POP/ROCK
Jimmy Cliff, "Rebirth" (Universal)
Although he has tossed in a few torrid reggae numbers on nearly every album he has recorded, there hasn't been an across-the-board, consistently great, wonderful- sounding Cliff album since his true breakthrough of 1972: his songs on the soundtrack to "The Harder They Come" and its immediate follow-up, the mighty and mournful "Struggling Man." There simply hasn't been the strength of empowered lyrical composition and dynamic melody to go along with his trademark angelic wail since that time. That is, until "Rebirth."
Mirroring Cliff's longtime relationship with his producer, the late Leslie Kong, Tim Armstrong (of ska punk's Rancid) gives the aged-like-fine-wine Jamaican icon the sympathetic, roots-reggae sound that was part of Cliff's initial groundswell. The pair create a softly spiraling groove to back the pensive, troubled-world lyrics that made Cliff a universally concerned citizen. While "Children's Bread" and "One More" look for solutions with soul as their self-help aid, a torrid version of the Clash's slow-dub sensation "Guns of Brixton" rocks Cliff's casbah and updates the track, applying it to contemporary troubles in the Middle East.
A.D. AMOROSI, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Jeff the Brotherhood, "Hypnotic Nights" (Warner Bros.)
The Nashville garage-rock band Jeff the Brotherhood, made up of Jake and Jamin Orrall, started 11 years ago in the Orralls' preadolescence. They'd made two albums before either had turned 20; they wrote feckless, short-order, hard-rocking slacker songs, casual or mock-mystical or jokey. And they became almost proudly derivative, particularly of the big, distorted riffs and melodic phrasing of early Weezer.
Since they started, a lot of other guitar-and-drum duos -- the White Stripes, the Black Keys, Japandroids -- appeared or expanded or exhausted their experiment. But the Orralls, displaying lower aesthetic ambitions and sticking to more basic pleasures than any of those, remain superachievers committed to making underachieved music.
"Hypnotic Nights," the band's seventh album, is its first with outside production help, from Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. It's not brain surgery -- perhaps not even middle-school science. (Two songs are about cooling off on a hot day.) But it's more even and settled than anything the band has done: better arranged, better constructed, better mixed, more precise.
