Three for Three

Over his last few releases, Alan Jackson has now and then given the impression of a quality artist still producing at a high level because when he's coasting he's better than three-fourths of his competitors at their best. But other than his 2006 twin bill of Precious Memories and Like Red on a Rose, much of his work leading up to Freight Train had a definite plug-and-play feel.

But that 2010 release was easily some of his most creative work in years, and he continues his career's second wind with Thirty Miles West, further leaning down his sound and dipping it deeper into straightforward guitar twang and steel slides that have always been the soil nourishing his music.

In fact, banjos show up along with fiddles and a mountain shuffle on the album's seven-minute hinge-pin, "Dixie Highway," collaborating with Zac Brown. A lot of country music mines the small-town nostalgia vein these days, but Jackson is one of the few who makes those kinds of songs sound real instead of corny. The opening "Gonna Come Back as a Country Song" likewise pays tribute to the genre in a way that sounds more real than any half-dozen "country proud" anthems clotting the airwaves and charts.

Jackson's bread and butter has always been thoughtful mid or slow tempo songs reflecting on life, love and some of their mysteries from a distinctly adult perspective -- he's happy to goof around on "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere," but he seems to know that "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning" will be a longer-lasting legacy. Several of those numbers show up on Thirty Miles, offering listeners the chance to think a little themselves while they tap their feet or sip their iced tea.

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It's a shame that the national music scene has fragmented so much; Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are a band that could have parlayed chart success in pop and rock's more unified culture days into icon status. They're a throwback in many other ways; several years of a heavy touring schedule helped sharpen their playing individually and as a unit and and allowed Potter to shape her voice into a multi-format weapon that easily handles differently-styled songs.

The Lion the Beast the Beat is the outfit's fourth studio album and shows them continuing to develop. The title track is a straight-ahead rocker that would fit comfortably with anything on Heart's Bebe le Strange, but "Loneliest Soul" plays over a demented carnival chorus and "Parachute Heart" and "Timekeeper" are artful ballads. The latter deploys Potter's much more nuanced vocals to excellent effect.

But at its core, Lion is a rock record, and "Turntable" (complete with opening vinyl crackle) and "The Divide" underscore that she and the Nocturnals are a rock band that can move in other genres, rather than a pop band playing at being rockers. Even if they never become icons, if they keep making records like this they should be able to put food on the table and hands in the air for quite some time to come.

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Melody Gardot's praises have been sung and her story told early in the history of this blog, and the fact that The Absence, her third album, marries her smooth smoky jazz vocals to Mediterranean, Brazilian and African rhythms will not bring anything less.

Though the bossa nova and calypso instrumentation is different and in many cases more complex than the bass-piano-and-drums of her previous two records, Gardot's voice is still perfect for whatever song she's singing and somehow manages to both command the tune as well as dwell in it, tripping across the scales like water down a rocky hillside.

She can still sing a torch song so well that you can see the narrow ties, sheath dresses and hipster berets of a late '50s beat club, as in "My Heart Won't Have It Any Other Way," and even adds a rare belt tune with "Goodbye" (Gardot's health problems make it painful for her to sing very loudly or listen to louder music). Gardot spent the time between 2009's My One and Only Thrill and Absence traveling the world and soaking up its different songs and sounds. Here's hoping that whatever she listens to over the next few years produces something as wonderful.