[ blues ]
Ben Harper could make you mad, he masters so many styles within styles. Starting with early Delta, Get Up! (Stax) focuses on blues in all shades, the natural territory for a collection of originals built to showcase his harmonica-playing buddy Charlie Musselwhite as much as his own picking and singing. Musselwhite’s mouth-harp buzzes like a symphony of murderous bees, underscoring lines like “I see your mouth moving but there’s a circus coming out” (from “I Don’t Believe a Word You Say”). —Mary Armstrong
[ ambient/electro-acoustic ]
Expansive yet far from remote, the long-form abstract ruminations of Brooklyn duo Mountains behave like ambient/drone, but with an unusual amount of personality for music so placid and formalist. That’s never been more true than on Centralia (Thrill Jockey), their self-evident magnum opus, which follows the burbling, buzzily analog Air Museum with an even richer integration of synthetic and organic layers, interweaving electro-acoustic swells with sweetly pastoral fingerpicking. —K. Ross Hoffman
[ dvd/blu-ray ]
Long maligned, and equally beloved, as an Emerald Isle fantasy, John Ford’s The Quiet Man actually wrestles with the issue of myth, both embracing and undermining it. The gay abandon of the old country is as seductive as Maureen O’Hara’s vermillion locks, restored by Olive Films’ Blu-ray to their original luster, but with it come old enmities that can only be sliced through by John Wayne’s expat. —Sam Adams
[ electronic ]
The austere architectonics of LA beatscaper Nosaj Thing’s debut LP, Drift, evoked pristine spaces starkly devoid of human presence — though still capable of poignant, near-spiritual resonance. But his return to the format on Home (Innovative Leisure), as tidily meticulous as ever, traverses terrain that’s decidedly less rarefied and more, well, habitable. The rather ghostly vocal presence of Kazu Makino (Blonde Redhead) and Chaz Bundick (Toro y Moi) plays a role there, but it’s mostly an overall sense of warming and softening, plus the suggestion of more bodily forms of movement in gestures toward two-step and fractured, skeletal funk. —K. Ross Hoffman
