New Albums

I bought the new Wye Oak album, and I'm also thinking of downloading the new Ray LaMontagne, reviewed here:

[T]he new Supernova is a surprisingly bold, enterprising follow-up from an artist who could have easily ridden out the rest of his career on adult-alternative autopilot. Produced by Dan Auerbach, the record mostly sets aside the neo-Bob Seger roots-rock of God Willin’ and undertakes an expansive survey of the psychedelic-tinged ’60s music scene.
Supernova is saturated in Auerbach’s contributions, but it’s much more than just LaMontagne’s songs laid atop bluesy Black Keys riffs. Across the album, both LaMontagne and Auerbach show a willingness to try new things: The hazy “Pick Up A Gun,” for example, lazily drifts through four key changes while building quiet, compelling drama—it’s a track with subtle elements of the two musicians’ styles but does not fit comfortably into either’s canon. From hollow, echoing backup choruses and meandering organ runs to thick, trippy jams, Auerbach’s flower-child revival injects LaMontagne’s rustic folk-rock with looseness and a sense of mystery. For his part, LaMontagne keeps it all reasonably polished and structured, and works in healthy bits of the Western, country, and R&B deployed on God Willin’.