Ken Tucker

The Beastie Boys are all about noise. Their beats are big and booming. Their production style is intentionally fuzzy and frequently distorted. Their lyrics are the dense, articulate yammerings of wiseguys who will not get out of your face.

Emmylou Harris sings with a steadfast purity that can be starkly beautiful; it can also be coldly distancing. Over the years, her public image has coalesced around the idea of a serene singer-songwriter whose elegance and wisdom is signaled by her silver-gray hair. It takes a lot to get a rise out of Harris, but producer Jay Joyce has succeeded on Hard Bargain.

"I'm losing sleep, I'm losing dignity," Edwyn Collins sings in the title song of his new album, Losing Sleep. Powered by soul-music rhythms and sung in a tough, terse tone, Collins sounds impatient, eager to get on with his life. The music is the work of a man on a mission.

In the world of The Smithereens, women tend to be girls, who tend to be either saviors or destroyers of the singer's closed-in universe. With a lesser band of middle-aged American men deploying guitar chords and harmonies that assiduously evoke 1960s British Invasion pop, this could come off as stunted, even laughable. With The Smithereens, however, it's an achievement in a musical conservatism rendered joyously.

There's a singer-songwriter intimacy in many of the songs on Middle Brother, as though band members John McCauley, Taylor Goldsmith and Matthew Vasquez were sharing secrets and anecdotes and decided to set them to music.