are abstract, with found-sound voice recordings and clouds of echo. They’re also easy to follow, emotionally clear. It doesn’t matter how dark the tonality gets: “Revisionist” is an album for motivation, for the all-day victory.
But victory over what? This music is rugged, but ultimately dreamy. There’s an exciting track on “Revisionist” called “You Thy __.” It begins with unsyncopated blast-beats and moves into an ecstatic groove halfway through; a couple more guitar tracks pile in; the surge begins. From the deep rumble of Mr. Refano’s guitar sprouts a high and repeated single-note line. After a couple of repetitions, the line is pushed digitally higher by several octaves, like a flag held high at the front of an infantry charge. And just before the four-minute mark, the song tails off into emptiness, like its title. BEN RATLIFF
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL
“Still the King: Celebrating the Music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys” (Bismeaux)
Truth in advertising, consistency of product: these are bedrock values for Asleep at the Wheel, never more so than on “Still the King: Celebrating the Music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.” A low-fuss event record, with different guest stars on each of its nearly two dozen tracks, it pays the fondest of tributes to the man justly billed, from the mid-1930s on, as the King of Western Swing.
Asleep at the Wheel, formed by Ray Benson 45 years ago, has done this sort of thing before. Two of its nine Grammy Awards have been for tracks from “A Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys,” in 1993, and “Ride with Bob,” in 1999. On both of these albums, the musicianship was lean and clean, with cameos from rugged country heroes like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, who do sterling work again here.
What sets the new album apart is its focus on a new class of upstart country traditionalists, both in Nashville and in Austin, Tex., which the band calls home. Among the album highlights are a galloping “Tiger Rag” featuring the Old Crow Medicine Show; “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” with a hayloft boost by the Avett Brothers; “Faded Love,” a courtly sashay with the Time Jumpers; and one coy chestnut apiece for Carrie Rodriguez, Kat Edmonson and Elizabeth Cook.
“Still the King” genuflects little to Nashville’s reigning commercial center, but the artists on deck pull their weight.
Brad Paisley gets a front-and-center showpiece on guitar, and Jamey Johnson luxuriates in his phrasing on a country blues. Buddy Miller finesses a two-step. As for George Strait, who recently rode into the sunset as a touring act, he brings his great, gallant ease to “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way).” If there’s a shred of doubt surrounding Asleep at the Wheel’s tour, which reaches the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Wednesday, it has everything to do with expectation and absence — but again, that’s nothing this band hasn’t faced before. NATE CHINEN
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