3: Robyn Hitchcock – Robyn Hitchcock
This year’s comeback award, which I benevolently bestowed upon Martin Fry and ABC in 2016, goes to an Englishman who also did his most high-profile work in the 1980s. London-born singer-guitarist Robyn Hitchcock reached peak popularity in 1988 with the jaunty MTV hit “Balloon Man.” And while he’s never really gone away, continuing to release albums every few years, his recent output has been uneven and all too easy to ignore. Hitchcock’s latest is a heartening, supremely tuneful return to form. After 21 solo albums, he’s not reinventing the wheel here. Robyn Hitchcock serves up exactly what longtime fans want, witty, surreal lyrics set to jangly college-rock riffs with frequent Beatles-style flourishes. (The psychedelic pop gem “Autumn Sunglasses,” with its prominent cello accompaniment by Emily Nelson, digs particularly deep into the Fab Four’s bag of production tricks.) On the album closer, “Time Coast,” Hitchcock looks back on his 40-year career and seems to wonder if his best days are behind him. “I’m singing like a fossil, time goes by so fast,” he frets. But this dazzling collection of songs is proof positive that he’s still got it.
Some of the most interesting acts in pop music today– 
Separately, sisters Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer have forged enduring careers in country music— Moorer has released 10 albums, Lynne 15. But they haven’t gotten around to recording together in earnest until now. Their first full-length collaboration is a superb collection of covers that runs the gamut from comfort-zone picks by Merle Haggard and the Louvin Brothers to surprising curveballs by Nick Cave, the Killers, and Nirvana. In a close race, the cover to beat is the Bob Dylan-penned title track. Taken from the 1997 late-career masterpiece Time Out of Mind, Dylan’s hushed ode to creeping mortality is handled with tender loving care by the siblings and an ace backing band that includes Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ keyboardist Benmont Tench. The most unexpected cover, Nirvana’s “Lithium,” is also the one that doesn’t quite work. While Lynne and Moorer get points for thinking outside the box, the comparatively tame country arrangement lacks the grunge trio’s dynamic punch and Kurt Cobain’s singular genius-stoner delivery. The one original song here, “Is It Too Much,” written by Lynne, is a haunting meditation on the weight of pain and loss that is wrested from the gloom by the sisters’ rapturous harmonizing. Here’s hoping for many more collaborations to come.
Katie Crutchfield, the creative force behind Waxahatchee, steps on the gas for her fourth full-length outing. While the Alabama native’s early work mined an introspective indie-folk vein and 2015’s promising Ivy Tripp toyed with various styles and tempos, Out in the Storm flat-out rocks. It recalls the dynamic ‘90s grunge-pop of Belly and the Breeders. Collectively a rumination on the dissolution and aftermath of an unhealthy relationship, the songs crackle with raw emotion. “I’d never be a girl you’d like or trust or respect,” Crutchfield laments on the bitter “Brass Beam.” If Crutchfield’s lyrical confessions can be at times uncomfortably intimate, the alt-rock riffs are so buoyant that it’s possible to tune out the heartache and just pogo around the living room. But the pain is impossible to ignore on “Fade” the gorgeous ballad that ends Out in the Storm. Here we find the protagonist post-breakup, battle-scarred but ultimately wiser. “I poured everything out/It never would be enough,” Crutchfield acknowledges mournfully. It’s an apt moment of closure on this electrifying album.
Real Estate covers no new ground on its fourth album—pun intended, I’m afraid—but the New Jersey fivesome’s brand of smart, mellow indie-pop is such a winning formula, it doesn’t need to…yet. Internally, the group suffered a seismic upheaval in 2017 when it lost founding member Matt Mondanile, who left to concentrate on his solo project Ducktails. But judging from this fine first post-split effort, Mondanile’s departure has barely caused a ripple in the band’s placid sound. The jangly melodies still recall soft-boiled R.E.M.—think “So. Central Rain,” not “Finest Worksong,” etc. And co-founder and head songsmith Martin Courtney’s lyrics remain genial, daydreamy musings cut with a dash of suburban dread. The lovely “Holding Pattern” chronicles a predictable day in the life of its author, who flirts with existential angst (“It’s just this game/Makes me insane/I wonder where we’re going”) before succumbing to the comforting numbness of sleep (“Someone pressed pause/Wrapped me in gauze/And turned the lights off”). In my 
With its seductive melodies and pillow-talk interplay between vocalists Romy Madly-Croft and Oliver Sim, xx, the 2009 debut album by this London trio, was the sultriest British export to come along since Sade. After the mild sophomore slump of 2012’s Coexist, which sounded like a paler copy of the original, the xx pumps up the volume a smidge on this outing. The brassy synth notes and insistent beats that introduce the lead-off track, “Dangerous,” promise a more club-ready sound, and I See You does indeed deliver a few danceable numbers, most notably “On Hold,” the band’s catchiest tune to date. But fans of the hushed intimacy of the first two albums shouldn’t fret too much. The grooves here stay at the techno-lite simmer of, say, “Missing” by Everything but the Girl. And there are still plenty of slow burners like “Replica” that allow Sim and Madly-Croft to wrap their sexy, simpatico voices in an aural embrace. One or two disposable cuts keep this from placing higher on my list, but all in all it’s a sure-footed attempt at expanding the group’s very identifiable sound.
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