Midas Fall
Eleven. Revert and Return
Monotreme

The atmosphere is heavy on Midas Fall’s album Eleven. Revert and Return. The clouds are low and thick, the temperature is cold and everything is wet — even without a rain. The Edinburgh band seems to be the quite literal product of its environment. The five-piece 21st-century prog rock band claims to be influenced by Radiohead. To say that is readily evident from the opening track, and a gross understatement.

Elizabeth Heaton with her plaintive voice plays the part of Thom Yorke. The lone exception is the tune “Fog Sky Nun.” It kicks off with a heavy bass-drum beat and Heaton puts some power behind her words without letting her voice soar. It’s also the only song on the record that keeps the band  — and it’s overly ambitious atmospherics — from pushing the song to the edge of becoming a droning bore.

Haunting as her voice may be, it cuts through the beats and repetition of the band, making the album feel like a soundtrack to a tense horror flick where we never see the Wolfman. While the technique is tested and proven effective on occasion, more often the audience needs to see the terror unleashed to maintain its interest. —Jeffrey Ramsey

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
The Live Anthology
Reprise Records

For most of their 34-year existence, Tom Petty’s band, The Heartbreakers have been an afterthought. The sentence, “Hey man, have you heard the new Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers record?” is rarely, if ever uttered. Their supremely talented frontman has overshadowed the band for good reason. His intelligent songs speak to the brain as well as the belt-buckle region, and his arrangements flow effortlessly between Allman Brothers Southern grooves to good ol’ fashioned 3-chord rock.

On the band’s new 4-disc collection, The Heartbreakers’ talent and professionalism is not only apparent, it’s at times stunning. For folks that only think “Tom Petty” when they hear the song “Breakdown,” it’s tough to ignore the band after listening to this collection.

Spanning the band’s entire history, the collection features many of the usual suspects found on half-a-dozen other greatest hits packages: “Refugee,” “Free Fallin’,” “The Waiting, Won’t Back Down” and “Even the Losers.” However, the treasures to be found here aren’t, as Petty writes in the liner notes, “The greatest hits, played faster,” but some of the deeper album cuts re-imagined along with some truly amazing takes on the blues classic such as “I’m a Man,” Dave Clark Five’s “Any Way You Want It,” Booker T & The MGs’ “Green Onions” and a cover of “I Just Wanna Make Love to You” that will (thank God) wipe away all memory of Foghat’s version of the Muddy Waters standard.

Sequenced by mood and groove rather than chronological order, the anthology let’s the listener experience one of the truly great American bands, as they should be, live and at the peak of its creative power. It just so happens that the band rose to that peak early and has managed to stay at the top for well over three decades. —Jeffrey Ramsey

Miranda Lambert
Revolution
Columbia Records

Since Miranda Lambert blew up on the contemporary country scene in 2003 as a contestant on the short-lived talent show “Nashville Star,” she has been packing a not-so-latent pyromania into a compact, perky and bleach-blonde package.

Her first hit, “Kerosene” told the tale of a scored woman that burns down her former boyfriend’s home. Her second album featured “Gunpowder & Lead,” a tale of rapidly escalating domestic violence. On her latest effort, Revolution, Lambert keeps the fire going with no less than three songs with direct references to firearms and combustible liquids. She opens the album with Hey white liar/truth comes out a little at a time/and it spreads just like a fire/slips off your tongue like turpentine, a song that reveals that, while her beau may have slipped up with a mistress, Lambert has a surprise of her own.

What sets Lambert apart from her plastic contemporaries in the new country and re-packaged Gong Show worlds is not only her apparent extra dose of testosterone in her lyrics and driving guitars in her songs, but also her never-shy-away attitude. While most female artists on the country dial are pining for unrequited loves and crying over spilled champagne, Lambert makes it clear that she doesn’t suffer fools.

She also wrote or co-wrote 11 of the 15 songs on the album. She also rocks up John Prine’s “That’s the Way the World Goes ‘Round” and Julie Miller’s “Somewhere Trouble Don’t Go.” On “Heart Like Mine” she says she “ain’t the kind ya take home to mama,” and that may be so — but she has to be a helluva lot of fun on the riverbank with some fireworks. ­—Jeffrey Ramsey

Librarians
Present Passed
Postfact Records

The Librarians’ latest release, Present Passed should have kicked off with the third track, “Wait and See.” In between faint psychedelic tones, swirling atmospherics and cymbal-heady drum work, the drone of Wait and see/Have some patience with me please/I’m sorry if you grow a little tired. Over … and over like one of They Might Be Giants’ more avant-garde trips. Listening to the album does indeed take some patience.

Thing is, the Present Passed is not an unpleasant listen. In fact, nearly every one of the multi-layered songs drenched in production tricks and technically perfect instrument parts create a deep and rich experience that rewards repeated listens. The hooks and grooving couplets drive the album forward without letting the psychedelic elements drift off course into aimless zero-gravity psychedelic jams.

However, those same heavy-handed production techniques make the listener appreciate and marvel at the twirling of the dials at the soundboard without much thought about the band and musicians that created the parts. There is no illusion left in the listener’s mind that the band was ever or has ever been in the same room playing live as a unit while the tape was rolling.

Present Passed is a prime demonstration of the old adage that “technology ain’t got no soul.” One can easily imagine that if the robots ever take over, the Librarians will be their favorite band. —Jeffrey Ramsey