By JON CARAMANICA, NATE CHINEN and BEN RATLIFF
Published: October 3, 2010

TOBY KEITH

“Bullets in the Gun”

(Show Dog/Universal)

You can almost hear the muscle atrophying on “Bullets in the Gun,” the latest from Toby Keith. More than a dozen albums into a career known best for rallying jingoists and for cheeky, not altogether unpleasant smugness, Mr. Keith is finally letting go of old modes. So much for bluster. So much for pride.

“Bullets in the Gun” is his most scattershot album to date, a jumble of attitudes and tactics. Much of the time Mr. Keith, who has been one of the most underappreciated vocal stylists in country music, is singing without conviction on songs that are mere archetypes and lack any of his signature gestures. “Trailerhood” is a lazy song full of backwoods clichés, and “Drive It On Home” toasts the wonders of trucking. On “Somewhere Else,” for perhaps the first time, he delivers syllables in quick, nimble fashion, in the style of Jason Mraz.

The title track, a pumped-up and comically desperate tale of a couple on the lam in Mexico, is slick and almost parodic (“We came to a town with a name I couldn’t spell”), as if from an imagined Marc Shaiman cowboy musical. Worse, apart from “Is That All You Got” — “This old heart didn’t die/It’s been broke by the best” — he’s all but forsaken the gentle big-lug soul he’s been toying with in recent years, which had been a thoughtful, winning strategy against aging. (The deluxe edition of this album includes four tracks recorded live at Irving Plaza in New York in June, including a tender version of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown.”)

In places on the album, though, he’s still preening, and these vestigial moments are welcome. On “Think About You All of the Time” he cockily assures an ex that breaking up with him didn’t release her from his clutches: “If by chance I start romancing/You guessed it/I think about you.” This unbruised, masculine presumptuousness continues on the album closer, “Get Out Of My Car,” a comically loathsome but likable statement of late-night purpose. “Get out of your clothes or get out of my car/Whichever you choose, I’m ready to go,” Mr. Keith sings, loosely referencing the melody of his 2005 single “As Good as I Once Was,” his genial celebration of the body in decline. Don’t keep him up all night: time’s a wastin’. JON CARAMANICA

MARNIE STERN

(Kill Rock Stars)

Catharsis has been a good mode thus far for Marnie Stern. On her first two albums, released within the past few years, she whipped up a fast froth of electric guitar and yelping vocals, turning strenuousness into a life force. Her lyrics often raced by in a flash, and so did the intricate lines she finger-tapped along her fret board, as if firing off an urgent telegraph. Even as shredders go, she seemed to find unusual comfort in fervor.

But she hasn’t purged half as much before, emotionally, as she does on her third, self-titled album. Apparently this is a byproduct of some recent tragedy: last year a former romantic partner committed suicide, and the news landed hard, though he and Ms. Stern hadn’t been in touch for some time. She wrote “For Ash,” the album’s galloping opening track, soon after his funeral. Its first line is, “Well I don’t remember how you got away,” though you might not make out that much through the cavernous echo and blurred striations of noise. The song’s more easily decipherable chorus features these sentiments, sprawled over a stuttering drumbeat:

I cannot bare

No one compares

I miss your smile

Sadness all the while.

Ms. Stern, who is 34, certainly understands the distinction between “bare” and “bear” in this context: what she’s resisting is naked exposure, even as she wills herself toward it. Another anthem here, meaningfully titled “Transparency Is the New Mystery,” features the mystical pronouncement “In order to see it/ You’ve got to believe it.” Elsewhere Ms. Stern sings lyrics like “I got something in my soul/Pushing me to hold onto the pain,” trusting that the music’s complexity will offset her journal-entry honesty.

About that complexity: it’s neither a lark nor a distraction. Ms. Stern has her usual dazzling collaborator in the drummer Zach Hill, whose booming kick drum and tinny snare end up tattooing each song with convulsive precision. Mr. Hill’s cross-rhythms mesh with Ms. Stern’s in secure but cryptic ways, like the work of Indian classical masters on tabla and santoor. (The only other musician on the album is Ms. Stern’s current beau, Matthew Flegel, who played some bass. She has different sidemen, a full band, on the tour that brings her to the Rock Shop in Brooklyn on Tuesday.)

The heady rush of notes envelops Ms. Stern’s feral-sounding vocals and clearly emboldens them: “Can you feel my hands clench?” she repeats over a rare postpunk riff in “Building a Body,” briefly sounding a bit like Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But she’s at her most compelling when she loosens that clench, as on “Cinco de Mayo,” another opus conceived out of funereal sadness. At that song’s peak she’s basically yelling, and only a glimpse at the lyric sheet will tell the full story, spelling variations included. “You will always be here!” is what she yells. “And here! And hear! And hear!”

NATE CHINEN

KING SUNNY ADé

“Bábá mo Túndé”

(Mesa/Bluemoon)

The track lengths on a King Sunny Adé album always signify. In 1967, the beginning of his record-making years, leading his Green Spot band in the sweet polyrhythmic Nigerian pop style called juju, they were short: mostly three-minute lilts. By the early 1970s they’d stretched out, often up to an LP side, more reflective of the band’s live performances. When his music was marketed to North America for three records in the early 1980s, the track lengths shrank again, in hopes of radio play. By his previous album for the Western market, in 2000, some of the keyboard textures had become Europop glossy, but the song lengths were creeping back up, to nearly 10 minutes.

Good news: the longest track on the new double-disc album “Bábá mo Túndé” runs past 31 minutes. The new, 16-piece version of his African Beats band recorded it recently in a Pennsylvania studio, with six chorus singers behind Mr. Adé’s soft lead vocals, two players of the talking drum and the marvelous trap-set drummer Taiwo Sogo Ogunjimi-Oba. (The pedal-steel guitar, long an exotic mark in his band, is gone for now.)

And the music, Yoruba praise-songs and parables with sprays of English, develops at its own schedule. The longer songs shuttle through segments, cued at will by Mr. Adé, of vamping, solos, verses and chants. The epic title track changes key exactly twice, and both times in the middle of short, lovely guitar solos by Mr. Adé, after the 17- and 24-minute marks. Both it and “Baba Feran Mi” end almost abruptly after lengthy talking-drum solos — expressions of vitality that our logic might put in the middle of a piece. These are strange and sometimes thrilling ways of bringing modulation and closure.

The hand-drumming through the record is light and precise and fixed, with the trap-set drums ebbing and flowing against it, constantly revising its patterns and stress beats. At 64 Mr. Adé is still a beguiling guitarist, making gestural, staccato phrases on top of the music, letting high notes sweep up or down and trail off, spiking the rhythm over the cyclical patterns of the band’s other guitarist, Segun Kalajaiye.

The record sags on the second disc. After the high of the title song, the Philadelphia-based remixer King Britt put his hand to a remix of the track, using what sounds like a digital rhythm sequencer, and the 15-minute result chugs along rigidly compared with what Mr. Adé’s band can generate in real time: music that feels like repetition but never actually does the same thing twice. BEN RATLIFF