After weeks of working on French Quarter Fest and Jazz Fest issues (and with the Jazz Fest dead ahead), I’m listening to music from outside our boundaries this week. Yesterday: Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Live Forever (UMe/Tuff Gong) which is primarily notable for being Marley’s last concert. It’s not remarkable for its excellence or fraility – for the duration of the show, the cancer that ended the tour and his life didn’t show – but it’s easy to forget after his post-death apotheosis how violence and struggle was the backdrop for his music, even as it called for peace. In that context, the love songs seem all the sweeter.

I’ll admit up front, Canada’s Sloan speaks to me. Their pop rock sounds like it could be outtakes from Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything, or a Raspberries song you forgot about or a Badfinger B-side. Everything shows signs of intelligence, even when making the sort of immediate music that was considered disposable when AM radio existed to play it. The title’s typical of the band, The Double Cross (Yep Roc) sounding like a typical album title but also referring to the Roman numerals for 20 – the number of years the band has been together.

At first, I found the band’s love of dove-tailing one song into the next emphasized the similarity of the songs, but once I got used to them, I have no idea how they ever sounded fussy or interchangeable. “The Answer Was You,” “Unkind,” “She’s Slowing Down Again,” “Green Gardens, Cold Montreal” and “Your Daddy Will Do” all have subtle wit, sometimes clever wordplay, and classic, durable pop song construction that holds up to obsessive re-listens.

I was more interested in Dengue Fever when world garage psychedelia was harder to get. The wildness of the original recordings in all of their lo-tech, distorted glory had the same effect on Dengue Fever that increased access to original garage band recordings had on second and third-generation garage bands. Cannibal Courtship (Fantasy) is good enough, but it sounds second-hand and a bit studied next to Asian garage rock from the 1960s. There’s a heavy dose of distortion and reverb on Zac Holtzman’s guitar, but it’s not in the track’s DNA the way it is on the music it’s modeled on. Cambodian singer Chhom Nimol adds charisma and exotic appeal, but a little casual poking around online will reveal wilder, more exotic singers. Fans of contemporary garage bands will likely respond better to this, and to Dengue Fever credit, they’re not trying to get by on speed and sweat – a modern garage band pitfall. Cannibal Courtship‘s well made, but it’s hard to see how it adds anything beyond contemporariness.