While Atlas Sound frequently is described as a “side project,” in fact Bradford Cox increasingly spreads his efforts equally there as with his “main band” Deerhunter, and the results are equal in achievement and in the time and attention they deserve. Cox grows more accomplished as a songwriter and a lo-fi producer with each release by either project. On Parallax, audible influences range from Brian Eno (the two-part “Quark” that closes the album, as well as several watery treated pianos and other textures throughout), Yes (the main riff of “Te Amo” updates “Long Distance Runaround”), and in “Amplifiers” an odd union of Sonic Youth’s “Diamond Sea” and early Modest Mouse, but with acoustic guitars, a soaring vocal in the chorus, and a little Latin percussion thrown in the mix for good measure. On earlier albums, this degree of variety and eclecticism comes close to a liability, making it hard to pick up a signature identifying characteristic. Here, Cox has built on the preceding Atlas Sound album Logos and made his voice the center and the signature element. Parallax is the culmination of years of experimenting and is Cox’s most concisely excellent work.

• album stream with descriptions by Bradford Cox of 4 songs at New York Times

If you’re neither British nor a music nerd over age 35, you won’t recall the Oasis vs. Blur “wars” of the mid ’90s. But for a while, the UK press whipped up rather a frenzy of rivalry between the two retro-looking bands. Today, the leader of each band releases the debut of a new project.

Joined by Gorillaz collaborator Dan The Automator, Damon Albarn co-curates a charity album featuring several astounding African musicians. If it sounds like the Blur leader is seeking to emulate Peter Gabriel, there are far less honorable choices he could be making. In fact, his presence is even less overt here than Gabriel’s, more akin to Ry Cooder’s role in capturing the music of the Buena Vista Social Club. The record is an involving mix of the artists’ contributions and the producers’ recontextualizations, and the results are highly recommended, truly “world” music but without the sanitization that so frequently accompanies the tag.

Firstly, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds album *sounds* fantastic: lush and layered but loose, every instrument perfectly placed and articulated. Also, Noel has grown startingly as a lead vocalist — surprisingly reminiscent of Roland Orzabal from Tears For Fears. It’s as if, with brother Liam and his Beady Eye pointed elsewhere, he’s finally able to let his voice loose from decades of restraint. The only drag is the persistence of the moderate walking tempo through the first several tracks — not until track 6 does the pace pick up appreciably, and from there the energy improves. And as expected, Noel remains a particularly lazy lyricist. For example, the musically charming “The Death Of You & Me” is immediately marred by rhyming two classic rock song titles (“summer in the city… isn’t it a pity”) before even the first chorus. Elsewhere, his characteristic trick of inserting a Beatles reference as filler continues, singing about “kaleidoscope eyes” in a song brazenly titled “A Simple Game Of Genius.” However, it is obvious that Noel is fully engaged in this material, to a degree unlike anything since Oasis’s “D’You Know What I Mean?” nearly 15 years ago. In particular, “Stop The Clocks” feels like a classic instead of sounding like the classics. Noel easily bests his brother and is merely a shuffling of the running order away from having made his best album since the Oasis debut.

• DRC Music – album excerpts at SoundCloud
• Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – album stream at Rolling Stone

November 8th is a big music release date in rock history for many reasons, but perhaps most notably for these two. Both Led Zeppelin and Motörhead made landmark fourth albums, released exactly 9 years apart. On each, the traces of their root influences have finally coalesced and become their own, resulting in their most definitive and most successful work both critically and commercially. And while each album contains a genre-defining, myth-building, and overexposed track (“Stairway To Heaven” and “Ace Of Spades”), in neither case is that track the undisputedly best on the album. Both are indispensable and widely influential, cornerstones in defining how far heavy metal could go in particular directions, and agreed upon as classics despite their iconoclastic natures.