The Von Bondies

Pawn Shoppe Heart

(Sire)

This new album from the Von Bondies may be the most compelling reason yet to give Meg White the slip. On Pawn Shoppe Heart, this Detroit quartet combines neo-blues-rock with a monster of a punk rock rhythm section, to often startling results. Is it blues-punk, finally? Almost.

“I’m a broken man, this here’s my broken band, from a broken land,” announces Jason Stollsteimer, the singer with a broken face. As ubiquitous as Stollsteimer’s battered image became following his thrashing at the hands of former mentor Jack White, the stars on this album are bassist Carrie Smith and drummer Don Blum. Their powerful playing breathes new urgency into a blues-rock formula that’s already starting to grow stale on the edges.

It may be telling that far-and-away the best track on Pawn Shoppe Heart, “C’mon C’mon,” is nothing if not power pop. With a desperation appropriate to it’s title, the song leads one to wonder when the White Stripes started substituting artifice for emotion, and whether the blues-rock tag isn’t just holding these guys back.

The rest of the album holds much closer to the Sex Pistols spend an evening with Eric Clapton format, which works brilliantly on the album-opener “No Regrets” but begins to sound cursory in the middle stretch of the album.

Stollsteimer has a voice versatile enough to draw on a wide range of influences. He sounds great when channelling Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, as on the overpowering title track, less so when channelling Jack White, as on “Crawl Through the Darkness.” But I doubt we need to worry about that anymore.

—Nathaniel A. Smith

TV on the Radio

DesperateYouth, Blood Thirsty Babes

(Touch and Go)

The thing that TV on the Radio have going for them is that they really do sound like nothing out there at the moment. They may borrow beats and keyboard accents from the retro-wave fad that’s sweeping the current New York scene, but they add to them in such interesting and entertaining ways that it’s hard to make comparisons between TV and any of the old-time greats.

Tunde Adebimpe’s distinctively shiny voice, combined with the hypnotic falsetto chiming of Kyp Malone, is what makes this record so unique. The music, looping beats and random instrumental coloring, plays background to the luscious vocal harmonies. A capella love song “Ambulance” is positively entrancing as the duo sing on hauntingly syncopated beats over the constant bounce of backing bass.

Opener “The Wrong Way” begins with pumping jazz saxophones and turns into some kind of evangelical gospel cry as soon as the vocals kick in. The song is a poignant call to arms for liberty in the face of racial and social adversity, a message that resonates powerfully despite the track’s playful pace. “Hey, desperate youth! / Oh, blood thirsty babes! / Oh your guns are pointed / your guns are pointed the wrong way,” Adebimpe sings with disarming import.

The repetitive simplicity of the music on Desperate Youth gets old by about the sixth track. But somehow, the so-vibrant-you-could-touch-it personality of the vocals and lyrics captivate over even well-explored territory.