Iris DeMent
My Life
(Yep Roc)
★★★★

THIS is a welcome 30th anniversary reissue of Iris DeMent’s second album.

After hitting the big time with her with 1992 debut record, including the much-covered Our Town, the Arkansas-born singer-songwriter dedicated the follow-up to her father, who had recently died — directly addressed on No Time To Cry, one of many affecting songs in the set. 

DeMent’s lyrical interests of family, relationships and rural, small town life, are a dime a dozen in the traditional country music scene she inhabits. But she’s such a sympathetic, philosophical observer of people and the lives they live that it’s difficult not to be pulled in to the drama of her vignettes. 

Moreover, it’s her extraordinary voice — described as “a tremulous wail” by Pitchfork — that marks her out for greatness, placing her music alongside that of country icons like Emmylou Harris and Tammy Wynette.

Japandroids
Fate & Alcohol 
(Anti-)
★★★★★

FATE & Alcohol is the fourth album from Japandroids, and apparently their last. 

It’s a magnificent swan song — full of the furiously paced, scuzzy indie rock the Vancouver alt-rock duo have made their own. 

In many ways frontman and guitarist Brian King has an incredibly limited lyrical palette — nearly all of the songs are about drinking in bars, women and touring. But he sings the supercharged anthems with such passion and urgency, the set driven forward by the thundering drumming of David Prowse, that it’s difficult to think of a more vital rock ‘n’ roll band. Perhaps The Hold Steady, with whom they share a knack for writing lots of singalong choruses — check out Japandroids’ defiant 2012 mini hit The House That Heaven Built.

Romantic, rough and rowdy, it’s a glorious racket. This band could be your life. 

Aaron Parks
Little Big III
(Blue Note)
★★★

I FIRST came to Aaron Parks through Arborescence, his striking 2013 solo piano record for ECM Records.

Turns out it’s something of an anomaly — pretty much all the 40-year-old US jazz musician’s other releases are of him playing or leading various trios, quartets and quintets. 

Thus Little Big III is his third studio album with the band Little Big, made up of Greg Tuohey on guitar, David Ginyard Jr on bass and drummer Jongkuk Kim. 

Co-produced by Blue Note Records president Don Was, it’s a focused set of accessible instrumental jazz. Shifty opener Flyways pulsates nicely while the intense drumming on The Machines Say No brings to mind post-Kid A Radiohead. The set closes with the elegiac AshE, which first appeared on Terence Blanchard’s 2007’s Grammy award-winning A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina).