THE LEG UP / Stephen M. Deusner

STRAIGHT OUTTA WORMHOLE

Giving you the benefit of our advance listens.

In the near future, these musicians will scurry through wormholes to visit the not-so-distant past. I’m a robot sent from the future to warn you not to miss three and to give the fourth a wide berth.

Loudon Wainwright: Recovery (Yep Roc, August 19)

With Joe Henry producing, Loudon Wainwright reinterprets a baker’s dozen of his old tracks on Recovery, with a new band and many more years behind him. It’s a strange, suspect project: The word “reinterpreting” can be just a fancy word for “covering” or “resting on your laurels” or “living off your back catalog.” But that album title is more than an easy pun, and Recovery is more than simply a glorified greatest hits. Sure, he’s recovering “Motel Blues” and “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry” from Big Star and Johnny Cash, respectively, but mainly this album sounds like self-reckoning. Sung by a man closer to the end of his career and his life than to the beginning, these old songs have new relevance and more complex emotional gradations, which give songs like “School Days” and “Be Careful There’s a Baby in the House” a heftier impact than such a project promises. Age has tempered his anger but thank God not his humor. Just listen to him hit those goofy low notes on “Be Careful There’s a Baby in the House,” which is coincidentally one of his venomous sets of lyrics. And now that children Rufus and Martha are following in their father’s footsteps, “Saw Your Name in the Paper” has more distance and regret than ever, but also more well wishes.

On repeat: “Saw Your Name in the Paper,” “Motel Blues”

Horse Feathers: House with No Home (Kill Rock Stars, September 9)

Portland-based Horse Feathers have no back catalog to recover, so they set their sights even further in the past. The songs on their eerie sophomore album, House with No Home, sound as if they emanate from decades ago, drenched in sepiatone and indebted to Harry Smith. But Horse Feathers aren’t not playing dress-up or bowing to some notion of an old weird America; they sound too subdued, too opaque. In his hoarse voice (no pun intended.... really), Justin Ringle sings softly and keeps his lyrics secondary to the music, which draws its dusty ambience from Peter Broderick’s eddies of violin and the sustained low end courtesy of Heather Broderick’s cello. Recalling Bon Iver’s debut as well as Samamidon’s overly studied All Is Well, and improving tenfold on the band’s debut, House with No Home sounds effortlessly, gracefully out-of-time.

On repeat: “Working Poor”

The Broken West: Now or Heaven (Merge, September 9)

The Broken West follow up their breezy debut album with an equally breezy sophomore record, and while Now or Heaven may lack a song as immediately catchy as “Down in the Valley,” it does sound more adventurous yet more consistent. Consistent isn’t exactly an exciting adjective, nor is mature, yet the West draw from a deeper range of sources and use a greater variety of sounds, thinking outside the SoCal pop. “Perfect Games” is a good Wings; a bit of watery Cure guitar seeps into “Embassy Row”; and “Terror for Two” sounds like the kind of tossed-off grandeur that every blog band has been aiming for. But more than anything else, on Now or Heaven the West sound like a West Coast Wilco--that smart, that off-script.

On repeat: “Auctioneer,” “The Smartest Man Alive”

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Stephen M. Deusner is a freelance music journalist based in Washington , DC. Don't ask him about Norwegian pop or house rabbits, unless you have a few hours.