Ya gotta move: Róisín Murphy, Lydia Loveless, Bill Callahan

In this month’s reviews, I couldn’t have imagined I’d juxtapose a dance artist’s determination to use the genre for introspective (and performative) ends with albums by a pair of singer-songwriters.

Róisín Murphy – Róisín Machine

“A private restaurant serving every dish I want/But I want something more,” she prays on her fifth album’s midpoint, so she continues the search, extending track lengths, letting her bassists pop, luxuriating in the warm pulsating waves of some of the year’s filthiest sequencer programming. Wary of and disappointed by every follow-up to 2007’s perfectly titled Overpowered, I succumbed to the singles released ahead of this one, notably “Incapable.”, a triumph of the locked groove. “We Got Together” and “Kingdom of Ends” are the strongest new tunes; Róisín Murphy uses electronics for ruminating and posturing like folkies do their guitars. Her imperiousness is a tonic. If she luxuriates in the dips and swells of the music, she does so while statue-still. When she memorializes a Narcissus, it’s clear she admires his self-love. No folkie has tried that trick.

Lydia Loveless – Daughter

Fans have groused about the ratio of fast songs to slow songs, but when the writing impresses as often as it does on her fifth album I can ignore that rockcrit failsafe. In my Pitchfork review, I place Loveless in the lineage of John Mellencamp and Tom Petty. “Falling out of love with jerks, hitting the bottle hoping it doesn’t hit back, Loveless positions herself not as a survivor but a fighter. She expects tough times and no breaks, not even from herself.”

Bill Callahan – 35

On one of his shortest, slightest, but strongest albums, Bill Callahan wants listeners to know about the quiet weirdness of domesticity. The amiable burr used for his speak-sing shapes this quiet weirdness. A year after a double album valentine, he spots trouble, which retroactively transforms 35 into the Legendary Hearts to Shepherd in a Sheepskin Dress‘ The Blue Mask “She don’t drink because she don’t wanna fight,” he sings on “Breakfast,” his tone suggesting he grips the fork like a weapon. Indifferent to melody as he ages, Callahan picks figures on his guitar for the sake of his fully formed verses, most of which boast lines like “I don’t see myself in the books I read these days.”