The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Billy Bragg

Steamboat Springs — “Mr. Love & Justice”

Billy Bragg, political folk pioneer, has two emotions: in love, and upset.

The most recent distillation of the things that are important to Bragg — expressing the everyday joys and miseries of love, and speaking out for people who don’t have a voice — is “Mr. Love & Justice.”

His first solo studio album in six years, “Mr. Love” is an excellent capstone to a career that has become the defining measure for establishing a socially conscious voice in popular music and has acted as an odd anti-folk touchstone for everything from pop punk to alternative country acts. This record catches Bragg at a time where he’s as relevant, and as rich, as he’s ever been.

Of course, he’s not at a loss for material. Although Bragg is English, he’s as qualified as anyone (except maybe Bruce Springsteen) to comment about the United States’ place in politics.

And strangely, he more or less steps back from that challenge, shedding some of the outward anger from his punk beginnings and filling in the gaps with love songs and thick swaths of American country and soul music.

The old Bragg rears through on one track, “Something Happened.” Everywhere else, and especially with “O Freedom” and “Sing Their Souls Home,” his political takes on the war on terrorism have less vinegar and more disappointment.

What’s missing on “Mr. Love & Justice,” and what gained Bragg relative fame in the United Kingdom through the 1980s, is the anger that used to be spring-loaded behind his musings on life and love. Here, that grit is replaced with an older, wiser weariness about the world.

While fans of Bragg’s earlier work might find that shift a little unsavory, consider the alternative: either Bragg makes this record, with its time-tested sincerity, or Bragg works his way toward a life as a 60-year-old punk rocker with nothing believable left to say.

It’s not easy for a tooth-and-nail fixture such as Bragg to make the argument that the best thing he can do now, at least musically, is to start figuring out how to come to terms with how terribly we’ve messed this up.

But maybe that’s what we need. And on “Mr. Love & Justice,” Bragg figures he’ll give it to us.

Rating: ★★★★

Tapes ’n Tapes

“Walk it Off”

As much as their 2006 debut “The Loon,” Minneapolis rockers Tapes ’n Tapes’ second release, “Walk it Off,” is a throwback to the days when independent rock meant that the band wasn’t signed to a major label — not that the band had tendencies toward lighthearted love songs and keyboard ornamentation.

Tapes ’n Tapes came out of that 2006 run of retro rock bands that was most popularly fronted by The Hold Steady, and the Minnesota foursome continues on the simply stated mission to share a general, but optimistic, weariness with life.

That lends “Walk it Off” to songs that are not especially uplifting, but are likeable in that way where it feels like you’ve heard them before. On a second time through, just about everything on “Walk it Off” will feel like a nostalgic classic.

And while none of the songs here will be as lasting as the tracks from Pavement or Broken Social Scene or The Shins that give them that instant familiarity, they’re a likeable enough substitute for now.

Rating: ★★★