Album Reviews: Caroline Rose, U.S. Girls, Sonny Landreth

Caroline Rose

Superstar

(New West *** 1/2)

Caroline Rose used to be an earnest Americana singer. But on her 2018 album Loner, she figured out there’s much more fun to be had making perky, unabashedly upbeat, synth-powered pop music that’s indebted to Devo and Prince.

Superstar carries on that mission, embracing a surface-level gloss, with tongue only partly in cheek. Dressed in red and making kinetic, instantly catchy music affords Rose the opportunity to simultaneously celebrate and critique the culture of the self.

“I’m so in love with myself / It’s so romantic,” she sings in the irresistibly 1980s-style bop “Feel The Way I Want.” But later in the same song, the cracks open in the facade, and vulnerability is revealed: “I am on a strike against my body and mind / What once was pain is now a pleasure of mine.”

Superstar follows a loose narrative about a “Freak Like Me” caught up in the American fame and fortune complex. Rose has cited movies like Michael Patrick Jann’s 1999 beauty pageant mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 movie The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant as influences.

But while there’s plenty in Superstar to ponder about celebrity and ambition, self-confidence and self-doubt, the album succeeds so well because the songs are so crafty and grabby. And while its protagonist gets carried away by fame and the complications that ensue, the music never succumbs to seriousness or forces the fun. It’s a high-wire act that doesn’t take a wrong step. — Dan DeLuca

Caroline Rose plays Underground Arts, 1200 Callowhill St., at 8 p.m. Friday, March 27. $18. undergroundarts.org. 215-627-1332.

Sonny Landreth

Blacktop Run

(Provogue ***)

"A new day is dawning / And I have never felt so alive,” Sonny Landreth sings on “Blacktop Run,” which opens his new album of the same name. The statement reflects the continuing creative vitality that the South Louisianan displays throughout the set.

He’s backed by a drums-bass-keyboards combo, and he sings on six of the 10 tracks. But of course, the most eloquent voice on any Sonny Landreth record is his guitar. He is known as the King of Slydeco for the way his slide guitar, with its distinctively shimmering tone, melds with songs that echo, to varying degrees, the native sounds of the bayou. So it’s a delight to hear his six-string navigate through the tough, headlong rhythms of the instrumentals “Groovy Goddess” and “Beyond Borders,” or the interplay of his Dobro with Steve Conn’s percolating accordion on the funky R&B of “Don’t Ask Me.”

The deep heart and soul behind all the musical virtuosity is driven home by Blacktop Run’s final two cuts: The instrumental “Many Worlds” and the acoustic-textured “Something Grand” are Landreth at his most evocative and lyrical. — Nick Cristiano

U.S. Girls

Heavy Light

(4AD ***1/2)

Meg Remy started U.S. Girls as an introspective, insular project, but her albums quickly blossomed into maximalist, kaleidoscopic statements. An American expat who lived in Philly for a time and is now a permanent resident of Canada, she relishes dipping in and out of genres. Her impressive 2018 In A Poem Unlimited explored abuses of power, especially toward women, while veering from art-rock to disco to girl-group pop. Heavy Light is similarly genre-agnostic and dense with ideas. She worked with 20-odd musicians — including the E Street Band’s Jake Clemons, who contributes a climactic sax solo to the thumping “Overtime” — and it sounds like it: Each song seems crafted in its own universe, and several spoken-word interludes help make the album a coherent journey.

Remy’s voice can move from a sneer (on the Patti Smith-quoting “Born to Lose”) to a perky swing (on the joyful-sounding but bitter “4 American Dollars”) to a soulful ache (on the Spector-ish “Denise, Don’t Wait”). She’s repurposing history — she quotes “MacArthur Park” in “Woodstock ‘99” — to comment on contemporary social issues, but Heavy Light sounds timeless. — Steve Klinge