LISTEN: “Want Your Attention” Is a Perfect Song for an End-of-Summer Soundtrack

Rock & Roll Globe premieres Ana Egge’s new single

August 24, 2021 Lee Zimmerman

Ana Egge has always been a thoughtful and provocative singer and songwriter.  Her debut album, 1997’s River Under the Road, won immediate kudos and garnered her the title of “Best Singer Songwriter” and “Best Folk Artist” at the Austin Music Awards, and marked the beginning of a critically acclaimed career. She quickly accelerated her efforts from there and began working with a number of notable artists, among them, Steve Earle, producers Alex Spiegelman, Stewart Lerman, and Joel Plaskett, as well as the Stray Birds and The Sentimentals.  

Earlier this year, Egge released a pair of songs as a virtual two-sided single, “This Time/“The Ship,” which, accordingly, received further praise from both friends and fans. Now with a new album, Between Us  — remarkably, her 12th effort to date — she’s staking out new sonic territory while continuing to explore themes that dig deep into the human psyche. She claims that many of the songs on the album were inspired by dreams, and further processed in collaboration with Irish singer-songwriter Mick Flannery, with whom she shared FaceTime during the early stages of the pandemic. Their efforts resulted in eleven songs that made their way to the new album and several others that Flannery will use on his own.

With producer Lorenzo Wolff behind the boards and an ethnically and racially diverse group of musicians enlisted as her backing band, Between Us diverges from her previous efforts in terms of its sounds and sonics. While her hushed but pointed vocals are still prominent at the fore, there’s brass dominating nearly every track, with added embellishment from synths, steel guitar, and other added instrumental accoutrements. It is, as Wolff says in a press release, “a big, messy record.”

That ambition is reflected in the album’s first single “Want Your Attention,” which Rock & Roll Globe is privileged to premiere. Catchy and playful in an eager yet easy sort of way, the song suggests a chance encounter between two people who find a shared attraction.

“You make me laugh, take me off

Wanna catch you lookin’ want your attention
How you nod when I talk when you want what I got

Don’t you stop not listening”

“‘Want Your Attention’ is all about catching someone’s eye and being desired,” Egge told us exclusively. “About feeling good and moving your body. The melody for the chorus came to me in a dream and I realized that it fit perfectly with the verse chord structure that I’d been fooling around with Alec Spiegelman. Mick Flannery and I had a great time writing the lyrics and the rest of the melody together. We imagined we were out at the club and what that’s like, chasing and being chased flirtatiously. When it came time to record it, I knew that I wanted the incredible J. Hoard to take the lead vocals. His voice and energy fit the song perfectly. Singing with him in the studio was a real highlight of the whole year for me.”

Hoard was equally complimentary when it came to Egge and her ability. “Ana Egge is a genius songwriter,” he notes, “’Want Your Attention’” is another tune that showcases her endless skill in lyricism and melody. I am honored to feature on this bouncy, playful, and downright cute song. ‘Want Your Attention’ will make heads bop and toes tap! Perfect song to include in the end of summer — a beach/pool party soundtrack.”

We tend to agree. At a time when everyone is seeking some adventure and compelled to make a connection, “Want Your Attention” begs notice all on its own.

LISTEN HERE

BEAUTIFULLY MELODIC AND LYRICALLY INCISIVE, ANA EGGE’S TRIUMPH, BETWEEN US, ARRIVES SEPTEMBER 17th ON STORYSOUND RECORDS

The acclaimed singer-songwriter’s new album features collaborations with Producer Lorenzo Wolff and Irish artist Mick Flannery

When conceiving Between Us, Ana Egge knew she wanted to do something new and different for her 12th album. The process started early in the pandemic, when she began collaborating online with Irish singer-songwriter Mick Flannery, whose path she had crossed at festivals over the years. They would FaceTime regularly for two-hour songwriting sessions. “It was so fun, and the writing happened so easily — it was almost eerie,” Egge admits. “Almost every time we’d meet up, we would write a whole song.” Nine of Between Us’ 11 songs came from these virtual sessions. They wrote so many songs, in fact, that Flannery, himself an award-winning musician, is doing his own album including some of their collaborations.

Egge also added another new element to her songwriting when she started a dream journal after realizing so many songs and melodies were appearing in her dreams. When she would become aware of dreaming about a song, she would wake herself up and hum the song idea into her phone. Her dreams, she reveals, were the genesis for many of the album’s tunes.

Searching for a producer with a fresh sonic direction to bring these brilliant, thought-provoking songs to life, Egge met with Lorenzo Wolff after being fascinated by his work on the recent Judee Sill tribute Down Where the Valleys Are Low. They quickly found a common wavelength on how to approach her music. “She was interested in making a big, messy record that reinforced the message of this beautiful collection of songs,” Wolff explains. “I was able to make sonic choices in a very deliberate way to reinforce what she was already saying so eloquently in the songs. And since Ana has such adventurous ears, she would not only be accepting of this landscape, but push the arrangements into even more ambitious territory.”

While Egge has long written insightfully about relationships, the stressful, ominous feelings caused by the pandemic and social unrest led her to take a “let’s get to the truth — let’s do that right now” attitude with her songwriting. On tracks like “Sorry,” “You Hurt Me,” “We Let the Devil,” and “Heartbroken Kind,” she delves into the complexities of troubled relationships — no one is free of blame; everyone has the ability to take some accountability for their actions — as well as the ways “to have some type of bridge between the space between us.”

 “Lie, Lie, Lie” and “We Lay Roses” were so personal to Egge that she felt compelled to include them on Between Us. “Lie, Lie, Lie,” the one song she wrote solo, addresses the frequently impossible attempt to make a loved one break out of his judgmental intolerances and hateful behavior. Egge wrote “We Lay Roses” with Grammy-winner Gary Nicholson as a eulogy for her nephew; she hopes it can help people in grief “who are looking for a song about honoring someone and letting them go.”

The idea of accountability also factored into selecting musicians for the album. Aware of how few people of color she had worked with in the past, and how few she has encountered in the acoustic music scene, Egge prioritized diversity among the musicians she worked with on this record. “It’s up to me to work for an equitable, inclusive community as much as I can in my life and career,” Egge states. “I can be one of the people trying to make a difference; even though that might be small, it’s still in the direction that I want the world to be moving in.”

The players Egge and Wolff assembled were all people she had never played with before (except for backing vocalist J. Hoard) and they brought eclectic musical backgrounds to the music. Corey Fonville, who told Wolff that “no one ever calls me to play on this kind of stuff,” drums in the jams and jazz group Butcher Brown. Bassist Michael Isvara Montgomery and guitarist/steel guitarist Jonny Lam are part of the African psych-funk outfit Sinkane. Egge had seen flautist Anh Phung performing in a bluegrass band. New Orleans-schooled keyboardist Jon Cowherd has a long association with Brian Blades (Joshua Redman, Daniel Lanois, Joni Mitchell), while the horn players’ credits range from Ricky Martin to Rhiannon Giddens.

“All the players are so incredible,” Egge says. “Friendships have begun and I love how the album turned out!” Wolff (who also plays on the album) and Egge gave the musicians a lot of free reign. “It was really fun to hear the sounds that they came up with.” The percussion/drum-like sound on “You Hurt Me,” for instance, was actually played by Anh Phung on the flute. And the whimsical sound effects in the groove-heavy “Want Your Attention” were created by Egge’s seven-year-old daughter singing through a $19 echo microphone.

Egge acknowledges Between Us won’t help those trying to categorize her music; however, the album does connect to her prior work. Synths and horns, for example, also were used on White Tiger and Is It the Kiss, although acoustic instruments are less prominent on Between Us. Egge remembers how much she has always loved Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball and that groundbreaking album (which also features Cowherd’s frequent collaborator Blades on drums) provides some genre-splitting context for Between Us. “Synthesizers were one of the first things I heard, along with Willie Nelson and Bob Marley,” Egge elaborates. “It’s all totally natural and part of the air that I breathe just as much as pedal steel is. Even though some people might not call it organic, it really is to me.”

Egge burst onto the music scene with her debut album, 1997’s River Under the Road, which All Music noted “signaled the arrival of a unique songwriting perspective and moving new voice.” She was named “Best Singer Songwriter” and “Best Folk Artist” the following year at the Austin Music Awards. Since then, Egge has consistently garnered praise for her music, and has worked with producers Steve Earle, Joel Plaskett, Alec Spiegelman, and Stewart Lerman and appears on albums by The Stray Birds and The Sentimentals. No Depression hailed her 2017 release, White Tiger, as “nothing less than a balm for the soul” and Folk Alley proclaimed that 2019’s Is It the Kiss brought “great, honest songs to the collective consciousness.”

In the first months of 2021, Ana released a virtual two-sided single, “This Time,” which Rufus Wainwright described as “beautiful” and Anais Mitchell called “Perfect!!! Incredible,” and “The Ship,” which, in the words of American Songwriter, “speaks quietly but defiantly of a simmering revolution brewing in the world today, reconciled only by an understanding that working together achieves a harmonious goal.”

Egge is justifiably proud of Between Us. “It was an amazing experience to work through all of those roadblocks and still come through with something so immensely beautiful,” she shares. “I really love the record so much.” Egge also loves that she has tour plans again. She’ll be hitting the road with Iris DeMent from September through December.

 February 2, 2021  Hannah Means Shannon

The name “Judee Sill” is very evocative, even if you’ve only heard of her in passing conversations or references, but approaching her early 70s released music more directly only adds to the mysterious sense that she evades any simplistic images we may conjure of her. For those who have delved into her biography, they are aware that she was a remarkable composer and performer, but had a mass of contradictions at work in her life, including a difficult upbringing and the drug addiction that eventually ended her life far too soon. Those struggles stand in contrast and relationship to her ethereal and groundbreaking music, created at a time when a “woman with a guitar” was not allowed well-rounded expression in her work.

Musician and Producer Lorenzo Wolff set to work to create a tribute album to Judee Sill that is, in some ways, as unusual as Judee herself, and will arrive from StorySound Records on March 12th, 2021. Creating new arrangements and interpretations for seven of her songs, each brought to life by a different vocalist, has revealed a full spectrum of genres and possibilities latent in Sill’s own compositions. These surprising and exciting directions shed new light on Sill’s own multi-faceted nature during a time when, thankfully, her work is receiving increased attention. Today, Americana Highwaysis delighted to debut the second single featuring vocals by Grace McLean, “Crayon Angels,” from Down Where The Valleys Are Low: Another Otherworld for Judee Sill, as well as the striking video for the song created by experimental filmmaker Lewis Klahr. Lorenzo Wolff also spoke candidly with us about Judee Sill’s life and work, as well as the inspiration behind this new approach to “Crayon Angels,” below.

Americana Highways: I was aware of the medieval associations with Judee Sill’s work, but when I looked and listened more closely, I was really amazed by what I could hear in terms of lyrics and in terms of musical traditions, like Gregorian chant and Plain song. And that seems to especially apply to “Crayon Angels” and this new version on the tribute album.

Lorenzo Wolff: “Crayon Angels,” specifically, has samples from these secret female rites. The Margaret Berry contribution is “keening,” something that Scottish women do, traditionally at funerals. The other sample that is in the middle of the song is an old African American song that women sang to their daughters. It’s called “No Room in the Inn,” so there are these two parallel, secret female rites that I felt lucky to get to contemplate. Judee has always felt so occult, and the secrets are so close to the surface in a way that gives me a way into those things and connecting with them, as an outsider.

AH: It’s definitely the kind of music where you listen to it, and you wonder if you are interpreting it “correctly” in some official sense, or not. You’re aware that you should go with your personal reaction, but at the same time, you wonder, “Am I really turning the key on this?”

LW: Yes, for sure. For me, that’s what kept me listening to her music again and again. Upon first hearing Judee Sill’s music, for me, it felt like psychedelia. I didn’t really listen hard enough to the lyrics and it felt like traditional 70s, out-there, California music, but the more you listen to it, the more detailed and almost confessional it is.

AH: In terms of making this album, I heard that you were attempting to separate the mythology from the woman. That suggests that there is a strong mythology about Judee. How would describe that myth?

LW: There are probably at least a couple of different versions of how people interact with Judee Sill. There are rabid fans, firstly, who know everything about her, and she’s kind of a cult figure. They know everything about her life and experience, and her music feels like an escape or another world that she’s built for herself to them. When you know her backstory, you can hear that her music doesn’t seem to have a lot of the dirt and the horror that a lot of her life seems to include, based on reading biographies.

Then, there are people who listen to it, and to them it seems kind of like occult Carly Simon. If you don’t know her story, it’s easy to have that experience of her music of traditional instruments presented in a neoclassical way, which she made into a beautiful thing. And hearing it that way is great, too. But for me, I think the more that I learned about her and listened to the music, the more I felt that there was something deeper about the way in which she was presenting this “other world”. It was both autobiographical and something that avoided what her life was actually like. When you talk about turning the key to a song, you never know what someone is thinking. She died very young and didn’t do a lot of interviews, but in the interviews that exist, she is not soft-spoken, sweet, or gentle, but often the music is. My interpretation, on this album, is what would the Judee of interviews be like making a record, versus the Judee that exists on the wax? It’s a sort of true biography through her own songs.

AH: That’s a really cool way of thinking about it. What did you feel like you needed to do to be able to approach this project? Or were you already steeped in her life and music?

LW: I’d been a fan of hers for a long time. I’d been listening to her music for about ten years and I’d always loved it. I’d send the record Heartfood to people, if I really liked them. It was something I was letting them in on, something we’d share together. As opposed to a playlist, I’d send it to people I cared about to see what they thought about it. But I found that I had a very different interpretation of her music than other people I knew. Initially, it was just a production experiment for me. I did the song, “Down Where The Valleys Are Low.” I wanted to see if the songs could handle more aggression or a bigger, more bombastic feel. And it worked so well that I started doing more songs, and also going deeper into her way of thinking, her life story, and my interpretation of where those two things collided in her art.

AH: That touches on a question I wanted to ask you: What was it about the songs that made you think that they could handle this reinterpretation without losing their identity? I do think these new songs preserve the core of the original songs very well.

LW: I think that when, in 1971 and 1973, when these two records came out, there was a pretty small range of roles that a woman who wrote songs could inhabit. Siouxsie Siou hadn’t come out yet, though Mahalia Jackson was plenty aggressive. But for white women with acoustic guitars, there wasn’t really an outlet for that. Judee’s music feels like it was right on the edge of that to me. Even though it’s acoustic guitars, sweet harmonies, and Bach chord changes, it feels like Proto-Punk to me in the way that she delivers it, or at least Proto-Big Star. It feels like it’s right on the edge of an explosion, so my experiment was to see if I could light the fuse a little bit.

AH: I’m so glad that you said that, because I felt, listening both to her music, and then to this album, that you were posing the question: What would have happened if she had continued into the 1980s?

LW: Yes, and there are any number of things, including her own addiction and the people around her, who kept her from doing that. She didn’t ever have an easy road, it seems. But who knows what would have happened. Maybe Blackheart would have picked her up, or Eyeball. Then she would have had an Emo Screamo resurgence in the early aughts. It is inspiring to me, though, that when I talk to people about this project, many more people know who she is now than did ten years ago. Early on in my fandom, when I’d send the record to people, no one would have heard of her. And now, though she’s not a household name, if you’re someone who digs in crates, you’ve come across Judee Sill or someone has recommended her to you.

AH: When you approached the different vocalists who worked on this album, were they already in the know about Judee Sill, or did you get to watch their first encounters with the music?

LW: For “Crayon Angels,” Grace McLean is such a scholar of all things that relate to femininity and the occult, that Judee Sill had long ago come across her desk. But there were other people who had never heard of her and others who had heard of her but never interacted with her music. The side men seemed to know her stuff more, like Jeremy Gustin, the drummer. There were a number of singers who I approached about this project, and often the big Judee Sill fans were horrified by the idea. I can see how they might find it offensive because things like “Crayon Angels” are such a departure. But the music so completely holds up to it and thrives in the rougher treatment.

AH: It should have occurred to me that big fans might be upset, but actually it didn’t. It seems like this new album could be two things: A route to discovery for those who haven’t encountered Judee’s music before, or something interesting to think about for big fans. It highlights her role as a composer and also her significance in music history to make this new album.

LW: I’m excited to have those conversations with people, though. As I was going through the project, I had crises of faith, wondering why I should exert my viewpoint on this woman who I don’t know, but the more I interacted with it, and the more I worked on it, the more encouragement I felt. The more research I did on Judee Sill, the more there seemed to be a Star Wars-style projection in the room, like Obi-Wan, saying, “Go fuck yourself, but this is okay.” I tried to listen to my idea of who she was while I was making it, to make sure that I wasn’t forcing her songs and her visions into something unnatural.

AH: I hear you on that. It seems to me that she was very open to combining traditions and sounds in unusual ways, and that gives a kind of thematic resonance to combining the elements of these existing songs in new ways, too. That’s just my take.

LW: Absolutely. Even ideologically, the lyrics have all these different faiths and perspectives, and that’s why you can’t call Judee Sill’s music Christian music or praise songs. Because in the music, the Devil is kind of sexy, and there are Eastern philosophies as well as out-there 60s occult stuff. She’s such a polyglot thematically, as well as musically. It seems like she had huge ears and a really open mind about so many things.

AH: How did you choose these seven songs to reinterpret?

LW: I did maybe five or six others that I didn’t end up releasing, which exist in various stages of completion, but it seems like these seven were the most complicated, thematically. There was more room for interpretation in these seven songs, which made it feel like she had laid the blueprint for exploring other worlds in these songs. There are other hit songs that people love, like “Loping Along Through The Cosmos,” but it doesn’t seem as broad in its range of interpretations. Likewise, “Enchanted Sky Machine.” Also, when you’re collaborating with singers, you want to leave a certain range of possibilities for them to experience and explore for themselves.

AH: To return to “Crayon Angels,” I can definitely see how the original song has a lullaby feel, and in the new interpretation, I hear that Proto-Punk feel we were talking about earlier. The video both emphasizes that Proto-Punk potential, I feel, and also reminds us that this song originated in the 70s, too. It’s an interesting duality.

LW: Lewis Klahr, who directed the video, asked before he started working on it if it was okay to take it in a 70s direction, or whether I wanted it to be more modern. I left it up to him because I am such a fan of his work, and I figured that anything he could interpret would either be more interesting or a different perspective on the song from what I already had. It was really nice to be surprised by what he made. He used photos from a bus stop in the 70s in California that he had clipped out and had in his studio, sitting there for years. The juxtaposition is very cool to me, with the retro-looking video and the slightly more modern-sounding song.

AH: It suggests so much in terms of different avenues to approach the song. The advertising imagery and the darker suggestions work well together. Often the photos and ads from that period look so pretty and clean-cut, but we know that human life is not usually like that. Especially with someone like Judee, we know there were other elements in her life. The video is a great tightwire act of not giving too much away about Judee’s life, while also suggesting that things may not be what they seem.

LW: There are some little easter eggs in the video, too, for those who know about Judee’s life. If you see the woman in the car with the revolver, you may think, “Maybe that’s related to her robbing liquor stores.” I think Lewis got pretty deep in his research of Judee and presented images that are not at all accidental when they seem to relate to her life. One element I hadn’t thought of, which Lewis included, was the idea of Vietnam Vets returning home during this time and feeling disillusioned. It was Lewis’ interpretation of one of the possible meanings of that song, and it’s really cool to see that coming out in the video.

Read the full article HERE

January 25

Lorenzo Wolff Collaborates with Bartees Strange on Soul-pop Rendition of Judee Sill’s “The Pearl”

January 22, 2021 by Glide Magazine

Producer and multi-instrumentalist Lorenzo Wolff first encountered the beguiling music of Judee Sill back in 2010 on a playlist created by tour-mate Henry Wolfe during one of those long, typically dull, drives between gigs. He still recalls how the late, much lamented singer/songwriter’s music stood out “like a briar patch in a line of palm trees.”

Sill’s music stuck with Wolff over the years. He marvels at how her work evoked “a strange, somewhat untrustworthy landscape of shadow figures.” His fascination with Sill’s music led him, in 2019, to create a Sills tribute project, Down Where the Valleys Are Low, in which seven songs are presented in bold interpretations of the original versions. Wolff, who also is a big fan of artist Pieter Bruegel’s detailed, maximalist style, believes Sill’s vibrant, dramatic lyrical and musical language — which he describes as “both psychedelic and medieval, like an illuminated manuscript annotated in Day-Glo” — could not only support a more robust, aggressive sonic palette but actually asks for it. The collection is set for release from StorySound Records on March 12th.

To achieve this expansive approach, Wolff utilized different lead singers for each song, resulting in each track being distinctive yet staying connected to the others. Wolff also feels like these reimagined renditions remain connected to Sill’s vision. “The more I learned about Sill, the clearer the chasm between the artist and her art became,” Wolff explains. “Her life was not only too short, but often nasty and brutish, while her music was pristine, elevated onto an altogether higher plane … [and her songs] were like a gymnasium she’d built for herself to exorcise and exercise her demons.”

Judee Sill was David Geffen’s first signing to his Asylum label; however, she never found the mainstream success that other Asylum acts — Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, The Eagles, or Tom Waits — achieved. The California singer/songwriter only put out two proper albums in the ’70s (her 1971 eponymous debut and 1973’s Heart Food). Sadly, Sill, who was a longtime drug abuser, died from an overdose at the age of 35 in 1979. Tracks recorded in 1974 at Michael Nesmith’s studio for her unreleased third album were later mixed by Sonic Youth producer Jim O’Rourke, and released in 2005 as Songs of Rapture and Redemption.

Today, Judee Sill remains a name that terms like “little-known” and “overlooked” are typically attached to, but those who know her music hold an intense adulation for her. XTC co-founder Andy Partridge described her songs as being “like little tiny symphonies with beautiful chord changes I’d never heard anyone use.” Singer/songwriter Shawn Colvin has compared Sill to Brian Wilson, and proclaimed, “she didn’t sound like anybody else … streetwise and yet … religious.” Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, another obsessed fan, wonderfully summarized Sill’s multi-layered music when she wrote that “her songs are psychological labyrinths, twisting and searching; they are religious and mythical explorations that touch on pain, wonder, and joy. The happy/sad quality is both elating and heartbreaking.”

These celestial/earthbound dichotomies in Sill’s music were things Wolff sought to clarify and magnify on Down Where the Valleys Are Low. While Sillʼs songs have been described as being otherworldly, Wolff feels her recordings suggest a person who had a lifetime of suffering and abuse (and self-abuse), but who also recognized that real beauty can be found in some very bleak places. “She didnʼt make music to escape from the reality of her surroundings,” Wolff says. “She was writing songs to understand and celebrate the dark, the scary and the uncertain.”

With this album, Wolff has attempted to separate the mythology from the woman. “I’ve pushed dirtier, more earthbound elements to the forefront, and used Sill’s words and melodies as parts of a portrait illuminating the angry, cruel, beautiful, complicated, dangerous woman that she was,” he reveals, adding: “I like to picture Judee listening to this album and telling me to fuck off.”

Today Glide is excited to premiere Wolff’s take on “The Pearl,” which finds him teaming up with the talented singer Bartees Strange. With a thumping, reverb-soaked glam groove that brings to mind david Bowie and Pink Floyd, Strange lets his soulful vocals float dreamily over the music. This arrangement takes the song from its sparse folk origins to a technicolor morsel of infectious soul-pop. This fresh energy jolts this timeless song into the 21st century and presents it in a funky new light that is truly original. 

Wolff shares his thoughts on “The Pearl”:

Anyone who’s had someone in their life who’s fighting against addiction knows what “The Pearl” is about. It’s not introspection from the perspective of an addict, it’s the story that your friend tells you before she goes out to cop again…I had seen [Bartees Strange] in his hardcore band Stay Inside and expected a much more aggressive delivery. Instead we talked about his childhood playing in the country bands of Mustang, Oklahoma, and his love of roots music. After we finished the session he said, “No one ever asks me to sing country music.”

WATCH the video

'I Can Still Hear You' the new album by Suzzy Roche & Lucy Wainwright Roche gets 4 Stars in the January issue of MOJO Magazine

and is included in the magazine's Top 75 Albums of 2020. "...thoughtful, understated, affecting and quietly profound. Late night therapy for the downhearted".

Suzzy Roche & Lucy Wainwright Roche, I Can Still Hear You

Although Maggie Roche passed away in 2017, the legacy of the singing sisters from New Jersey endures: The Avalanches sampled “Hammond Song” in “We Will Always Love You” earlier this year, and family traditions old and new are renewed on Suzzy’s third and strongest album with daughter Lucy (her dad is Loudon Wainwright III). Softly padding beauties like the title song and “I Think I Am a Soul” are imbued with a sense of loss and longing, as is a version of Maggie’s never-recorded “Jane.” The heartbreaking depiction of humanity’s cruelty in “Ruins” feels chillingly relevant. Recorded partly during the early months of the lockdown, the album has a hushed, muted melancholy about it: the goofy joy of classic Roches may be missing, but the family vocal blend and wry intelligence are, thankfully, being passed to the next generation. — D. Browne