CD Reviews

A full year out of rehab, the controversial rapper Eminem is back with Relapse, his first album since 2004. Curiously, he brings back an obscure rap subgenre called horror-core, and critic Robert Christgau thinks he should have stayed home a little longer.

The grainy, blurry portrait of Ran Blake on the cover of his album, Driftwoods, looks like spirit photography: the pianist as ghostly presence. His playing can be spooky, too. The CD radically transforms popular vocal standards from Billie Holiday, Hank Williams, Quincy Jones and more.

Eva Ayllon is sometimes called Peru's Tina Turner. On Kimba Fa, the 30-year veteran takes all sorts of liberties with Afro-Peruvian music, adding in piano and sometimes a brass section, as well as jazz harmony and ideas from other Afro Latin styles.

The self-billed "blind couple of Mali" have been recording since the '80s, but they've never stuck to one style. On Welcome to Mali, Amadou and Mariam absorb ideas from everywhere and sound like they're having a ball.

Despite a constant flood of new music, people still like to insist it was all better in times past. But Marianne Faithfull, who has survived a bunch of musical decades, recognizes that right now is a golden era of its own. Her new record, Easy Come, Easy Go, is all covers, but alongside old standards are what might be some new staples.

In the mid-1960s, an electrician converted his basement into a jerry-built, custom studio he dubbed Double U Sound. Between 1967 and 1981, Felton Williams recorded more than 300 reels of tape. Downriver Revival is the first in a series of compilations focusing on the recordings of these local studios.

Originally released in 1961, electric guitarist Grant Green's first album with Blue Note Records, Grant's First Stand, has been reissued. Green has a solid swinger's knack for skippy, airborne jazz rhythms, but some of his lines wouldn't sound out of place in a Chicago blues bar.

Animal Collective is an experimental pop band that's cultivated an air of mystery over the past few years, as well as a passionate following. Will Hermes reviews the band's new album, Merriweather Post Pavilion.

On their first recording together in more than 50 years, saxophonist James Moody and pianist Hank Jones show that the elder statesmen of jazz can still play beautifully. Our Delight displays the golden virtues of jazz with warmth and grace.

Bebo Valdes left Havana 50 years ago, but at the piano, it's as if he's still there. He's not reviving anything; he just kept on doing it the old way, long after music in Cuba had moved on. On Live at the Village Vanguard, Valdes shares billing with his frequent duo partner, bassist Javier Colina.

Gregg Gillis is a Pittsburgh DJ and musical mixologist who was known only by his stage name, Girl Talk, until his music took off and he could quit his day job as a biomedical engineer. Often, music by mixologists sounds esoteric, but that could hardly be claimed of Girl Talk's latest mashup album, Feed the Animals.

For the Cherryholmes family, bluegrass is more than just a pastime that morphed into a career. It was cathartic for dealing with the death of their oldest child, Shelley. On the band's third CD, Don't Believe, the Cherryholmes still deal with the profound emotions triggered by that loss.

Brooklyn's TV on the Radio has always been a forward-thinking rock band. Its new album, Dear Science, is its funkiest, but in a typically complicated way. Sick of living with pessimism, the band has brightened its tunes and beats.

Reggae music has gone a lot of places over the years, from minimalist dub to culture-warring dancehall. Almost 40 years on, Spear still hews to the reggae basics: a deep, easy groove; brassy R&B flavorings; and a mystical take on history. His new CD is Jah is Real.

Fresh Air's jazz critic takes a fresh look at the reissue of the album Head On (Blue Note/EMI), a 1971 session led and recorded by Bobby Hutcherson.

The Bright Eyes singer made Conor Oberst on an impulse while visiting the mystical mountain town of Tepoztlan in Mexico earlier this year. The approach is straight folk-rock, but it's less simple than it seems at first. But it also sounds like the next installment in the Bright Eyes catalog.

American and Brazilian musicians have been finding common ground ever since jazz artists turned to bossa nova 50 years ago. But the result has never quite sounded like Nation Beat's mash-up of Southern country and northeast Brazilian maracatu.

Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the new Silver Jews album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. The band is fronted by singer, songwriter, poet and occasional cartoonist David Berman.

In this year of high gas prices, reviewer Meredith Ochs is already sick of the word "staycation." But she's found an Austin, Texas, band with a great new song — which doubles as a handy rationalization for spending a holiday at home.

More than anything Malkmus has done, Real Emotional Trash engages in the sort of shape-shifting that marked Bob Dylan's career. He wears a different mask on virtually every song, and it certainly helps that the band is his strongest post-Pavement outfit yet.

Kathleen Edwards is a 29-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter with a taste for rock 'n' roll, folk and especially country music. Given her country of origin, it's no surprise that her songs find metaphors in hockey skates and border crossings instead of red dirt farms or the Blue Ridge Mountains. On Asking for Flowers, she steps up her game even further.