Adrian Whitehead / Dave Sheinin

Adrian Whitehead-Nerd from the Suburbs. I got heavily into indie power pop in the mid-2000s and started this blog shortly thereafter, so a lot of the discs I grew to love in those first few years still stand out in my memory. And when I'm reminded of one of those albums and then realize the artist hasn't released anything new since then I figure to myself that he or she has moved on to other, likely better-paying pursuits and I'm just thankful for the music they did make. So it was truly a "whoa" moment when I noticed that Adrian Whitehead, who had my #3 album of 2008 with One Small Stepping Man, has released his first new album in ten years. Nerd from the Suburbs isn't quite a rerun of the debut, which was heavily Beatlesque. Instead, it's more like Elliott Smith when Smith was at his Beatlesque. "Folie a Deux" (French for "shared delusion" and the title of a great X-Files episode) is a wonderful album-opener and the prime example of this slight shift in sound, driven by acoustic guitar but with an electric solo all in service of a pretty melody. The E.Smith comparison also applies to the darker yet baroque combo of "Blaming the Snake" and "Sigmund Freud" both of which feature trumpet, tuba and trombone. Other standouts include the piano ballad "Shades of Grey", the gloriously melodic "Gilded Cage", and the title track which isn't the autobiography its title implies but an honest plea for love and friendship. Unlike some artists who sound the same even after a decade+ absence, Whitehead has clearly evolved, going from the boyish Beatle-pop of the debut to a richer, more mature set of songs both lyrically and musically.

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Dave Sheinin-First Thing Tomorrow. In the Adrian Whitehead review above, I spoke of musicians moving on to other pursuits but here's a case of someone more prominent in another field making music. Dave Sheinin is the national baseball writer for the Washington Post (you can read his articles here), and his debut album is one of 2018's best to date. Sheinin gets help from the Myracle Brah's Andy Bopp among others, but these are his songs and they're uniformly good. With its staccato guitars and catchy melody, "Lies" kicks things off with a definite 70s AM radio vibe while "Oh Amelia" boasts a jangly, chiming riff at its center. "Little California" sound as sun-kissed as its title and features backing vocals from Bopp, and "City You Left Behind" sounds like a lost Posies track. Throw in a couple of fine piano ballads ("A Warm February" and "You Love the Sunrise") and First Thing Tomorrow is the rare debut album that sounds like the work of a long-time professional. And it's easily the best album from a sportswriter since J.P. Cregan's Man Overboard.

P.S. The album art looks like it was inspired by the opening credits of The Leftovers, which earns it bonus points in my book.

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A pair of old friends.

Today it's a pair of new releases from artists who've been releasing new music almost every year since I started this blog in 2006.

The Well Wishers-A View from Above. Jeff Shelton is back with his ninth Well Wishers full-length (not counting last year's covers album) and ho hum, it's another top-notch collection of jangle pop/rock. What sets it apart from recent Well Wishers albums is that it's a bit more folk-rock oriented, hearkening back to mid-2000s WW albums such as Under the Arrows. You won't notice right away as the rocking "Gravity Waits" opens the proceedings but the acoustic guitars come out for the mid-tempo "In Another Life", the tres jangly "April is Only a Lie" and perhaps the album's best track, "Ways & Means". But fear not, rawkers: there are plenty of loud guitars here on "I Like You Better", "There Goes My Gun" and "I'm Not the Enemy", a track first heard on last year's Trip Wire album with Shelton being a part of that collective. And "The New Fade Out" is a terrific album-closer, 5 1/2 minutes of Shelton at his melodic best.

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Dropkick-Longwave. The boys from Edinburgh are back in town with their annual release (technically the first since 2016 but last year saw an Andrew Taylor solo album which differed in name only) and Longwave is what you've come to know and love from this Scottish band. Opener "Out of Tune" is anything but, and it only takes a matter of seconds for their Teenage Fanclub-inspired pop to take hold of your ears and "I Thought it Was OK" with its dreamy melody is an instant Dropkick classic. And while nobody's going to mistake them for Led Zeppelin, a few of these tunes do rock harder than others - most notably "It's Still Raining" and "Fed Up Thinking of You", both of which retain the band's trademark melodies and harmonies. Their amazing consistency over what is now 15 albums is worthy of note, and even if there's a strong element of predictability to their music, having new Dropkick music fall into your lap or pop up randomly on shuffle is always a welcome thing.

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