POP/ROCK: Noel Gallagher, "Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds" (Sour Mash/Mercury)

When Brit-pop super-group Oasis last toured, before the band's acrimonious split in 2009, songwriter-guitarist Noel Gallagher mainly stuck to his customary stance behind younger brother and lead singer Liam. Two years later, couched by cheeky diatribes in the media, Gallagher is front and center, live and on his solo debut. Not as memorable as Oasis' best anthems in the '90s, or as nasally rock-ready as his brother's latest incarnation, Beady Eye, the album hovers within a melodic good-to-average middle ground.

If Liam hones the Stones, Noel reworks later-era Kinks, forgoing guitar theatrics for the inclusion of strings, horns and a chorus, sometimes to overwrought effect. His bright tenor, though, serves him well. The album encircles themes of love, melancholy and aging.

While many songs sound similar, with uptempo beats and a carnival swagger, ascending ballads "If I Had a Gun" and "Stop the Clocks" are lyrically plush and show what Gallagher's capable of. It's a start, but here's to his next solo project, with electronic musicians Amorphous Androgynous, which should push more boundaries, and himself.

  • SOLVEJ SCHOU, LOS ANGELES TIMES

POP/ROCK: Meshell Ndegeocello, "Weather" (Naive)

"We can always blame it on the weather," sings Ndegeocello, her voice shaded in octaves, on "Weather," the title track and opener of her intoxicating new album. The line arrives in the service of seduction, but functions as an overarching metaphor. Love and attraction, sexual entanglement and romantic attachment -- they're as mutable and unaccountable as complex weather systems, Ndegeocello suggests. And she's intent on flying kites in the storm, taking some readings for herself.

She has covered this ground before, but rarely with such an unwavering sense of clarity and restraint. "Weather" is her most consistently strong album in some time, a product of vision and discipline. She had a shrewd outside producer in Joe Henry and the inestimable advantage of her working band, which she has honed like a steel blade. She opened herself to collaborators such as Benji Hughes, who wrote those lyrics in "Weather," and who plays piano on "Oysters," a skeptic's sensuous petition.

As has been the case onstage in recent years, she reserves her potent electric bass playing for select moments, including "Chance," a sleek exercise in post-retro 1980s pop. What takes front and center is her voice, dark and sultry one moment and coolly aerated the next.

She brings an air of enigma to more direct sentiments: wounded lust ("Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear"), lusty submission ("Petite Mort"), righteous disgust ("Dirty World"). When she covers Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel," the part that sticks out is an instance of hot-and-cold fluctuation: "I need you, I don't need you." There's one more cover, which closes the album: "Don't Take My Kindness for Weakness" by the Soul Children, slowed to a desolate crawl. Ndegeocello sings this one in her most fragile register, and it's haunting even though the song's central presumption is, in her case, hard to imagine.

She performs Jan. 22-23 at the Dakota.

  • NATE CHINEN, NEW YORK TIMES