This Week's Soundtrack: June 11, 2012

This week's soundtrack is seriously shaped by last week.
1. "The Coming Tide" - Luke Winslow-King: I've been listening to and enjoying Luke W-K's new album by the same name all week.
2. "Oh Susannah" - Neil Young & Crazy Horse: The lead track from Americana. By now, a collection of remakes of folk tunes is a little been-there/done-that, and his version of "Get a Job" doesn't change enough to be interesting. Still, I love Crazy Horse's native stomp, and spelling out "banjo" gives the song a sense of humor I hope I'll discover in some of the other tracks.
3. "Hey, Hey We're the Gories" - The Gories: The Detroit garage-punk band plays Saturday night at Siberia with the 3-D Invisibles.

4. "Face Down in the Gutter" - Quintron: A lot of this last week was spent at the Music Box, where Quintron conducted the final, improvised-within-a-framework shows. He mapped out the performance and signaled players in and out of the mix.
5. "Unforgettable Super Lady" - Javelin: The guys from Javelin were two of the performers at the Music Box.
6. "Armoire" - Curren$y with Young Roddy and Trademark: From The Stoned Immaculate. With Lil Wayne, I always felt like the mixtapes were the testing grounds for ideas that would take shape on Tha Carter II and III. With Curren$y, I wonder if the major label releases are the ads for mixtapes, which are where his music really lives.
7. "Crew Love" - Drake with The Weeknd: The Weeknd plays the House of Blues Tuesday.
8. "Street Parade" - Theresa Andersson: The title track from her most recent album. Part of the reporting for my story on Theresa in the current issue of OffBeat was done when she shot the video for this song at the Music Box.
9. "I Can't Make it Alone" - Continental Drifters" Susan Cowsill singing lead on the Dusty Springfield classic. Cowsill performed Dusty in Memphis in its entirety Saturday night at Carrollton Station.
10. "No Easy Way Down" - Dusty Springfield: If I'm going to play a Dusty cover ...
11. "Pacific Coast Highway" - The Beach Boys: From the new That's Why God Made the Radio. I wasn't eager for this album despite my love of The Beach Boys because of the sound of the title track and its nostalgia - usually my least-favorite of the band's modes. Most reviews agree that the last three songs give the album a reason to live; so far, this is my favorite of the three.
12. "Dreamer" - Dennis Wilson: From Pacific Ocean Blue. I think Beach Boys' obsessives overrate this album, but Dennis developed an authentic writing voice when Brian couldn't be counted on, and that gives his treatments of conventional subject matter life.
13. "Bells" - Quintron: Like "Face Down in the Gutter," this comes from his Sucre du Sauvage album, and it's more in keeping with the experimental nature of the Music Box performances. The ambient sounds were recorded in City Park during the time when Quintron installed himself as a museum exhibit at NOMA as part of his "Parallel Universe" show with Miss Pussycat.
14. "Little Boxes" - Teenage Head: A year ago Saturday, my friend Imants Krumins passed away. He kept seeing Teenage Head and giving them a chance way longer than anyone else did. I wish the original mix of Teenage Head's debut album could be found online instead of this artificially revved-up version, but since it's what we've got, it's what we go with.
15. "I Zimbra" (12" version) - Talking Heads: Right now I'm plowing through Jonathan Lethem's entry in the 33 1/3 series, Fear of Music. Lethem's wrestling with a lot of ideas starting with the question of how to address the album now while honoring his changing relationship to it over the years, and I wish he was handling that challenge with less circular writing. I've rarely moved so slowly through a 33 /13 book.
16. "Back.te.riality" (Magas remix) - Die-6, Magas: Chicago's Jim Magas was also among the performers at the Music Box this weekend.
17. "Express Yourself" - Diplo feat. Nicky Da B: From Diplo's new Express Yourself EP. This is one of the handful of non-New Orleans tracks to get bounce right.
18. "I've Got My Mind Set on You" - Luke Winslow-King: Also from The Coming Tide. Here he and Esther Rose cover George Harrison.
19. "Free State of Jones" - Cary Hudson: Blue Mountain's Cary Hudson periodically does a solo show on the House of Blues' patio, the Voodoo Garden. He'll be there as part of a songwriter's showcase Wednesday at 7 p.m.

Curren$y on Wiz, Pharrell and The Stoned Immaculate

Saying Curren$y's back seems wrong because he never goes away. The Stoned Immaculate is his second Warner Brothers release, and like Weekend at Burnie's, it presents Spitta at his most accessible. The beats are still luxurious and he still obviously enjoys his own languorous flow, but it's all slightly more precise, 15 percent less weedy (except for "Showdown" - he's post-verbal by the end of the track). As usual, he's chasing paper and smoking as much as breathing, but while the isolation that's implied in his rhymes is touched on here ("Privacy Glass"), guest spots by Estelle and Marsha Ambrosius particularly counter that remote vibe as women enter his musical world.

Unlike former runnin' pardner Lil Wayne, his major label releases don't seem like the things that the mixtapes were building to. Tha Carter II and III pulled together all of Weezy's musical and conceptual obsessions, while The Stoned Immaculate and Weekend at Burnie's feel like ads one more gambit in the Jets Life branding effort, and the truest expression of Jets Life comes on the mixtapes.

Check out The Stoned Immaculate on Spotify.