LISTEN UP

New Hayes Carll album is quiet study in acoustics

Album cover for Hayes Carll's "Lovers and Leavers"
Album cover for Hayes Carll's "Lovers and Leavers"

A Hayes Carll

photo

Album cover for “Kome Ryde With Us” by Green Ova South featuring Lil’ Flip

Lovers and Leavers

Hwy 87 Records

First of all, has it really been five years since Hayes Carll's last album?

Reckon so, because the calendar says it's 2016 and the brilliant KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories) was released in 2011. Dang, time flies. And welcome back, Hayes Carll.

This new album, recorded in just five days and produced by Joe Henry, is not the second coming of KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories). The good-time, smart-alecky, broken-beer-bottle stomp of that record is nowhere evident among the quiet, acoustic studies here.

What is here, though, is Carll's eye and ear for a good lyric and understated melody. Listen to the quiet snaps, claps and brushes in the heart-wrenching character study "You Leave Alone." He nails the plight of the singer-songwriter in "The Sake of the Song."

The album's highlight is "The Love That We Need," a crushing portrait of failed love where Carll, a Texas native and graduate of Hendrix College in Conway, lays bare a relationship gone cold, where the couple is now simply going through the motions. "Got the life that we wanted/not the love that we need." It's a brutal denouement in plainspoken terms.

Alt-country free spirits like Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell are getting lots of mainstream attention these days, and rightfully so. Hopefully Lovers and Leavers will nudge Carll's name up alongside them. He deserves it.

Hot tracks: "The Love That We Need," "The Sake of the Song," "My Friends"

-- SEAN CLANCY

B+ Green Ova South featuring Lil' Flip

"Kome Ryde With Us"

Off Tha Block Rekords

The latest single from Green Ova South -- Little Rock cloud rap king Pepperboy with Squadda B and Young God -- features verses by Lil' Flip and is a dreamy shot of smooth beats and strong rhymes with a mesmerizing chorus that should be bouncing out of cars all summer long. "I rock Versace all day/I don't rock Prada," raps Lil' Flip before Pepperboy slides in with his distinctive, silky falsetto. "Kome Ryde With Us" is the title cut from the forthcoming album by Green Ova South. If the single is any indication, we can't wait to hear the whole thing.

-- SEAN CLANCY

C M83

Junk

Mute

There is no shortage of influences in M83's music, as 2011's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming showed.

That album sprawled across two CDs, loaded with thrills that tapped a variety of dance forms -- house, synthesizer pop, electronica and rock, with occasional cheesy touches such as TV show themes.

Junk opens with the pop-flavored, slightly Beatles-tinged "Do It Try It." It has lush moments amid the piano runs and house beats. "Go" starts easy, as it builds to a spacious chill followed by hard beats and rousing guitar. Remixes should turn this into a big club fave. "Laser Gun" taps into a dreamy, subdued vibe.

The best is the haunting and luminous "Solitude."

But M83 -- Anthony Gonzalez's nom-de-band -- veers off course too often and seems emotionally distant. The album is too immersed in kitsch and cliches -- a musical junk food feast that leaves one hungry.

Hot tracks: "Laser Gun," "Solitude"

-- ELLIS WIDNER

B+ The Jayhawks

Paging Mr. Proust

Thirty Tigers

Paging Jayhawks fans: The Americana band of renown has returned with a timeless gem that belongs among the group's best and its loose, expansive genre.

Paging Mr. Proust kicks off with a one-two punch. The leadoff, "Quiet Corners & Empty Spaces," shimmers with a beauty and familiarity that wouldn't have been out of place on the band's Tomorrow the Green Grass or Rainy Day Music. It's followed by "Lost the Summer," which equally rocks but the jangle is replaced with funky syncopation and distortion.

Gary Louris, who leads a band that's cohesive despite the at-times acrimonious comings and goings of absent co-founder Mark Olson and others, revels in musical dichotomy: For every song that's straightforward and clean (the first track and "Isabel's Daughter"), there's something more crooked and cacophonous ("Pretty Roses in Your Hair" and "Ace").

That mostly works. "Ace" might be the only track that doesn't totally land -- it's groovy, smoky and swampy, yet seems more like an opportunity to let off some steam before embarking on the rest of the musical journey. "The Devil Is in Her Eyes" is a ruggedly exquisite rocker with heartbreaking harmonies.

The album is co-produced by former REM guitarist Peter Buck.

Paging Mr. Proust finds a band supremely confident of where it has been, where it is and, one hopes, will be.

Hot tracks: "Quiet Corners & Empty Spaces," "The Devil Is in Her Eyes"

-- JEFF KAROUB,

The Associated Press

Style on 05/03/2016

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