Joni Mitchell’s folk did the same thing back in the early 1970s with Laurel Canyon-hippie-cowboy rock. She, much like Orton, was the bright, privately sensitive girl who partied with the boys while they were knocking out hit records. There’s another similarity: Orton borrows Mitchell’s phrasing, even though her voice is more temperate, without that sometimes grating trill. The difference is that Mitchell could write. Think of the way the last verse of “Big Yellow Taxi” — the one where her man walks out and climbs into a cab — gives a protest song about saving trees and DDT an ironic sucker punch: “Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

Not so Orton. The songs on “Central Reservation” aren’t Jewel stupid; they’re just sort of clichid and banal. Orton’s the kind of writer who uses weak similes like “She’s as deep as a well,” and then repeats the line to convey significance. It’s not that she has nothing to say, but it’s unrewarding to pay attention. On the Terry Callier duet “Pass in Time,” she’s gazing at the human soul’s big-picture insignificance. She looks at regrets as “lessons we haven’t heard yet” on the breezy “Sweetest Decline.” And angels — angels! — appear on the echoey, acoustic “Devil’s Song.” Sill, Orton’s voice is so disarmingly good that it’s worth ignoring her words. Let them pass over like pretty, empty syllables. To misquote a phrase used by the 19th century aesthetes, “l’beauti pour l’beauti.”

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The Del McCoury Band
THE FAMILY | CEILI MUSIC
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BY WILLIAM HOGELAND | Don’t look for genre-bending roots eclecticism from the Del McCoury Band. “The Family” offers some of the straightest contemporary bluegrass available. Some of the best, too. That’s why the band has natural allies outside the genre’s mainstream. (Steve Earle, sure, but also Phish.) On “The Family,” textures and chops are unparalleled — particularly Ronnie McCoury’s mandolin lines, which consistently shimmer, drum and bite — yet virtuosity always serves group swing. Familiar indeed, the sound is also beautifully balanced, freshly polished: no strained, breakneck picking, no earsplitting close-enough harmony. Del McCoury’s lead vocals remain piercing and intense.

If the album has a drawback, it’s the songs’ ephemerality. Bluegrass this accomplished often relies on Victoriana — lonesome winds, hearts as hard as stone — instead of distinctive songwriting. Wit can pierce the veil, as in Mark Simos’ “Darlin’, since you’re leavin’,/Don’t you think it’s time to go?” The band also renovates the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Nashville Cats,” a song whose adulation of redneck picking sent Yankees to Nashville and helped spark the ’60s bluegrass craze, in which Del McCoury first made a name.

But the memorable songs on “The Family” are its two gospel numbers, “Get Down on Your Knees and Pray” and “The City of Stone.” Not surprising; bluegrass vocals sprang from Southern gospel’s athleticism and anguish. Bill Monroe’s “Get Down on Your Knees” recalls the haunting plangency of the Monroe Brothers and the brother-duet idiom in which they excelled, before Bill lit out and concocted bluegrass. “City of Stone” is a spiritual nightmare in an admirably restrained musical setting: eerie lead fiddle, Del’s singing left naked and alone, with the subtlest help from other voices. That sort of maturity and taste make “The Family” both a primer for the bluegrass-curious and a refresher for the jaded.

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The Damnations TX
HALF MAD MOON | SIRE
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–>BY TONY SCHERMAN | Smart, tuneful roots-rock from Austin, Texas. This trio revolves around sisters Amy Boone and Deborah Kelly, who write the songs and sing ‘em. Boone plays bass, Kelly guitar, and they’re joined by Louisianian Rob Bernard, who picks spunky if unspectacular lead guitar and banjo. Austinites by way of upstate New York, Boone and Kelly absorbed a world of influences from their parents’ record collection: the Beatles, Southern rock, bluegrass, Bob Dylan (can you find the sly lift from “This Wheel’s on Fire”?) and straight-ahead country. There’s a punk aesthetic at work here, too. “Half Mad Moon’s” dashed-off, slightly ragged feel is less a product of naiveti than a deliberate choice. The songs are chunky little affairs, the music’s homebuilt simplicity effectively countered by the lyrics’ imagination and dry wit. In “Kansas,” a lawman from back East shakes his head at the savage goings-on in Kansas, bleedin’ Kansas, circa 1850; the very next song, “Black Widow,” leaps to 1990s Austin, where the sisters mournfully, if wryly, memorialize a stolen amplifier: “Nothing now is gonna sound the same/Oh, the damn thing even had a name/We called her Black Widow/Even though she’s blue.” If I had to make a comparison, I’d call Boone and Kelly a down-home, tougher version of the McGarrigles. They’ve got potential in spades. Ain’t no telling how good they’ll sound in five years, and they sound pretty damn good now.

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Bad Livers
INDUSTRY AND THRIFT | SUGAR HILL
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–>BY WILIAM HOGELAND | “Industry and Thrift” may be more nearly related to Wyclef Jean’s hip-hop collage “Carnival” than to the bluegrass and punk-rock purism with which Bad Livers are so often branded. All the more impressive, then, that given its high degree of artistic ambition, the album is so short on pretentiousness. Good spirits abound. Livers eschew roots-rock clichi. “Industry and Thrift” may therefore be the roots-rock album of the turn of the century.

Which century, though, remains a question. Like roots rock, punk also had its first heyday in the mid-’70s, but with notable exceptions didn’t then mix with country or soul. Now we take for granted that punk-related music can fraternize with hoedown, with blues, even with New Orleans parade. (Greg Garing, impresario of New York’s Alphabet City Opry, looks like a Goth yet has a firmer grasp of the country idiom than anyone else in two generations.) But still: Can punk rock usefully be equated with ragtime, even with band concerts in small-town squares? If “Industry and Thrift” has anything to say about it, yes.

Bad Livers have recently stripped down. Danny Barnes and Mark Rubin are touring as a duet. (Barnes also tours and records solo; Rubin leads the klezmer group Rubinchik’s Okestyr.) Favored sidemen and clever multi-tracking give “Industry and Thrift” its rich, seductive textures. The sound is deeply burnished but rough. What’s punk and folk is the DIY ruggedness, the pervasive skepticism, native to garage and church, about the worth of mere chops. Brilliant sonic effects are built of herky-jerk fragments. The whole thing could fall apart at any moment.

When Bad Livers do give in to straight bluegrass, and Barnes indulges in effortless clusters of Scruggs picking, your ears may actually prick up. Other parts may too. This is what bluegrass sounded like — too warm and fast and tight, too dizzily hospitable — the first time you heard it. Redeeming that blessed, silly moment is but one minor pleasure among “Industry and Thrift’s” many major accomplishments.

In a way, “Keep It Like a Secret” is a condensation of “Perfect” and a synthesis of all three Built to Spill releases. (Excluding “The Normal Years” because it’s a rarities album, and the “Built to Spill/Caustic Resin” split EP.) The songs are, like those on “Perfect,” arranged around transitions and repetitions instead of relying on verse-chorus-verse structure. But like the compositions on “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” they’re shorter and deliver the punch without dancing around the ring.

That’s the obvious stuff. A remnant from 1993′s “Ultimate Alternative Wavers” — a sort of silver-lining social criticism that came out in the verses “In America/Every puddle/Gasoline rainbow” — echoes throughout “Secret.” “You Were Right” is like a key to the rest of the record, because Martsch speaks so directly. The song is a litany of rock ‘n’ roll verses nicked from the glory days of AOR radio. “You were right/When you said, ‘You can’t always get what you want,’” Martsch sings in his warbly, Neil Youngish voice. “You were right/When you said, ‘We’re all just bricks in the wall.’”

On “You Were Right,” Martsch makes a declaration with a straight face,
something that he usually doesn’t do. (Elsewhere on the album, the broken
romantic stories in “Carry the Zero” and “Sidewalk” are indefinite and oblique.) When I talked to Martsch in 1994, right after he released “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” he told me that the record title was sort of a joke. He meant it to sound precocious, sarcastic. “Originally it was a tongue-in-cheek kind of remark, but true,” he said. “I mean, ‘There’s nothing wrong with love,’ you can’t argue with that. But then the record came out as kind of a sappy love record anyway.”

Back then, Martsch was softening his remarks, hedging his pronouncements. He doesn’t do that, musically or lyrically, on “Keep It Like a Secret.” On “Center of the Universe,” he lashes out at a couch potato, and on “Temporarily Blind,” he makes what could pass for a rallying call, in a vague, non-committal sort of way: “Who history doesn’t teach it makes numb,” he sings. “Turn your back on their taming.” Even the album’s title is an imperative. It’s worth mentioning that throughout “Keep It Like a Secret,” Martsch never puts himself on a soapbox, never elevates himself above his listener. “I don’t like this air/But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop breathing it,” he sings on “Center of the Universe.”

But back to “You Were Right.” The song starts here: “You were wrong when you said/Everything’s gonna be all right.” That’s a Bob Marley line from “No Woman No Cry.” You could probably attribute it to the Velvet Underground as well, given that Lou Reed promised everything was going to be all right more often than a high school guidance counselor.

After that first wrong, the song moves to rights. “You were right when you said/It’s a hard rain’s gonna fall.” And: “You were right when you said/We’re still running against the wind/And life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone.”

Maybe the song is literal: Bob Marley was wrong, Bob Seeger and John Cougar Mellencamp are right. Maybe it’s a song about how rock music is depressing — that like, oh, Thomas Hardy or some other classic author said, all life is mundane, broken up by only tiny flashes of inspiration and joy. That “All we are is dust in the wind.”

Maybe the song is about the power of rock ‘n’ roll, how phrases seep into our consciousness to the point where they no longer belong to the artists who wrote them. Or maybe it just raises more questions than it answers.

Here’s one last interpretation: Maybe the song is a nod to Martsch’s heroes and guilty pleasures. The humble guitarist regularly champions the little guys, especially small Northwest bands. He used to praise the defunct Lync, and in interviews he claims Modest Mouse is a big influence, even if that band’s budding guitar god Isaac Brock was in eighth grade watching Martsch play onstage with his previous band, Treepeople.

But Martsch’s music always sounded like he never paid much attention to his peers. In 1993, when A&R guys in Seattle were signing anyone with a pulse, he settled down with his girlfriend and his baby in Boise. His first record with Built to Spill was dense and complicated when everything around him was short, sludgy and loud. His second was conversely sappy and cute. On his third, he brought back well-produced virtuoso guitar rock while other bands were playing out-of-tune instruments on their four-track recorders. So maybe that’s it, maybe Martsch is acknowledging his real influences. Maybe he’s not afraid to admit that Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan and, yup, even the Doors made excellent music, even if he’s in the habit of coddling Northwest
unknowns like Satisfact and the Feelings. And maybe none of it adds up on purpose. As Martsch sings elsewhere on “The Plan,” his voice trailing off in an uncharacteristic weary confusion, “This history lesson doesn’t make any sense/In less than 10,000-year increments/Of common sense.” Built to Spill craft large, grandiose pieces. If it’s out of fashion, or seemingly puzzling now, just wait a while. Let them seep in, wash over; give them a chance to accomplish the size and magnitude that this guitarist wants you to hear.

Just as the hip-hop popmart known as “Odelay” built upon the bombastic “Mellow Gold,” “Mutations” — which was originally a Bongload Records project before it was plucked by Geffen — rides the rails sledgehammered by the crude blues of his K Records release “One Foot in the Grave.”But if “Grave” reveled in rawness, the 11-track “Mutations” echoes the beauty of those songs. “Nobody’s Fault But My Own,” recorded with his touring band and his father on viola, conjures sepia images –rusty blades, chain gangs and open graves — but the delicate Indian instrumentation and the pained lament of the chorus make it the prettiest song he’s ever written.

That said, “Mutations” is another record where the listener tunes in as Beck “turns shit into gold,” as he puts it on the record. Constantly churning through forgotten and certified dead pop movements, the folkie alchemist uses “Mutations” to resuscitate late ’60s Brazilian jazz (“Tropicalia”), hayseed country (“Canceled Check”) and orchestral easy listening (“We Live Again”). The most impressive part of the record –and what gives Beck his genius — is how the songs feel referential without sounding like clichis.

Like so much of Beck’s writing, the “Mutations” lyrics are successful as clever strings of word poetry: They’re as much about the pure sound of the syllables as the associative moods they conjure. Sure, only a theory slut could find a message in “Egos drone and pose alone/Like black balloons, all banged and blown” if he read it on the page. But say it aloud — go ahead — or listen to Beck slur it in a bluesy drawl, and there’s at least temporary meaning.

And that’s enough: Even if these songs end up filed in the vault of some pretentious radio station or as mere blips on a Top 40 chart — both of which are unlikely — at least he still believes thatpop music should be popular.

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Seal
HUMAN BEING | WARNER BROTHERS RECORDS
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–>BY MICHAEL E. ROSS | Sealhenry Samuel has always worn the scars of this world more forthrightly than other musicians. In a few albums over seven years, he’s borrowed from an amalgam of musical styles — primarily folk, rock and soul — with a philosophy grounded in the melancholy of moderntimes, the losses of our lives, the hope of redemption and the need for carrying on in the face of adversity. With his new album, “Human Being,” his first in four years, this pilgrim’s progress continues in much the same elegant, winning style that’s characterized his earlier work. But there’s a disquietingly downbeat worldview at work here. On his latest song cycle of the human conundrum, the world makes him wanna holler and throw up both his hands. The first single, “Human Beings,” takes its cues from the slayings of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Onother songs, such as “State of Grace” and “Lost My Faith,” Seal’s admitting his own inner turmoil and confusion, in searing melodies that make fine use of the chameleon instrument of his voice. “No Easy Way” and “When a Man Is Wrong” ruefully explore the slippery slope of personal relationships. It’s all done with the lapidary production values that have been a hallmark of his sound. Clearly, the man’s still searching. That his way to confession largely resists the mawkish or the saccharine is testament to a formidable lyrical intelligence and a true musical sophistication. For anyone weary of the limited emotional range of much of contemporary music — a span whose complexity hasn’t really ventured far beyond June-moon-croon — Seal’s latest will be abracing tonic, one that seductively addresses the Big Issues. Go ahead.Listen. Squirm.

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Alanis Morissette
SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE | MAVERICK/REPRISE
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BY JEFF STARK | On 1995′s “Jagged Little Pill,” Alanis Morissette misinterpretedirony, pronounced herself Miss Thing and confessed to blowing a boy in atheater. Now a wizened 24-year-old on “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie,” she apologizes for abusing her so-called power, flirts with spirituality and returns to the theater to see a lover — but this time Morissette’s sitting in the front row, eating popcorn.

Say hello to the new Alanis. After selling 15 million copies of”Jagged Little Pill” to embittered teenage girls and people who usually don’t buy albums, the woman to blame for Fiona Apple and that chick who sang the “Bitch” song has mellowed from an angst-filled demoiselle into a more reserved — if occasionally confused and nostalgic –woman. Although she is noticeably tamer, the shift is far less dramatic than the metamorphosis that took her from Nickelodeon childactor to Canadian Debbie Gibson to multiplatinum optimist with one hand in her pocket.

Musically, Morissette’s “Junkie” songs sound like radio, or more precisely, MTV. Most of the tunes are broadcast-friendly, mid-tempoballads. There are faux-folkie Jewel moments (“That I Would Be Good”), scraps of Sneaker Pimps trip-hop lite (“I Was Hoping”) and trendyquasi-spiritual loops (“Thank U”). Contrary to the pronouncements of some critics, Morissette and her songwriting partner Glen Ballard are not idiots — bland, safe and predictable maybe, but definitely not idiots. After that business in Canada, Morissette’s not about to give upon the formula (a thick gloss of Liz Phair, PJ Harvey and PattiSmith-style sexual frankness with a bump of grooveability ` la Blondieand Madonna) that gave her singles a mortal lock on the pop charts. No, Alanis Morissette’s bread and butter is still the subject she knows best: Alanis Morissette.

With an astonishing disregard for rhyme or meter, she crams and stretches syllables into a tableaux of 17 self-absorbed songs about herself (“UR”), her minor manias (“One”) and her relationships (“Unsent”). Morissette’s trick is to take her journal entries and give them something approaching a suburban universality, full of fake IDs, emotional affairs and a post-break-up fuck, just for the hell of it. Her appeal is similar to the occasional charm of open-mike poets: They might be grating, but listeners are more likely to sympathize if they have bad poems in their own notebooks.