END TIMES

E Works/Vagrant

Mark Oliver Everett, the songwriter behind Eels, regularly casts himself as a man who's solitary, miserable and getting worse, quietly or noisily. It's a role that suits his bleary voice and his direct, unadorned lyrics. Everett stays mostly subdued on the Eels' eighth studio album, "End Times," which he has bluntly described as a "divorce album." In the title song, he sings, "The world is ending/And what do I care/She's gone/End times are here."

Everett, 46, has written about heartbreak and separation before, particularly on his 1993 album, "Broken Toy Shop," which was full of songs about a woman who left him. Now he's older, more reflective and more deeply hurt. "In my younger days this still would've knocked me down," he sings, "but I would've just bounced right back." Through a dozen terse, exposed songs Everett proceeds from bittersweet memory to guilt to resentment to a kind of acceptance. Even the glimpses of self-pity stay matter of fact.

Much of the album was recorded on four-track tape, like Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska." By necessity those tracks use only a handful of instruments, with a hissy, low-fi sound that underlines the singer's isolation. Everett isn't strict about the limitations; now and then he overdubs a modest string or horn arrangement, though he still leaves empty spaces.

Most of the album is depressive, banked-down folk-rock. "The Beginning" recalls romantic moments when "everything was beautiful and free," but so somberly that it's clear from the first notes that such comforts are gone forever. Everett's humbled voice is accompanied only by guitar picking and organ chords hovering in the distance.

Every so often anger plugs in the music, turning it into skeletal rockabilly or garage-rock. In "Gone Man," with maracas, slap-echo and a distorted guitar, Everett blames himself for "keeping good things away," imagining his epitaph: "Here lies a man who just wanted to be alone." But in "Paradise Blues" and "Unhinged" it's the woman's fault; one compares her to a suicide bomber, while in the other she's "a mean old girl behind her crazy eyes."

The album ends with "On My Feet," a slow waltz that circles back to memories of love and concludes, tentatively, "I'll be all right/I just gotta get back on my feet." He sounds a little closer to doing that - but only a little.

- Jon Pareles, New York Times News Service

The Necks

SILVERWATER

ReR

"Silverwater," like most albums by the Necks, is like land passing below you from an airplane window. It's so big and slow that it resists description.

It's the same for miles at a stretch: mostly piano, bass and drums repeating, repeating, repeating a grid of static sounds or short melodic figures in a cycle. There are small rolls of tom-toms, a four-note ascending bass line, a mutating organ wash, light cymbal crashes on every fourth beat. Over time the music changes, but so gradually that your mind has erased what it sounded like five minutes ago. Of course you can go back and find out, but that flattens the experience. It's better to experience this in person, and you can do that next week. They'll play at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn on Jan. 27 and 28. (Details at issueprojectroom.org.)

None of "Silverwater," this Australian trio's 15th album, follows any straight-up idiom, whether jazz or classical minimalism or rock. It imitates the surfaces of all those things, at various times. The Necks know endless ways to stretch their resources. They isolate an instrument. They make foreground slowly become background. They don't particularly care about melody or moving harmony. What they really care about is how to articulate and repeat a short phrase, not only on their three primary instruments but also, here, on organ and shakers and - a first for a Necks album - on electric guitar, played by the drummer Tony Buck. They'll stagger or layer different approaches to these short phrases, rendering them evenly, intermittently, wavelike.

When the Necks seem vaguely jazzlike (the big tone of the acoustic bass, the small repeated shards of a chattering drum or piano pattern), they sound full and authoritative. But the Necks imitating rock has no wiggle in it; it's as juicy as eating dust. I much prefer Buck's more aggressive, immediate, Fugazi-like guitar playing and drumming on "Project Transmit," his solo album from 2008. With the Necks, it seems, his job is to delay everyone's gratification: the audience's, certainly, and maybe even his own.

The point of "Silverwater" is the entire creation: not just the taste of each ingredient but how it gets put into the bowl. And, of course, the slow logic of the transitions. You're always waiting, with this band. It methodically drips all these ingredients into the mix, never breaking an even pace, and you wonder when it's going to shake it up, displace a few things, stumble or shout: i.e., make music. Then at some point, no matter how many times you've heard the group before, you say, "Oh I see, this is the main event." Yet you're still wondering where it's going. It's got you twice over.

- Ben Ratliff, New York Times News Service

Lindstrom & Christabelle

REAL LIFE IS NO COOL

Smalltown Supersound/ Feedelity

The first sound on "Real Life Is No Cool," an early front-runner for the year's best Norwegian electro-disco album, is a disembodied voice: urgent, female, digitally garbled, backward-looped. It sputters alone for a while before a synthetic bass line fades into the mix, followed by a beat. "What should we do?" the voice asks breathily then, one minute into "Looking for What," the album's opening track. "Should we start? Should we stop? Should we stop looking? Looking for what?"

The voice belongs to Christabelle Sandoo, and over the course of this album she makes it clear she's not really seeking answers to her own questions. As a collaboration between Christabelle (who goes by her first name) and the producer Hans-Peter Lindstrom (who goes by his last), "Real Life Is No Cool" gestures faintly toward human concerns. Cooing or speak-singing vague lyrics in her Scandinavian-accented English, Christabelle is a cool cipher, throwing off more shadow than light.

That's good enough for Lindstrom, who has made engrossing tracks out of less. His 2008 debut, "Where You Go I Go Too" (Smalltown Supersound/Feedelity), was a slow-morphing opus with a nearly half-hour-long title track. Nothing here approaches that sprawl; the songs average a poplike four minutes. And most of them predate "Where You Go," which means Lindstrom isn't scaling back so much as picking up where he once left off. (Two of the more solicitous tracks, "Music in My Mind" and "Let's Practice," were out as singles in the early-to-mid-2000s, when Christabelle went by the name of Solale.)

Beyond "Looking for What" and a psychedelic salvo called "Never Say Never" the album studiously avoids idiosyncrasy. The frame of reference is impeccable 1980s pop: from Sade, say, to Grace Jones to Michael Jackson. ("Baby Can't Stop" has the staccato horn and guitar parts, and the casual effervescence, of a track from "Thriller.")

But it can feel facile, this emulation. In a longer form Lindstrom lets his allusions bubble up as if from the depths of a lake. Here they skitter across the surface. As for Christabelle, aside from "Keep It Up," a Prince-like dose of troubled bliss - "Dig deep/So dark/But I can see" - she seems content not to know what she's looking for.

- Nate Chinen, New York Times News Service

Various Artists

CRAZY HEART: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK

New West

In the film "Crazy Heart," actor Jeff Bridges plays a hard-drinking country singer struggling to maintain a career long after he's stopped having hits. The soundtrack leans on the bluer side of country music, ignoring modern country's slick surfaces for a compilation of classic country, acoustic blues, and hard-bitten singer-songwriter fare.

Musical director T Bone Burnett cherry-picks hits by the Delmore Brothers, Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Louvin Brothers, Buck Owens and Kitty Wells to ground the soundtrack in time-tested standards. He balances it with more recent tunes by Americana singer-songwriters (Ryan Bingham, Billy Joe Shaver, Townes Van Zandt, Lucinda Williams) and a blues legend (Lightnin' Hopkins). Then he works in original songs from the film, most of them co-written by Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton and sung by Bridges or co-stars Robert Duvall and Colin Farrell.

The actors don't have the distinct vocal character of the established singers, but Burnett gives their songs an earthy resonance befitting the film's honky-tonk ambiance. "Crazy Heart" makes a convincing argument that there are certain country music traditions that remain timeless.

The soundtrack comes in a limited-edition, expanded package with 23 songs or a regular 17-song version.

- Michael McCall, AP

Various Artists

2010 GRAMMY NOMINEES

Capitol

More encompassing than one of those popular "Now! That's What I Call Music" compilations - but no less reductive - this year's edition of the Grammys' annual mix CD is a comprehensive listen to the music that dominated 2009.

If you were paying close attention and listening to lots of FM radio, you're likely sick of most of these songs. But if you're only now catching up on the year's biggest tracks, this serves as an excellent primer.

It starts with the pop - the music that makes you move. "I Gotta Feeling," by the Black Eyed Peas, is last year's defining party anthem, and Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" is a close second. Kings of Leon's "Use Somebody" is a powerhouse of an emotive rock song that helps the disc transition nicely into some of the year's soft-rock favorites, from a banal Dave Matthews Band ballad to Taylor Swift's clean-cut "You Belong to Me," from catchy Colbie Caillat's "Fallin' for You" to the Fray's ubiquitous "You Found Me."

The disc includes the obligatory country tracks - upbeat pop-country offerings from Sugarland, Lady Antebellum and the Zac Brown Band. A couple of weak offerings from U2 ("I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight") and Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood ("Can't Find My Way Home") bring the disc to a close, but, as expected, the comp stronger on the pop side, what with the inclusion of dance-floor fillers "My Life Would Suck Without You" (Kelly Clarkson) and "Hot N Cold" (Katy Perry).

The Grammys will be awarded Jan. 31.

- Ricardo Baca, The Denver Post

Mads Tolling

THE PLAYMAKER

Madsman Records

No doubt some jazz fans unfamiliar with violinist Mads Tolling's background - he is best known for his stints with the Turtle Island Quartet and a recent edition of bassist-fusion pioneer Stanley Clarke's band - will be put off by a few tune choices on his new CD, "The Playmaker." But probably not for long.

With his honed technique, vigorous attack and engaging brand of swing, Tolling makes a convincing case that songs associated with Radiohead ("Just") and Led Zeppelin ("Black Dog") can colorfully bookend a collection of pieces composed by Thelonious Monk, drawn from Danish folk song traditions or inspired by the likes of James Brown, John McLaughlin and Jaco Pastorius. And let's not forget the Tolling-penned "Playmaker" tributes to ball players Tom Brady, Zinedine Zidane and LeBron James.

Of course, Tolling, a native of Denmark, doesn't pull off this trick without help from an impressive supporting cast. In the album's liner notes, he explains that "in sports, the playmaker's role is to facilitate his teammates, and in music it's kind of the same thing." The lineup includes bassist Clarke, vibraphonist Stefon Harris and keyboardist Russell Ferrante and Tolling consistently benefits from their input. Yet while there's sufficient firepower to fuel the rock covers, the album's highlights often find Tolling and company nimbly exploring swing, ballads and blues.

- Mike Joyce, Special to The Washington Post