Crocodiles adhere to a Paisley Underground retro-Velvets pop sound for “Teardrop Guitar,” but add harmonies and a non-wasted energy. The balance of raw and refined is remarkable. The chorus: “I… wanna see you cry.” The song is part of the most recent Crocodiles album Crimes of Passion.

The band Beverly gets airy and thumpy in equal measure on its single (and video) “Honey Do,” which is kind of a liberating answer-song to the defensive rockabilly classic “Honey Don’t.” Not that “Honey Do” is a retro record. It’s a straight-ahead punk rock groove adorned with exquisite high-register vocals. A real charmer.

Miniature Tigers’ hysterical, glossily overproduced yet understated soul pop anthem “You Used to Be the Shit” has a video accompaniment. It’s basically a song about old romance and lost youth, augmented with references to once-hot items such as laser disks. The video, which came out last summer, ramps up the retro with clips of everything from Jerry Springer and Urkel to Michael Jackson’s Bad and Friends to pogs and AOL. “We used to be free,” the harmony group intones, “but now she’s just used to me.” The song’s on the most recent Miniature Tigers album Cruel Runnings.

Savant, Zion. Ferocious 75 minutes of samples and concepts, keenly and leisurely developed by ace mixer Aleksander Vinter (aka Savant). Zion’s separated into 16 songs, but I’ve heard it several times through and appreciate it most as a cohesive album-length suite. A lot of it is dance-friendly electro/dubstep stuff, but I don’t dance and find it great background music to write to. Middle Eastern sounds rise up in Zion regularly (sometimes very cleverly, as in “Shazam”), and the beats are generally very frisky, but my favorite bit is probably “Outcasts,” a slowish soul scream right in the middle of the thing. It reminds me of the magic performed with a short sample of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” on his 75 minute Underground mixtape.

RONiiA, “Fool’s Game.” This is one of those songs that has enough ideas in it to be a full album. It’s a cool collaboration among Nona Marie Invie of Dark Dark Dark, Mark McGee of Marijuana Deathsquad and Fletcher Barnhill of Joint Custody. Slow and droney without being willfully arch or antagonistic, “Fool’s Game” is a nightmarishly dream spun from chirps, thumps and ethereal (yet low and human) vocals. It gets dense, yet still floats. Real 3 a.m. contemplative stuff. Wish it were 20 minutes long instead of five.
http://www.wonderingsound.com/song-premiere-roniia/

POP ETC, “Running in Circles.” Spazzy synths. The repetitive lyrics, about “running in circles without you,” match the riffy rhythms. Then it kicks into power-pop overdrive for the chorus and bridge. Cartoons might like to dance to this.

Dexys, One Day I’m Going to Soar

So many of my favorite bands from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s (Real Kids, Faust, Gravel Pit) have returned after long absences that I’m a little worried that it’s a portent of doom. But considering how strong all these albums are—remarkable returns to form, after years in the wilderness—it’s more of a portent that space and time will come to lack meaning and the future is uncommonly bright.

This Dexys album has been out in the UK since 2012, but wasn’t available for US download for ages after its overseas release. Unable to get it at first, I forgot all about it and only this month was reminded of its existence.

One Day I’m Going to Soar represents the first Dexys (or Dexys Midnight Runners) album in something like 27 years. Strangely though, it begins right where the last album, Don’t Stand Me Down, left off, with long conversational songs about romantic confusion and bitter break-ups. Stranger still, Don’t Stand Me Down was a record that basically destroyed the band, taking them in a leisurely, reflective direction that the hordes of peppy, stepdancing “C’mon Eileen” fans could not fathom.

Me, I was a fan of all Dexy Midnight Runners albums, from their high-energy early experiments blending punk, trad folk and soul (“Dance Stance,” “Geno”) to their later soul-searching (“This is What She’s Like”). I was enraptured with Don’t Stand Me Down, played it endlessly, forced it upon friends. proclaimed it the best thing I’d heard in 1985 and felt validated when many of the British music journals which had lambasted it upon its initial release did complete about-faces and sang its praises highly when it was reissued on CD in 1997 and again (“the director’s cut”) in 2002.

One Day I’m Going to Soar has the same mawkish inward-turning sentimentality as Don’t Stand Me Down, and yes it’s no surprise that it may be a turn-off for many listeners. But both albums have sustained drama that I find riveting even it when it gets flip or melodramatic. Midway through One Day I’m Going to Soar is a mini-musical called “I’m Always Going to Love You,” in which Kevin Rowland (Dexys leader and only sustaining member) tells a woman (Madeleine Hyland) he loves her, gets her to confess her love for him, then abruptly has second thoughts and dumps her. It all takes place in one four and a half minute song, but what’s truly distinctive is the torrents of abuse hurled at Rowland by the aggrieved Hyland. “Kevin! Don’t talk to me!,” she wails in Aretha Franklinesque female soul-furor. It all happens over an old-school Philly-soul beat, with the vocal interplay sounding improvised even though it’s obviously tightly scripted. There’s little you can compare this song to. And it’s matched by much of the rest of the One Day I’m Going to Soar album. Mixing soul swagger with insecurities, antagonisms and oafish insolence is something Dexys has done for years, and it’s still unsettling and disarming and bizarre and brilliant.

Faust, Just Us

I think Faust is one of the most important bands of the 20th century—progressive but not indulgent, virtuosic yet still basic and earthy, experimental yet accessible, unpredictable yet trustworthy.

I was turned on to them in the late ‘70s when I asked the great avant-garde percussionist Chris Cutler, after an Art Bears concert in a chemistry lecture hall at Tufts University, what I should be listening. He wrote “Faust” and an address in Germany on a slip of paper and handed it to me. I found Faust So Far first (in the stacks at the college radio station) and never looked back.

Faust’s main moment was a brilliant four-album salvo in the early ‘70s, but they resurfaced 20 years later. They later splintered into two separate Fausts, both with founding members. One of these Fausts, led by Werner Diermaier and Jean-Herve Peron, has been rather prolific; the other, led by Hans Joachim Irmler, not so much. I’d say I prefer the Irmler variant, whose album Faust is Last is up there with the original band’s best work. But the Diermaier/Peron Faust has done seven decent albums to Irmler’s one great one, and has toured extensively. So they’re the ones really keeping the Faust flame alive.

And Just Us (spelled on the album cover thus: “j US t”) has the high concept, sheer bravado and clammering, clanging candor of vintage Faust. The album comes with a thesis. According to the official description of the record, “Founder members Jean-Hervé Peron and Zappi Diermaier have laid down twelve musical foundations, inviting the whole world to use them as a base on which to build their own music. The tracks presented by Peron and Diermaier are clearly, intrinsically typical of Faust in their own right, yet offer enough space for completely different works to develop. Which is exactly what they hope will happen.”

Yes, you could certainly sample these tracks, many of which are made up of repetitive beats, chords and machine noises. Or you could be suspicious of that come-on, as some critics have been. Personally, I’ve been too worshipful of Faust for too long to consider that I could have anything of substance to add to their music. I find the simplicity of Just Us ideal for breaking up all the melodic pop on my iPhone playlist. These are ear-opening pulses of neo-Futurist noodling, amalgams of quivering humanity and invasive industrial effects. I find it dark and compelling and imaginative and rhythmic and dreamy and evocative. It may be a lightweight effort for the oft-denser Faust. It may be like a great painter showing you their palette and asking you to consider it as conceptual art. But, hell, it’s got a good beat and I don’t dance and I like it.

The Real Kids, Shake…Outta Control

I’ve been a big Real Kids fan since 1976, when I heard them on the Live at the Rat album (aka The Record That Changed My Life). But I still feel I came late to the party and haven’t bolstered my devotion nearly enough. I’ve heard all their records, including the alternate-takes albums and the nearly-Real Kids bands like the Taxi Boys or The Lowdowns, and the John Felice solo stuff and some bootlegs and such. But I’ve barely ever seen the band live.

My lack of commitment, despite my deep love of their songs, was driven home to me when I found out The Real Kids had regrouped and released a new album six months ago and I hadn’t even known about it. It took me a review in the new issue of Ugly Things to make me wise, and minutes later I’d downloaded Shake…Outta Control in all its glory.

Maybe I should ease up on myself. I’d given up looking for new Real Kids product long ago. John Felice had gone a few different directions and it didn’t seem like the Real Kids were necessarily one of them, outside of a reunion show or two.

The new line-up has founding Real Kid Felice plus longtime compatriot Billy Cole, who was The Taxi Boys’ bassist and became The Real Kids’ guitarist in the early ‘80s. (The original bassist, “Alpo” Paulino, died in 2006. Shake…Outta Control certainly sounds like a good old Real Kids album, and it actually sounds a lot better, production-wise, than a lot of Felice’s output in the ‘80s and ‘90s. This is a record where the sound is not connected to a trendy commercial style. It’s geared to The Real Kids, made to sound like the band sounded at their best.

Felice may not have slowed down much, but he’s slowed some of The Real Kids songs down, with mixed results. Of the self-covers on Shake…Outta Control, “Who Needs You” (the rousing, riffing Live at the Rat classic track that I’ve personally heard several thousand times over the years) is presented at about the same tempo as the already balladic “Common at Noon,” which in turn is reconstructed as a Country & Western song. “No Fun No More” is given a Rolling Stones-esque refinement. As for most of the other songs, it’s hard to tell what’s vintage and not—when they were written, whether they’re directly derivative of old stuff or newly wrought in the approved style. “That Girl Ain’t Right” sounds like a basement tape from 30 years ago. “All Night Boppin’” is in the spirit of The Real Kids’ live covers of roots-rockers. “Fly Into the Mystery” sounds like The Velvet Underground and mentions Route 128, two things which remind you that John Felice was a charter member of The Modern Lovers. “Got It Made” has the steadiness of “Needles and Pins” but the characteristic Real Kids whine. The two songs with “Shake” in their title present two familiar yet distinct sides of The Real Kids. “I Can’t Shake That Girl” has simple lyrics meant to ride the song’s tricky opening riff. “Shake…Outta Control,” the album’s title tune, starts with drum beat and harmonica, and while the lyrics at first sound as basic as “I Can’t Shake That Girl”’s, it’s one of those personal proclamations of passion, independence, insecurity and angst that Felice is such a master at. He makes the need to dance sound like an affliction.

This album shakes. It’s timeless. Reunion albums come in many varieties. This is very much in the “as if they never went away category.” This is a band with the word “Real” in their very name, and they still sound real.