POP/ROCK: Evanescence, "Evanescence" (Wind-up)

"Hello, remember me?" Amy Lee asks at the top of the first Evanescence album since 2006, and given all that's happened in pop over the past five years, you can understand her uncertainty. Yet if Lee is a smaller star now than she was during the chart-scaling days of "Bring Me to Life" and "My Immortal," she hasn't lost her faith in goth-metal melodrama. This self-titled effort is instantly recognizable as an Evanescence album, with the churning guitars, minor-key strings and densely layered vocals Lee was using before the Euro-house beat colonized American radio.

The result delivers plenty of pain-soaked pleasure: "What You Want" rides its central riff with a bulldozer's efficiency, while closer "Swimming Home" finds room in Lee's gloom for a harp. (Scour the album's liner notes for the identity of her "harp technician.") And it's a kick, as always, to hear Lee flex her sense of ice-queen sarcasm in "Made of Stone," where she tells some hapless doofus, "Speak your mind, like I care." But "Evanescence" can also feel a little battened-down, as though its steadfast familiarity were an act of resistance against the dance-pop Barbies at the gate. A livelier album seems to lurk inside this one, struggling to sneak past its creator.

  • MIKAEL WOOD, LOS ANGELES TIMES

POP/ROCK: Mayer Hawthorne, "How Do You Do" (Universal Republic)

Let's pretend that Cee-Lo Green and the poor lady on the receiving end of the more profane version of "Forget You" decided to patch things up and go back to bed. What record do they put on? "How Do You Do" might do the trick.

Hawthorne made his reputation as an ever-falsettoed crooner on L.A.'s weirdo rap imprint Stones Throw. "How Do You Do" is his major-label debut, and it splits the difference between the well ironed soul revivalism of Adele and R. Kelly's baroquely dirty mind.

Hawthorne's voice has always been the centerpiece of his catalog -- imagine Al Green with the tiniest onset of a head cold. On "How Do You Do," he finally comes into his own as a vocal powerhouse: He nails a totally winning baritone affect on the brooding goth-Stax single "Can't Stop" (and upstages his guest Snoop Dogg in the player-prowling game). His wink-nudge seducer's anthem "No Strings" can get you pregnant from 100 yards out.

The production makes stellar use of his major-label money; the sound is refined and dynamic in a way that's wholly missing from pop radio. That might be his biggest obstacle: "How Do You Do" is grown-man music that fully inhabits its tradition instead of just nodding to it in making hits. But it's all in service of some fantastic pillow talk that might lead to actual rolling in the deep.

  • AUGUST BROWN, LOS ANGELES TIMES