Harry Styles, “Harry Styles” ★★★½
Harry Styles isn’t the first One Direction member to go solo — Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson both went the dance-music route in varying degrees of darkness and light — but he is the 1D most screaming fans really wanted to hear. Charming and unassuming in a long-hair, shaggy-dog fashion, Harry is — in Beatles’ speak — a Paul, the cute one. Now shorn of his locks and his quintet, Styles finds his expressive voice and confidence-questioning lyrics amid the tones of softly spun acoustic guitars and hammily epic glam anthems.
—A.D. Amorosi
The Mountain Goats, “Goths” ★★★½
John Darnielle has been a master of sharply observed character studies since he started releasing Mountain Goats cassettes in the early ’90s. He examined a dysfunctional couple on 2002’s “Tallahassee,” dealt with his own troubled childhood on 2005’s “The Sunset Tree,” and used tarot cards as a catalyst for 2010’s “All Eternals Deck.” After focusing on the rather hermetic world of professional wrestling for 2015’s “Beat the Champ” (and on his novel-writing for the recent “Universal Harvester”), Darnielle turns his empathetic eye to another subculture: black-clad goths and the rise and fall of the ’80s bands they loved.
— Steve Klinge
Low Cut Connie, “Dirty Pictures (part 1)” ★★★
Since the band’s 2010 debut, pianist Adam Weiner has been the focal point for Low Cut Connie, the Philadelphia band of merry barroom marauders whose fourth album was recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis. How could he not be? This is an unabashed ham of a piano-pounding showman — the Jewish Jerry Lee Lewis — as liable to be seen standing on top of the beat-up piano he’s named Shondra as he is playing it. But Weiner used to share songwriting duties with Dan Finnemore, a talented guitarist and drummer from Birmingham, England, who gave the group a two-fisted attack. Starting here, Weiner shoulders the load alone — though guitarist James Everhart does chip in with one song, the more-than-respectable rocker “Am I Wrong.” The good news is the piano man proves more than up to the task as he demands Dionysian transcendence (“Touch my body, touch my soul”) on the opening “Revolution Rock n Roll,” and the rhythm section rumbles as songs of misadventure like “Montreal” and “Angela” don’t let feelings of inadequacy get in the way of a banging good time. Of course, the cover of Prince’s “Controversy” couldn’t possibly measure up to the original, but Weiner turns its call for emotional honesty into both a heartfelt tribute and personal statement.
— Dan DeLuca
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