POP/ROCK

St. Vincent, "St. Vincent" (Loma Vista/Republic)

St. Vincent gets funky — in an art-rock way — on her fourth album. Recording as St. Vincent, Annie Clark has from the beginning hurled opposites at one another to create her songs: dulcet and ferocious, meticulous and deranged, clear and oblique, calm and manic.

Her lyrics are often character studies, while her music builds patterns of rhythm and riff, often in counterpoint to her vocal lines. She can sing with airy ease, in lofty choruses, with confrontational tension or with operatic hysteria. At any moment, she might ambush her own elegant structures with bursts of speedy, noisy guitar. St. Vincent's CDs have been show-offy in the best way: Lean or orchestral, intricate or blunt, they place each song in its own surreal domain.

On St. Vincent's 2011 album, "Strange Mercy," the settings were often plush and billowy. But "St. Vincent" veers the other way: toward the brittle, the shallow and the distorted, while the beat gets earthier. With producer John Congleton, Clark creates an unpretty backdrop for some of her most alluring melodies.

"St. Vincent" harks back to the analog era. There's a mini-Moog on every track, and when Clark stacks up her guitar parts in songs such as "Birth in Reverse" and "Regret," they revisit the squashed sound of glam-rock and Queen. Yet she writes about the digital era, especially in "Digital Witness."

Clark has always kept listeners guessing about what's personal and what's invented. But the second half of the album may be newly open: in "I Prefer Your Love," a hovering ballad full of gratitude for a mother's love; in "Regret," which swerves between post-breakup loneliness and bravado, and in "Every Tear Disappears" and "Severed Crossed Fingers," two different tributes to the healing power of love. Her openly artificial, deliberately restricted sound might be one way of insisting that she's still levelheaded.

JON PARELES, New York Times

R&B

Ledisi, "The Truth" (Verve)

If you had to pick one vocalist who would do a great job with the truth, Ledisi would be a great choice. She may not hold the keys to the Scriptures, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer or Springsteen, but she sounds as if she's got them jiggling in her breast pocket. This jazzy adult-contempo soul singer, with the warmest tones since Sarah Vaughan, has approached sexual abuse, yearning and raw topicality with passion, honesty and guile, with harder- and harder-edged music with each CD.

"The Truth" is sprightlier and faster-paced overall than her previous albums. "I Blame You," a bold-faced bit of good, old-fashioned romanticism, is the type of blowsy retro-R&B that Sharon Jones' Dap Kings would kill for. So is "That Good Good" and the super-sensual "Lose Control." The truth is, Ledisi's every breath has conviction and earnestness. That's a rare truth worth celebrating.

A.D. Amorosi, Philadelphia Inquirer