ALBUM REVIEWS

Dawes Passwords HUB Records

California band Dawes’ sixth album, Passwords, is a soothing, sugar-coated collection with a bittersweet lyrical aftertaste.

Led by singer-guitarist-songwriter Taylor Goldsmith, the 30-somethings in Dawes draw on authoritative artists like The Eagles, Jackson Browne and Stephen Bishop, while adding a twist or two of their own.

The power chords of opener, Living In the Future, and a scarily intense guitar solo are a good match for lyrics that read like a directory of modern challenges, from keeping your passwords safe and remembering them to feelings of living on the edge and anticipating being pushed off.

Feed the Fire offers electric sitar and a melody suggesting Stevie Nicks fronting Hall & Oates, while Crack the Case wishes for a lasting armistice — “It’s really hard to hate anyone/When you know what they’ve lived through.”

I Can’t Love buries the lead (“you any more ... than I do right now”), and Mistakes We Should Have Made is an energetic paean to regret with vocal assistance from Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig from indie pop band Lucius.

Dawes achieves a uniform veneer on Passwords, translucent coats of sound spread over situations and stories well worth a listen.

Fantastic Negrito Please Don’t Be Dead Blackball Universe/Cooking Vinyl

Fantastic Negrito has an incredible backstory but it would be a shame to allow it to overshadow the fantastic blend of blues, funk, rock and R&B created on Please Don’t Be Dead by the man born Xavier Dphrepaulezz.

He grew up with 13 siblings in a Muslim family that moved from Massachusetts to Oakland when he was 12, around 1980. He released an album (The X Factor) as Xavier in 1996 but was in a debilitating car crash in 2000 — the theme of this album’s cover. The debut of this new career phase was the 2014 EP Fantastic Negrito and The Last Days of Oakland, which won a Grammy for best contemporary blues album.

If album opener Plastic Hamburgers sounds like a Chris Cornell/Lenny Kravitz mashup, Dark Windows is a heartfelt tribute to the former, whom Negrito toured with extensively. A Boy Named Andrew alternates a Middle Eastern-sounding motif with R&B, while Transgender Biscuits has Tom Waits-like bullhorn vocals as well as an oasis of pop sounds.

Negrito puts himself in the middle of the fray with Please Don’t Be Dead, a tribute to those who persist.