Music

T Bone Burnett
Tooth of Crime

Producer T Bone Burnett is the Midas of music. Everything he touches is golden.

From the Grammy-winning O, Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack in 2000 to last year's unlikely but unforgettable pairing of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Burnett hasn't missed.

His latest, however, is off the mark — though not by much. Tooth of Crime, a solo CD, is the result of more than a decade's worth of tinkering with songs he initially wrote for the 1996 restaging of the Sam Shepard play "Tooth of Crime (Second Dance)."

The songs, which Burnett reworked with the help of players like guitarist Marc Ribot, are haunting and drip menace. Yet the album doesn't hold together without its accompanying narrative, lost and abandoned in a dark, dark place.

There are some strong pieces here. "The Rat Age" is downright mean, and "Sweet Lullaby" is as melancholy as a sorrowful goodbye.

But while sharing many of the same attributes with work he produced and arranged over the years, including his own release, the angular "True False Identity," in 2006, Tooth of Crime isn't able to reach the same transcendence as, say, "Raising Sand," the Krauss-Plant album, or Gillian Welch's "Hell Among the Yearlings."

Death Cab For Cutie
Narrow Stairs

Making the jump from an indie label to a major one can spell disaster, and many a fan heralded the demise of Death Cab For Cutie after their unfairly criticized Atlantic debut, 2005's Plans.

Again boasting slick production and a new direction for their sound, Death Cab's follow-up, Narrow Stairs, will shatter any expectations about this band — and here it's a compliment.

Typically grounded in warm and bright flavors, Death Cab have widened their scope dramatically on Narrow Stairs, with synth providing dark tones and biting atmosphere — the disc floats and echoes.

Disc opener "Bixby Canyon Bridge" provides a jolt, with a soft intro and frontman Ben Gibbard's emotive vocals lulling you in before a hard riff hits you over the head.

Impressive lead single "I Will Possess Your Heart" boasts an ambitious intro — maybe too much so — propelled by bass and piano before Gibbard flashes his typical eloquence: "How I wish you could see the potential/The potential of you and me/It's like a book elegantly bound/But in a language you can't read just yet."

Narrow Stairs is a knockout, and will make you throw out everything you've come to know about Death Cab For Cutie.

Duffy
Rockferry

Duffy's debut album could slip in between Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield on a collector's shelf, but the 23-year-old pop-soul ingenue says she developed her sound without hearing either artist.

Still, the singer-songwriter, who grew up in a remote Welsh village where top-40 music ruled, embodies the style and substance of a classic '60s soul diva.

She co-wrote each of the ten tracks on Rockferry, an album all about old-fashioned heartbreak. On the title track, Duffy has "a bag of songs and a heavy heart." She tells a lover they're finished in the sparsely arranged "Warwick Avenue," bemoans his lack of attention in "Hanging On Too Long" and tries to keep herself from the arms of a cheater in "Stepping Stone."

She knows she's a fool in love and pleads for compassion on the super-catchy single, "Mercy." Duffy taps into her inner Aretha Franklin on the electro-tinged tune, begging for mercy over a bouncy chorus of yeah, yeah, yeahs.

Rockferry only lags on its final tune — ironically the album's most positive. A soaring anthem about life's possibilities laid over an orchestral backdrop, "Distant Dreamer" sounds like the theme song for a cheesy children's film.