GLASVEGAS
(Columbia)

The Jesus and Mary Chain and Bruce Springsteen both cherish the three-chord structures and hefty beats of the old Phil Spector girl-group productions. Now Glasvegas has built its sound on the same foundation. From the Jesus and Mary Chain — which, like Glasvegas, is from Glasgow — come swaths of reverberation and guitar tremolo, though never to the point of drowning out the tunes. And from Mr. Springsteen come tales of misfortune and whoa-whoa choruses that call for singalongs.

Nearly all the songs on “Glasvegas,” the band’s debut album, stay within its chosen parameters, regularly chiming and swelling, almost interchangeably. Yet they are anthems of trauma and loneliness. Over doo-wop chord changes “It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry” wallows in all the ways the singer has messed up his life. In “Geraldine,” amid glimmering guitars and falsetto ooh-oohs, a woman promising hope and comfort turns out to be his social worker.

Between the bouts of self-pity, Glasvegas often reflects on fatherhood. In “Flowers & Football Tops” a father learns his son has been killed. In “Go Square Go” a schoolboy works up the nerve to follow his father’s advice and fight a bully. A son faces his parents’ impending divorce in “Daddy’s Gone” by railing: “What kind of way is that to treat your wife?/To see your son on Saturdays/What kind of way is that to live your life?” James Allan sings the refrain “He’s gone, he’s gone” as an accusatory bellow and, later, a wounded croon.

The combination of pomp and dishevelment is particularly British, and Glasvegas shows even more local pride with the thick Scottish burr that Mr. Allan uses when he sings. (For emphasis he regularly relies on a word that radio won’t play.) He bawls earnestly and unprettily in the tradition of Britpop, even quoting an Oasis lyric.

“Glasvegas” reached No. 2 in Britain and Ireland when it was released there this fall, and it’s easy to imagine British crowds raising their voices for choruses like “I’ll turn on my S.A.D. light” in “S.A.D. Light,” a song about seasonal affective disorder. Glasvegas is determinedly provincial, insisting there is grandeur in everyday lives. But what sounds rousing in Britain can sound sodden and overwrought to American ears — or at least to mine.

Glasvegas is to perform Tuesday night at the Bowery Ballroom; the show is sold out. JON PARELES

SCARFACE
“Emeritus”
(Rap-A-Lot/Asylum)

Scarface albums tend to sound heavy and morose, as if created under the cover of cloud. Since the late 1980s this Houston rapper, both solo and as a member of the Geto Boys, has been hip-hop’s pre-eminent existentialist. Long before he grew old — he’s approaching 40 — he rapped about life as if it were a long-departed enemy, unable to do him any more damage.

His mood can be leavened, though. “Emeritus” is Scarface’s ninth solo album and, he has indicated, possibly his last (a threat he has issued before). It is also among his breeziest, with just a touch of nimbleness animating his reliably sleepy growl over surprisingly exuberant production. The peppy “High Powered” sounds like a car braking over and over again; the smooth soul on “Can’t Get Right” recalls the production that a youngish Kanye West contributed to Scarface’s 2002 release “The Fix,” the album on which Scarface first re-emerged as an invigorated late-career rapper.

Even while death hangs over his music, Scarface doesn’t overlook life’s charms (the flirty “High Note”) or its nuisances, indicting CVS and Pfizer for predatory drug pricing (on “Can’t Get Right”). On “Who Are They,” a seething and mean-spirited conversation about women angling for a second chance that features verses from Slim Thug and the overlooked Houston veteran K-Rino, Scarface is uncommonly sadistic, and uncommonly gleeful to boot.

But really, he’s most comfortable in the abyss. Over pungent keyboard stabs on “It’s Not a Game,” Scarface sounds relaxed, imagining for himself a long-awaited meeting with the other side:

Please believe that when it’s time to show
I’ll be ready with my arms crossed, dying to go
And I won’t shed tears, I’m respected here
And you won’t hear things you’d expect to hear
I rejected fear
And I don’t want to be another second here. JON CARAMANICA

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ERIN MCCARLEY
“Love, Save the Empty”
(Universal Republic)

Erin McCarley’s airy, assured voice sails through “Love, Save the Empty,” a debut album full of romances: a few good ones and a majority summed up by the title of one song, “Lovesick Mistake.” That’s a waltzing piano ballad in which she tells herself, “I’ve gotta find some way to fumble right through this new heartache/It’s torn me apart.”

Ms. McCarley writes in the present tense about desire and its aftermath. “Pain takes my heart’s place/The love we made, we can’t erase it,” she sings in “Pitter Pat.” She comes up with the kind of pop songs — tuneful and reassuring, acknowledging sadness without succumbing to it — that can ease into film and TV soundtracks, where they have already been appearing.

Although she grew up in Dallas and is based in Nashville, Ms. McCarley stays outside country music. She doesn’t hide what she has learned from other songwriters, particularly Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann but also Sheryl Crow, Patty Griffin and Suzanne Vega. Ms. Apple’s retro swing and bluesy undertow show up in songs like “It’s Not That Easy,” which warns, “I don’t trust me with loving you.” And Ms. Mann’s expansive folk-rock echoes through the optimistic “Pony (It’s OK)” and the yearning but still buoyant “Hello Goodbye,” in which Ms. McCarley sings: “Am I the only one who cares here?/I can’t let you, let you disappear.”

Her producer and songwriting partner, Jamie Kenney, makes the arrangements stealthily hyperactive. They adeptly segue a singer-songwriter’s modest piano or acoustic guitar into elaborate studio confections. Cozy verses lead into panoramic choruses, often unfolding from pithy keyboard-and-percussion patterns to pealing guitars. But Mr. Kenney has all sorts of tactics. “Blue Suitcase,” for instance, starts out something like an orchestral tango, including castanets.

The production shows off Ms. McCarley’s melodies and helps separate her from the crowd of other women sharing her pop zone, though not entirely. Traces of other songwriters are too clear. Yet while “Love, Save the Empty” is the kind of debut that reveals more craft and talent than individuality, it’s a good start.

Ms. McCarley is to perform Tuesday night at Joe’s Pub. JON PARELES

JOE MORRIS BASS QUARTET
“High Definition”
(Hatology)

For more than 30 years Joe Morris has been an electric guitarist and a frontline, melody-oriented but free-jazz-inclined improviser. He likes high, thin, percussive sounds and blunt rhythmic stuttering, and he’s a strong-onions musician; you’re unlikely to feel blah about him.

But recently, by his own choice, he’s been spending a lot of time back in the rhythm section, lining out swing on the acoustic bass. That’s an unusual path for a jazz musician to take, but it’s not the main story of “High Definition,” the new album by his Bass Quartet. This is a band record, not a bandleader record. Mr. Morris, working in tandem with the drummer Luther Gray, isn’t calling extra attention to himself.

While his love for Ornette Coleman’s music has often been clear, here it’s in bold face, channeling Mr. Coleman’s basic strategies and energies. If you emulate the sound and the structure of Mr. Coleman’s early-1960s bands — all that bounce and song, with a saxophone, trumpet, bass, drums and no piano — you create the possibility for a special partnership out front: two horns playing written lines closely together, then becoming part of a collective tangle, with no chordal instrument to restrict them. Mr. Coleman and Don Cherry set the model for that kind of saxophone-trumpet partnership, but it lives on; recently John Zorn and Dave Douglas shined up the model in the band Masada, as did Jim Hobbs and Taylor Ho Bynum in the Fully Celebrated Orchestra.

Mr. Bynum, the cornetist and trumpeter, is in this group too, and here he works as part of a roving team with the saxophonist Allan Chase as his foil. Mr. Chase, with his different horns — especially baritone saxophone, on which he has an authoritative sound — works in tight circles, generating tough little patterns, while Mr. Bynum tends toward something much more scattershot, with wider intervals. Mr. Bynum is really nuts about sound itself; on the tracks “Morning Group” and “Land Mass” he runs through indexes of trumpet-sound possibilities: harsh buzzes, kinetic swipes, ballad tones.

The themes are fairly simple. What holds the album together is its play of opposites, not just between the horns but also in the music as a whole: sweetly played, take-your-time melodies over free rhythm, or free collective improvising over driving swing rhythm.

“High Definition” is more traditional than most of Mr. Morris’s albums, and not only because it recalls 50-year-old sources. It’s also because Mr. Morris is more conventional as a bass player than he is as a guitarist. He pulls some hot moves in solos, strumming chords and making repeated patterns, almost like a kora player. But playing in time during themes or behind other soloists, he’s satisfied to stay deep in the weave. BEN RATLIFF