Listening to…

Three Legged Fox, Always Anyway
Billed as “ska punk” where I came across them, but much foxier than that. Mild reggae beats (the kind soft-pop singers use) and blue-eyed soul strains give half the songs here an unexpected romantic air, like Simply Red crashed a basement party. Very few of the songs really jump—you feel restraint and intelligence at work here. Not that these style experiments are entirely successful, but they’re certainly intriguing, especially when the vocals start cruising atop the chunky guitars and keyboards in numbers like “Comin’ Back Soon.” Other songs include “Get Out Alive,” “Run for Your Life” and “High Time for Arrival”—it’s like some concept album for the peripatetic, and that frisky quasi-Jamaican style suits that theme pretty well.