After a week off, the CD stack is getting intimidating. Time to clear off a few.

Tom Jones: 24 Hours (S-Curve): He made ersatz bachelor pad soul for years, and it’s what he makes here. And the results are just as much fun, if just as secondhand. Only the modern-sounding “Sugar Daddy” (written by Bono and the Edge) sounds out of place because a) nothing else here sounds contemporary, and b) faux really only works if you keep the mask up. If you reveal that you know better, the question arises why you didn’t go for better. 

Hear “If He Should Ever Leave You” and the bossa nova “In Style and Rhythm.”

Quadro Nuevo: CinePassion (Justin Time/GLM): A beautiful album of interpretations of soundtrack music by Nino Rota and Morricone among others. If I knew the originals better, I’d know what liberties the band has taken with the material. As such, all I can say is how lovely I find it, and how nicely it fits in behind other things that I’m doing. Of course, that’s not entirely a compliment.

Hear any track. I don’t find anything more enthralling than anything else.

Ben Weaver: The Ax in the Oak (Bloodshot): Weaver’s Stories Under Nails made an impression on me as the grimmest, most darkly comforting album I’ve heard in years. He sounded like a caveman with a banjo who’d learned a few hard truths from nature and shared them because, as painful as they were, they were his only way to share and help. The Ax in the Oak is more sonically developed, and now his vision is dispassionate. I’m glad to hear someone doing something modern with roots rock/Americana, but I also wish this made the sort of impact on me that Stories Under Nails did.

Hear “Soldier’s War”

Herman Dune: Next Year in Zion (EverLoving): EverLoving seems to have thing for artists you have to excuse or approach charitably, and that’s certainly the case with Herman Dune. The French duo (with friends) can be heard as naive or as immature – you make the call. Me – I believe they know better, but periodically songs are simply optimistic and open to the world, and I’ll take those.

Hear “On a Saturday”

Inara George with Van Dyke Parks: An Invitation (EverLoving): As Van Dyke Parks’ strings and clarinets circle and play around George’s delicate melodies, she sounds dizzy trying to sort herself out. The stronger, simpler melodies suggest she’s getting her relationships straight in her head; the feathery ones make me feel lost as well.

Hear “Right as Wrong”

Hear “