CD reviews 8/13: Lindsey Buckingham's 'Seeds We Sow'

(Mind Cut)

This is Buckingham's third solo disc in five years and the first he's releasing himself after a long stint with Warner Bros. Like all of his own work, "Seeds We Sow" is thornier than Buckingham's material for Fleetwood Mac, with an emphasis on his percussive, sometimes discordant acoustic guitar playing and on his intimately recorded vocals, which in a stripped-down rendition of the Rolling Stones' "She Smiled Sweetly" push intriguingly at whatever border separates passionate from creepy. (Buckingham's originals reflect his usual blend of midlife introspection and limousine-liberal hand-wringing.)

Several cuts, though, suggest that the man who wrote "Second Hand News" and "Go Your Own Way" has indeed been thinking big of late: In "That's the Way That Love Goes" he layers an insistent vocal melody over a zippy fuzz-pop groove, while "Gone Too Far" has the lush light-rock feel of Fleetwood Mac's radio-bait late-'80s phase. Buckingham performs Friday at the Pantages Theatre.

The New York dance-punk acolytes soundtracked some of the most decadent nights out of the early '00s with cowbell-clanging singles that were so much fun, one might have missed how tight and ambitious this project was. After its sadly slept-on 2006 album "Pieces of the People We Love," the band is back to its old label but moving on to a genuinely uplifting revamp of its sound.

Though the band will forever be defined by the knife wound guitars of "House of Jealous Lovers," the besotted rave synths of "Sail Away" and classic house jitters of "Come Back to Me" suggest this band was paying attention to first-generation club music long before it was a pop prerequisite.

Lead single "How Deep Is Your Love?" is the best piano-driven floor filler since LCD Soundsystem cut "All My Friends," and singer-guitarist Luke Jenner kills his soul-man turn on "Miss You." One of the toughest tricks for a band to pull off is to stay relevant after singlehandedly igniting a popular sound. But this album might actually be a devotional record of sorts -- to downtown New York's musical DNA, and to the idea that dancefloor hedonism can be its own kind of grace. The Rapture performs Sept. 29 at the Varsity Theater.

Puddle of Mudd was doomed to fail on 11 covers of classic rock songs but the band clearly did it for fun. The hard rockers gamely take on "Gimme Shelter," "Rocket Man," "The Joker," "D'yer Mak'er" and more. Instrumentally, the band is solid and faithful. But Puddle of Mudd singer Wes Scantlin struggles, sometimes mightily, because he doesn't have the pipes to convey heart and soul on par with the original vocalists.