Vancouver, Canada’s Dan Bejar, the occasional member of the New Pornographers, has been crafting adventurous solo albums with various musicians under the heavy metal-like moniker  Destroyer since the '90s. On “Kaputt,” his ninth outing, Bejar has made one of his most unique documents yet, rifling through abandoned musical lexicons with the curiosity of a junk-shop dealer who believes that with the right arrangement, any beaten treasure can shine.

For “Kaputt,” Bejar has reclaimed a particularly maligned set of musical hallmarks from '80s soft rock and jazz pap, the kind that streamed out at the dentist’s office from speakers tucked near the Bob Ross-like painting. Think creamy synth settings plucked from New Age meditation tapes, squiggly saxophone lines floating high in the sky of Destroyer’s airy compositions, and Bejar’s own stumbling-around-the-kitchen vocals, at times poetic, at times reveling in the random. It’s as velvety as Roxy Music’s “Avalon” but made from scraps, a pop album for Ariel Pink fans and other radio vultures picking apart the carcass of rock and roll. But it's not zombie art; “Kaputt” has brains, as evidenced by the silken strut of “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker,” a cut-up built from text sent to him by the African American artist that touches on the same issues of race and feminism present in her visual work.

There are other influences on “Kaputt” -- some Cure-like cold bass on “Savage Night at the Opera,” the overheated backup singers on “Blue Eyes” and Spanish guitar from Nic Bragg on the refractive “Bay of Pigs” -- but it all melds together under the big tent of Bejar’s musical imagination. When there’s such a vast palette of noises represented, it questions the very ideas of good and bad, and how much they are tempered by context, trends and generational bias.

For those who were fully functioning adults in the '80s, some of these songs might bring back bad memories of Kenny G commercials on TV. For those who were still kids or barely in existence, these sounds still hold some sort of exotic quality, the lost, sentimental history of crappy radio. At their worst, the songs can suffer from a strange inertia, stillborn in their own lathery bath.

Either way, Bejar doesn’t want the listener to get too bothered by it. After all, he has said that he recorded some of these vocals while lying on the couch or preparing a sandwich. On “Bay of Pigs,” he bastardizes a Duke Ellington title, murmuring over Deep Thoughts synths, “It don’t mean a thing, it never means a thing, it’s called that swing.” “Kaputt” is hallucinatory and unstructured, grabbing for whatever it likes in the moment -- it’s the radio of Bejar’s mind, floating off to sleep.

-- Margaret Wappler

Destroyer
'Kaputt'
Merge
Three and a half stars

It’s never easy to be subtle within the context of popular music. The crowd doesn’t want it; give them flash and flesh and a sugar overdose. For singer-songwriters, flash equals confession or florid imagery: paperback poetry, easy to grasp. Trying something harder may prove unrewarding.

John Vanderslice, the singer-songwriter and producer whose San Francisco studio Tiny Telephone is an indie pop mecca, makes subtle music that can be a bit off-putting. He’s a minimalist, in the literary rather than the musical sense; his spare melodies and carefully contained rhythms combine with scenes rich in imagery but deliberately short on elaboration. The emotion that seeps through his gently disturbing tales can be hard to track: What’s motivating the fear he communicates? What supports the love? The listener’s reward comes in doing the work of drawing her own conclusions.

“White Wilderness” makes that process engaging in ways that are new, though not necessarily easier. Instead of his usual electronically enhanced folk rock, Vanderslice turned to the composer Minna Choi and her Magik Magik Orchestra to complete the nine songs on this 31-minute release.

The semi-classical setting removes some of Vanderslice’s usual tricks — he can’t kick up the energy with a backbeat or use effects to enhance his gentle vocals. Choi’s arrangements carry the songs somewhere else, away from the tension-release of rock and into the more contemplative realm of art song.

One of rap’s oldest truisms is that great albums are the results of one producer with one rapper. Whether it’s Guru and Premier, Rakim and Eric B. or Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, all but the most versatile rhymers usually bond best with a particular style and sound.

A decade and half deep into a storied career, Brooklyn’s Talib Kweli falls into this category. Collaborations with Kanye West, Just Blaze and Madlib have all yielded critical and commercial success, but his most poignant material always comes in concert with the Cincinnati-bred Hi-Tek. Whether it’s the 2000 classic “Train of Thought,” last year’s rock-solid comeback “Revolutions Per Minute,” or even the 2007 one-off “Time,” Hi-Tek’s elegiac beats not only adhere perfectly to Kweli’s adenoidal double-time flow, but their plaintive nature brings out his most poignant and introspective writing.

Cobbled together from a babel of veteran underground producers, “Gutter Rainbows” feels rote. There are high points — most notably, the post-traumatic stress romance, “Tator Tots,” and the Ski Beatz-produced soul workout, “Cold Rain.” Too often he relies on inflexible rhyme schemes and self-congratulatory similes (“I’m lying like Pinocchio…I’m a freedom fighter like Voltaire.”) One hook (“Friends and Family”) lazily repeats, “Nothing else matters more than friends and family.”

Accordingly, “Gutter Rainbows” too often feels like an unfulfilled promise — an excess of concrete and not enough vibrancy.

—Jeff Weiss

Talib Kweli
“Gutter Rainbows”
Javotti Media/3D
Two and a half stars (Out of four)

There’s a graduate thesis waiting to happen in exploring the strangely beatific air that surrounds the music of Sam Beam’s Iron & Wine. With poetic songs that unspool like oblique parables and a lush beard that would make naturalist John Muir proud, Sam Beam’s early recordings felt almost startlingly intimate behind whispered words and guitar that seemed near-monastic in their raw simplicity.

Now with his fifth album, Beam may not have abandoned his roots, but he’s certainly stretched far beyond them. With a band stocked with veterans of Chicago’s experimental music scene that include members of Califone and the Chicago Underground Duo’s Chad Taylor, Beam’s evocative folk has evolved into incorporating dips into soul, woozy R&B and loose-limbed ‘70s rock. Behind a buttery electric keyboard and cooing backing vocals, “Tree by the River” sounds like a new classic of the AM Gold era, while the percolating world percussion and swells of noise in “Monkeys Uptown” and the dark travelogue “Rabbit Will Run” form vivid counterpoints for Beam’s urgent melodies.

Other welcome touches include drunken New Orleans horns on “Big Burned Hand” (spiked by a rare bit of profanity from Beam that feels weirdly jarring, like some breach of ecclesiastic etiquette) and the driving funk of “Yr City Is a Sucker,” which features high-pitched choruses and jazzy brass reminiscent of early Chicago that builds to Beam ranting like an end times prophet who can see the walls crumbling. It’s not always the stuff of angels, but it’s something far richer.

—Chris Barton

Iron & Wine
“Kiss Each Other Clean”
Warner Bros.
Three and a half stars (Out of four)

The Oklahoma firebrand once dubbed “the female Elvis” for raucous rockabilly records such as “Let’s Have a Party” shows that a 73-year-old grandmother is still fully capable of ripping things up — especially when you throw in with someone as party-ready as producer Jack White.

Like his “Van Lear Rose” collaboration with Loretta Lynn, White surrounds one of his heroines with the kind of sizzling and muscular instrumental backing you’d expect from a brash rock upstart, replete with reverb-soaked vocals over blazing, electric guitars, bass, drums and horns.

Several of the song choices — Harlan Howard’s down-and-out “Busted,” Little Richard’s hit “Rip It Up,” Johnny Kidd’s “Shakin’ All Over,” Eddie Cochran’s “Nervous Breakdown” — are era-appropriate for Jackson. The real treat is in the way she and White tackle more contemporary stuff like Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain” (in place of the composer’s reference to lusting after Alicia Keys, Jackson sings of wondering “where Jerry Lee could be”) and Amy Winehouse’s spooky “You Know I’m No Good.”

Her thin, raspy voice retains plenty of sass six decades on, and White’s live-sounding band conjures the ambience of a gritty gig in some back alley bar for a rowdy crowd of mariachi bikers. Well done, Grandma Wanda.

—Randy Lewis

Wanda Jackson
“The Party Ain’t Over”
Third Man/Nonesuch
Three stars (Out of four)

Alt-rock cleanup jobs rarely come more straightforward than Cold War Kids’ “Mine Is Yours,” on which this Long Beach foursome sands the edges from its clattering soul-punk sound.

Swaggering yet sensitive, it’s a record that appears to have been made firmly in the shadow of Kings of Leon, which after years in the underground finally broke through to the mainstream with 2008’s hit “Only by the Night.” Cold War Kids traveled to Nashville to record “Mine Is Yours” with Kings producer Jacquire King, and he gives songs such as “Broken Open” and “Royal Blue” the same arena-ready sheen; frontman Nathan Willett’s vocal hooks seem designed to be bellowed along with $12 beer in hand.

Longtime fans are apt to be disappointed by the change in direction, which for sure renders the band less unique. Yet the best songs here -- “Finally Begin,” “Louder Than Ever,” the aptly titled “Bulldozer” -- run with the kind of streamlined efficiency that can be just as satisfying as arty idiosyncrasy. Unburdened by their trademark clutter, Willett and his bandmates use that extra energy to push forward.

-- Mikael Wood

Cold War Kids
“Mine Is Yours”
Downtown
Two and a half stars (out of four)

“Life gets hard and then it gets good, like I always knew it would,” Mike Ness declares on Social Distortion’s new album. Old-school fans of this long-running Orange County punk band might have trouble accepting the latter half of that couplet, given the terminally down-and-out vibe of early Social D records such as “Mommy’s Little Monster.” (Sample lyric from that 1983 debut: “One more trip like that will put me in the morgue.”)

Nevertheless, “Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes” does indeed exude an essential optimism that feels no less believable than any of Ness’ tales from the dark side. Like his new labelmates in Bad Religion, the frontman values punk’s durability over its aggression or its (bad) attitude, which is why he piles on the Black Crowes-style classic-rock signifiers in “California (Hustle and Flow)” and breaks from autobiographical protocol in “Machine Gun Blues,” about an early-’30s gangster on a bloody interstate crime spree.

He even taps a disarmingly tender vein for the plaintive “Writing on the Wall,” in which he ruminates on the complexity of his relationship with his teenage son. You can tell Ness is still getting comfortable revealing that side of his artistic persona; most of the song’s words are self-help boilerplate meant to keep you on the surface of his thoughts. But the music provides a way in.

—Mikael Wood

Social Distortion
“Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes”
(Epitaph)
Three stars (Out of four) 

“Everything that I’m trying to say/ Just sounds like a worn-out cliché,” James Blunt sings on “I’ll Be Your Man,” a track off his new album, “Some Kind of Trouble” — and he appears to be heading naysayers off at the pass. Then again, the Britain-bred singer-songwriter has never been a critics’ darling: His smash hit “You’re Beautiful” and accompanying 2004 album “Back to Bedlam” set the platinum standard for edgeless adult pop. But Blunt’s 2007 sophomore effort, “All the Lost Souls” added a darker, reflective bent that explored the travails of fame — and subsequently sold well under half its predecessor.

“Some Kind of Trouble” attempts to correct that, yet overreaches in its slickness and underachieves in terms of inspiration. Though Blunt is assisted here in songwriting and production by hit makers Ryan Tedder (OneRepublic, Leona Lewis), Steve Robson (Carrie Underwood, Rascal Flatts), and Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen, Britney Spears), the results prove more professional than irresistible. Despite some subtle variances—tame confessionals like “No Tears” and “Superstar,” the libidinous dirge “Turn Me On” — “Some Kind of Trouble” rarely strays from formula: ’70s-style soft rock à la Christopher Cross and Al Stewart, occasionally updated with messianic Coldplay-isms and pulsing rave synths seemingly influenced by Blunt’s residence on the Spanish party island Ibiza.

All could be forgiven, however, if Blunt’s latest material proved catchier. There’s a kind of genius to “You’re Beautiful”: despite a significant schmaltz quotient, once its hooks kick in, the song becomes an effortless earworm. Here, Blunt’s everyhunk desire to please initially seems appealing, his plain singing style unpretentiously sincere — but it’s hard to remember a chorus after numerous listens. Despite all the work put into his workmanlike pop, it ultimately comes off as agreeable, but not memorable.

—Matt Diehl

James Blunt
“Some Kind of Trouble”
(Custard/Atlantic)
Two stars (Out of four) 

On “The Hazards of Love,” the 2009 album from the Decemberists, frontman Colin Meloy and his merry band of Pacific Northwest hucksters created a medieval rock opera. The band’s latest album, “The King Is Dead,” takes the opposite tack, exploring Americana, a much more simple, rustic format.

Problem is, you can take the man out of the opera but you can’t take the opera out of the man. Too much of “The King Is Dead” sounds like the showy wunderkind in theater class earnestly laboring through an Arthur Miller monologue when all he wants to do is stand up and trill at the top of his lungs.

“The King Is Dead” clings so closely to formula that it doesn’t sound like homage or even truth; it sounds like the studious but unconvincing work of an extremely gifted mimic. The right players are on the stage with Meloy — R.E.M.’s Peter Buck contributes guitar and mandolin, and Gillian Welch provides vocals that go a long way in establishing some measure of restraint here — but the songwriting never heads in a direction that can’t be predicted from the outset, a choice brave enough to inch the genre a little further along or afield.

One of the tracks that Buck contributes to, “Calamity Song,” is designed as a tribute to R.E.M., so much so that it almost steals the riff from “Talk About the Passion” note for note. Buck’s cooperation with such a stunt would seemingly remove possibility for a copyright lawsuit, but it only underscores what’s missing on the album — the shadowy, idiosyncratic depths of Americana that R.E.M.’s classic debut, “Murmur,” captured so brilliantly.

—Margaret Wappler

The Decemberists
“The King Is Dead”
(Capitol)
Two stars (Out of four) 

At their worst, the blues are license for self-indulgent musicians to toss out all sense of restraint and taste as they let ego run wild. At their best, the blues are a vehicle in which genuinely inquisitive ones wrestle with inner demons in the hope, but with no guarantee, of exorcising them. Gregg Allman, who’s been driven to excess at times over the Southern rocker’s long career, takes the latter path in this masterful effort shepherded by T Bone Burnett and assisted in a big way by the producer’s mojo-wielding band of players.

His voice sounding strong, limber and decades younger than his 63 years might suggest, Allman wrestles with why he feels distant from his woman in Melvin London’s “Little by Little,” and then agonizes after she’s abandoned him in Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman.” His troubles prompt him to light out for parts unknown in Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and maybe engage in a little retribution along the way.

It’s haunting, often harrowing stuff, but Allman knows this territory well, growling, yearning, pleading for some sense of peace that seems as if it will ever elude him — and maybe anyone who walks the earth. He gets close in the one song he wrote (with Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes), “Just Another Rider,” but the seeds of self-destruction are still apparent. With the help of stellar accomplices including Dr. John, guitarist Doyle Bramhall II and Burnett himself, Allman couldn’t be in better hands.

—Randy Lewis

Gregg Allman
“Low Country Blues”
(Rounder)
Three and a half stars (Out of four) 

“Sell yourself, don’t be a fool!” gurgles Matt Shultz, the wiggly frontman for Cage the Elephant, midway through the young Kentucky-bred band’s second album. He’s yelling at the hipsters and fakes whose convolutions confuse and upset him, but he’s surely also offering himself a warning.

Having gained notoriety a couple of years back for intense live shows and memorable singles like 2008’s slouchy, sexy “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked,” Shultz and his pals, including brother Brad on guitar and secret weapon Daniel Tichenor on bass, stand at a crucial juncture. Can Cage the Elephant survive the scrutiny of jaded aficionados who call its drum kit-toppling yet sweet-toothed approach to guitar bashery nothing but a rehash of flannel rock? This set of ripping rave-ups and effortlessly tasty singalongs answers YES, in all caps.

The band’s influences are obvious. Songs like “Aberdeen,” a nod to Kurt Cobain’s hometown, and the shameless Pixies rewrite “Around My Head” trash and lovingly refashion those sources the way kids take apart their toys during the winter holidays. It helps that these pilferers have great taste. They run like rabbits from the stultifying bottom end of grunge, instead honoring what was hot and sweet about ‘90s rock: the raucousness of its hooks and the accessibility of its noise.

The twang in Shultz’s voice and in Lincoln Parish’s lead guitar betrays the band’s Southern influence. Like the Kings of Leon, Cage the Elephant gains benefits from being rooted in a region where plain old rock still has wide appeal. There’s no pretentiousness to this band, and no tricks in the clean production by versatile Nashville vet Jay Joyce. And though Shultz’s lyrics betray much self-doubt, his wildfire yelp overcomes it. When he sings about a girl who holds “her dirty hands over the flame,” yeah, he’s singing about a lost love, but he’s also singing to himself. The flame is rock and roll, unquenchable.

—Ann Powers

Cage the Elephant
“Thank You Happy Birthday”
Jive/RED Records
Three stars (Out of four)

[Updated: In the original version of this review, Matt Shultz's name was misspelled and Daniel Tichenor was misidentified as Brad Tichenor. Also, the song "Around My Head" was mistakenly titled as "Paper Cut (Walk Around My Head)."]

Only Cake’s John McCrea could coax a song with the fuddy-duddy title “Federal Funding” into such witty existence. The opening track to their sixth studio album starts with some crud-covered guitar and the deadpan lyric, “You’ll receive the federal funding; you can add another wing.” It’s a cocky strut made for those thankless academics lobbying for grant money. University proles, congrats! Cake has elevated your career to the same status as the swaggering pimp in gangsta rap.

Its first album since 2004, “Showroom of Compassion” finds the Northern Californian outfit in toned condition, turning out polished compositions that could fit in with its classic catalog (strong with hits like “Short Skirt Long Jacket”) but updated with a few new twists. Also, the same notion of edginess that blessed and cursed other ‘90s bands like Soul Coughing (ahem: the semi-spoken vocals thing) has been nicely mellowed out. As ever before, Cake romps with whatever genre — pickled ska, roughshod country, even a rare snippet of Chopin-like classical piano — in its indie folk mash.

Recorded in the band’s own solar-powered studio in Sacramento over a period of some two years, each song on “Showroom of Compassion” sounds nurtured into its ideal state. The positive-minded “What’s Now Is Now,” with its chirping birds, strings and synth burbles, has almost a utopian, ‘70s AM rock glisten to it. Could a song developed off the city’s energy grid, literally soaked in sunshine, sound any other way?

Cake 
“Showroom of Compassion”
Upbeat Records
Three stars (Out of four)