The Raconteurs - Help Us Stranger (Third Man)

The Raconteurs' (Jack White, Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence & Patrick Keeler) mighty combo is reassembled, stronger and perhaps even more vital than ever before as they continue to push rock 'n' roll forward into its future, bonding prodigious riffs, blues power, sinewy psychedelia, Detroit funk, and Nashville soul via Benson and White's uncompromising songcraft and the band's steadfast musical muscle. Once again creating a sound and fury only possible when all four of its members come together. Deluxe vinyl while it lasts.

Willie Nelson - Ride Me Back Home (Sony)

Ride Me Back Home is another incredible addition to Willie's legendary catalog that finds him working once again with producer Buddy Cannon. Ride Me Back Home sits beside 2017's God's Problem Child and 2018's Last Man Standing as a trilogy of superior songcraft- exploring ideas of mortality with wisdom, empathy and a winking love of life. The two also call on their favorite songsmiths, great writers with great stories to tell: Sonny Throckmorton, Guy Clark, Mac Davis, Buzz Rabin. The result is a magical collection of tunes with emphasis on the lyric.

Divino Nino - Foam (Winspear)

There's undeniable songwriting chemistry between guitarist Camilo Medina and bassist Javier Forero, who met as kids in Bogota, Colombia and years later reconnected by sheer happenstance after their families had both moved to Miami. Both studied at the Art Institute of Chicago where they met guitarist Guillermo Rodriguez and drummer Pierce Codina. Now Chicagoans, their rhythmic, soulful - and at times bilingual - Latinx songs are a reflection of their continent-spanning bond and proof that they couldn't have formed without unlikely but happy coincidences.

Rob Burger - The Grid (Western Vinyl)

Rob Burger's talents as an arranger, composer, and keyboardist have been nurtured by more than two decades of contributions to a diverse roster of recognizable names, at the very least including John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, and Iron & Wine with whom Burger presently records and tours. The Grid combines neo-classical soundscapes, 70s kosmische, and jaunts of 20th-century exotica into a completely unique genre-quilt that synopsizes his long musical trek through multiple cities, scenes, and sounds.

Bedouine - Bird Songs of the Kill Joy (Spacebomb)

When you listen to the love songs of Bedouine, you will be reminded of Karen Dalton's world-wise voice or the breathy seduction of Minnie Riperton's vocals, the easy cool of French ye-ye singers, and the poetry of Joan Baez. Her folk is nomadic, wandering across time and space. On first discovery you may ask whether they're modern, or if you've uncovered some forgotten classic. It makes sense that singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian's arrival – both musically and personally – on her 2nd album has been influenced by her own wanderlust, displacement, and curiosity.

Mort Garson - Mother Earth's Plantasia (Sacred Bones)

If you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth in LA (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears) in 1976, you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for plants. Subtitled "warm earth music for plants... and the people that love them," it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him.

Fruit Bats - Gold Past Life (Merge)

Gold Past Life marks both an end and a beginning. It's the end of an unintentional thematic trilogy of records that began with 2014's EDJ (a solo record by name) and hit an emotional peak w/ 2016's Absolute Loser. They encompass years of loss, displacement, and the persistent, low-level anxiety of the current politics. They were written in the wake of friends who left these earthly confines and families that could have been. But these salves, these songs, also represent new beginnings- the journeys that await after making it through troubled times.

Titus Andronicus - An Obelisk (Merge)

Their 6th album finds them under the stewardship of legendary rocker Bob Mould (Husker Du, Sugar). This trans-generational meeting of the minds has yielded the most immediate, intense, and unadorned Titus Andronicus record to date. Clocking in it a brisk 38 minutes and change, it is also the shortest. Recorded over six days at Steve Albini's world-renowned Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, An Obelisk presents the sound of a rock band, at it's most irreducible, as monolithic as the album's titular monument.

Also New This Week

Bad Books - III (Loma Vista)
Philip Bailey - Love Will Find A Way (Verve)
Black Pumas - s/t (ATO)
Collective Soul - Blood (Fuzze Flex)
The Hackensaw Boys - A Fireproof House Of Sunshine (Free Dirt)
Hollywood Vampires - Rise (earMusic)
Hot Chip - A Bath Full of Ecstasy (Domino)
Mannequin Pussy - Patience (Epitaph)
Buddy & Julie Miller - Breakdown On 20th Ave. South (New West)
Nick Murphy/Chet Faker - Run Fast Sleep Naked (Downtown)
Richard Reed Parry - That Side of the River (Anti)
Himesh Patel - Yesterday OST (Capitol)
Joel Rafael - Rose Avenue (Inside)
The Rolling Stones - Bridges to Bremen (Eagle Rock)
Mark Ronson - Late Night Feelings (RCA)
Two Door Cinema Club - False Alarm (Glassnote)