The Lacking Details

Really, this review only needs five words: Francophone spaghetti western rock songs.

It’s like a solo bedroom funk-pop project, with all its trappings (spur-of-the-moment compositions, absurdist themes, flashes of intense brilliance), except it comes from two people. These songs will quickly settle into your head and raid the fridge.

This takes backing tracks from “This Year’s Model” and adds new Spanish-language lyrics and vocals on top. It’s a bewildering mix of the extremely familiar and the completely new, and if you speak the language, the lyrical translations are top notch.

The female vocals have a child-like quality, and the bass-forward music hulks behind it, sometimes like a princess’ bodyguard, sometimes like a delicate clockwork contraption.

Rock and roll is absent from the charts, and you’d hardly know there is a serious revival going on, this slab of shimmering paisley from the Fogerty kids being a prime example. Get your riffs, hooks, choruses, and more right here.

It’s hard to pin down this Brooklyn trio, with their angular guitar dissonance and harmonies that range from drone to treacle. This live album showcases the band’s strange energy with a barrage of short songs and very little audience reaction.

This is a reissue of a 20-year-old album, yet the pan-global disco stew that comes from this band could live anywhere in their decades-long career continuum, past, present, or future. This is dance music for getting subtly amped up.

The cover album is trite and cliché by now, but when the kings of Los Angeles release a tribute to the music scene that made them who they are, it’s definitely worth a listen, as both a rock show and a history lesson on what made LA sound that way.

Out of many odd cover-filled releases bands have ejected over the last year-plus, this is one of the most disparate and interesting, partly from the selections and the interstitial music, but mostly because it’s not what you expect from black midi.

It is difficult to make lush pastoral pop like this without going completely overboard into schmalz territory, but this band manages quite well, carefully draping their orchestral tendencies over a solid base of interesting songs.