New Recordings

Life Death Love and Freedom

(Hear Music ***)

As the title indicates, this is John Mellencamp at his most serious. Not to mention his most forlorn: "Life is an abstraction, and it tries to fool us all, and it's working so far, it seems," the normally feisty Hoosier sings on "Young Without Lovers." On "A Ride Back Home," the 56-year-old former Johnny Cougar is ready to lie down in a pine box: "I was showin' some promise once upon a time/But it's gone now, and it ain't comin' back." There's a full band backing him up, and a supple roots-rock groove with T-Bone Burnett producing and playing guitar, but the songs are uncommonly intimate, as if Mellencamp were singing them to himself, in between puffs on a cigarette in a darkened room, doing penance for forcing TV viewers to hear his "Our Country" Chevy commercials hundreds of thousands of times. And

Life Death Love And Freedom

is just about good enough to earn him forgiveness.

- Dan DeLuca

Miami Ice

(Obey Your Brain ***)

Dividing their ravenous appetites between spaced-out pop, slinky world music, and jazz-informed improv, the Philly-Chicago supergroup Icy Demons have answered their batty 2006 debut

Tears of a Clone

with another beguiling, pun-titled opus. Founding members Chris Powell and Griffin Rodriguez continue to refine the adventurous songwriting they have plied in such acts as Man Man, Bablicon, and Need New Body, here picking up Man Man ax man Russell Higbee and a few icons of the Chicago post-rock scene. As jumbled as genres are in Icy Demons, though, the results are smooth and often mellow, from "Summer Samba" to the hip-hoppy closer "Crittin' Down to Baba's." With that said, such fearless surveying will require an open mind on the part of any listeners new to this project.

- Doug Wallen

Hercules And Love Affair

(Mute ***1/2)

Hercules and Love Affair's "Blind" is indelible and irresistible: a throbbing Giorgio Moroder-esque sensation with percolating sequencers and a jazzy trumpet hook that backs haunted crooning from Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. Helmed by producer/ keyboardist / sometime vocalist Andrew Butler, NYC's Hercules comes out of the DFA stable, the collective that includes LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture. As with those bands, the music succeeds on both an intellectual art-school level and a visceral dance-club one.

While the detached Kim Ann Foxman and the quietly histrionic Nomi take vocal turns, Antony sings on half the album's 12 tracks, and his androgynous vibrato works as well in these updated new-wave disco settings as in his usual cabaret styles. Nothing on the rest of Hercules and Love Affair equals "Blind," but enough comes close to make this one of the year's most exciting debuts.

- Steve Klinge

The Turn

(Decca ***)

In Your Room

(Mute ***1/2)

Before there were British white girls like Amy and Duffy with big husky voices and soul for days, there was Alison Moyet - the biggest and grittiest of them all. And before there was Moyet, there was Yaz, her Spartan electro-duo with Vince Clarke that existed for three years at the beginning of the Eighties.

While Clarke perfected his swishing electro-pop sound with Erasure, Moyet started a solo career in 1983 that landed her where she started before Vince: belting blues, jazz and R&B in stunningly diverse tones. Like "Whispering Your Name," which managed the beauty of splashy disco and balladeer folk. On

The Turn

, Moyet does much the same thing - use her warm, rough-hewn voice for zippy pop purposes ("A Guy like You"), grandly emotive love songs ("One More Time"), and tango-inspired dramas ("Home") in which her raw silken tone is the center.

Though Moyet's tone is rounder and richer throughout

Turn

, it's the setting in which her gut-bucket vocals were placed within Clarke's spare synth-pop that made Yaz unique during its two-disc tenure. Expanded into a boxed set of its best, its B-sides and some rump-shaking rarities, the low, grinding blues of "Situation" and "Don't Go," and the threadbare soul of "Ode of Boy" and "Winter Kills" still conjures chills.

- A.D. Amorosi

Rollin' With the Flow

(Lofton Creek ***)

When it comes to his music, Mark Chesnutt has never been one to just go with the flow. Through varying commercial fortunes the Texan has steadfastly maintained his neotraditionalist approach, and the result here is another strong, satisfying collection of straight-up country.

Rollin' With the Flow

showcases the singer's range within that style. It starts off with some smooth ballads and mid-tempo numbers, including the strings-shaded title song, before heading to the barroom for the raw-boned honky-tonk of "Live to Be 100" and "(Come On In) The Whiskey's Fine." "Long Way to Go" references Chesnutt's own life in music, and as with many a good country song, the title phrase plays a couple of ways. His career may be far from finished, but as for mastering his craft, Chesnutt arrived quite a while ago.

- Nick Cristiano

The Last Country Album

(Shuffle 5 ***)

After seven years of gigging around Austin, Texas, and two live albums, this band of country veterans is still definitely in a "Honky Tonk Mood," to borrow one title from its first studio album.

Heybale! features three standout front men in pianist Earl Poole Ball, a longtime Johnny Cash sideman who wrote and sings "Honky Tonk Mood" as well as two other terrific saloon anthems; singer-guitarist Redd Volkaert, formerly of Merle Haggard's Strangers; and Gary Claxton, a real find as a singer and writer - he wrote or cowrote four of the 12 songs, highlighted by the cheating ballad "House of Secrets." The last country album? Not really; but with their effortless blend of barroom rowdiness and musical sophistication these guys sure know their way around real country.

- N.C.

Lifecycle

(Heads Up ***)

The Yellowjackets use some trappings of smooth jazz but don't scrimp on the soloing or get submerged in the smooth formula.

The result is accessible and reasonably challenging. The quartet's move to more free-wheeling jazz, which dates from the early 1990s when reed man Bob Mintzer joined up, remains evident on these 10 cuts.

The free radical in the mix here is guitarist Mike Stern, whose voracious runs on his tune "Double Nickel" score big time. His handsome "Dreams Go" sounds deep in the Weather Report pocket.

This is a session of original tunes, and some are Monk-like in the quirky ground they cover. Keyboardist Russell Ferrante's "Measure of a Man" has its Middle Eastern moments, while Mintzer's "Yahoo" projects a lilting, happy vibe that gives Stern another pleasant pad to vault from.

"Claire's Closet" from Ferrante is almost classical, while bassist Jimmy Haslip's "Lazaro" pulls out all the electronic stops, satisfying that yen for smooth radio in an honorable way.

- Karl Stark

Lo Que Somos Lo Que Sea

(Deep Tone ***)

The New York City-based Grupo Los Santos captures Cuban and Brazilian rhythms in the context of a jazz quartet. It's amazing how much juice they generate with acoustic instruments at low decibels.

The CD, released a few months ago, ranges from Brazilian choro, a samba cousin, to a Cuban jam session. The opening "Rumba in the Bronx" by drummer William "Beaver" Bausch is a winning, minor-keyed ditty that quickly stamps this group as worth hearing.

The quartet is more about serving up good dishes like "Happified" than answering absolute questions of authenticity on each ethnic foray.

Tenor saxophone Pete Carlon gets things rolling on "Clave 66," where his horn mingles nicely with the tones of guitarist Pete Smith. "Boogie Down Broder," dedicated to the late trombonist Juan Pablo Torres, is a mellifluous melding of drumsticks and guitar strings.

- K.S.

Jon Vickers, Ettore Bastianini, Amy Shuard and Regina Resnik; Edward Downes conducting

(ROH Heritage Series, ***1/2)

Janet Baker, Robert Tear and John Shirley-Quirk; Charles Mackerras conducting

(ROH Heritage Series, ****)

Gösta Winbergh, John Tomlinson, Nancy Gustafson and Thomas Allen; Bernard Haitink conducting

(ROH Heritage Series, ***)

More treats from the Royal Opera House archive here, but the British taste reflected in this choice of releases should be regarded with skepticism. The clear-cut recommendation is the 1962

Ballo

. Regina Resnik (Ulrica) and Ettore Bastianini (Renato) deliver all the necessary Verdian intensity, though the typically heroic Jon Vickers (Gustavo) gives one of his most tender, poetic performances ever. And two talents barely known outside of England - Amy Shuard (Amelia) and conductor Edward Downes - might be revelations to U.S. ears. The only drawback is the sound: The recording isn't taken from BBC radio tapes, but made by an anonymous tapist in the audience. That considered, the sound is better than acceptable, but singers are sometimes off-mike, and audience coughs are in the foreground.

Few great singers inspire such extreme reactions as Janet Baker, but whatever your position on her, this 1981

Alceste

, one of her last opera appearances, exhibits dramatic insights and intensity rarely heard in her studio recordings. Robert Tear, heard at his vocal peak, matches her at every turn. Given recent advances in Gluck performance practice, the opera would be paced with less deliberation were Charles Mackerras conducting it today, though it's hardly old-fashioned.

The 1997

Meistersinger

set suffers only in comparison to the zillions of other excellent live recordings of this opera. The value here depends on one's interest in cast members not widely heard in these roles. John Tomlinson is an unsteady Hans Sachs, Thomas Allen is a near-ideal Beckmesser, and the since-deceased Gosta Winbergh is a variable but, ultimately, a considerably rewarding Walther. Then there's Bernard Haitink's conducting: Though he has more than his share of routine performances, this one has a special glow.

- David Patrick Stearns

Orion String Quartet

(

Albany ***1/2)

The 89-year-old Leon Kirchner hasn't always been recognized as the great American composer he is - outside Boston, at least, where Harvard University was his home base for decades. He traffics rarely with big orchestras and multipronged commissions, but is mainly a chamber music composer. These four quartets written over more than a half century are a fascinating encapsulation. Simultaneously, they represent a long journey - from late-1940s modernism through 1960s electronics to the highly charged abstraction of his most recent quartet - but also no journey at all, since they so clearly hail from the same personality.

My favorite is the 1949 first quartet: It's humorously argumentative, full of youthful sleights of hand, and shows him at a starting point similar to Elliott Carter's in the same medium. The almost brusque creative velocity of the fourth quartet keeps you coming back to it, hoping to keep paces mentally with it. Strangely, his Pulitzer Prize-winning

String Quartet No. 3

is hard to take seriously: It pairs live string players with an electronic-music tape that now seems primitive and expressively irrelevant.

- D.P.S.