Let Me Down Easy

J. Edward Keyes on Shuffle

Like a rugged Mary J. Blige-in-training, 25-year-old R&B singer Keyshia Cole has a way of making despair sound like victory. In her 2005 song "I Should Have Cheated," she laments her own faithfulness to her abusive cad of a boyfriend, using the opportunity of his infidelity to project herself into a series of liaisons. As modern R&B singers go, she's something of an anomaly; many of her contemporaries favor a kind of hyperventilating melisma, but Cole's voice is almost proudly damaged. She's not afraid of its squeaks and cracks, and is already figuring out how to use them to her advantage. Her music evokes the sound of early '80s R&B, songs like "Heaven Sent" and "Got to Get My Heart Back" setting Cole's husky voice against lithe, buttery backdrops. There's nothing here that equals the wounded power that characterized her debut, and the record runs on longer than it ought to, but it also boasts enough thrilling moments to make it worthwhile. The quiet storm heartbreaker "Fallin' Out" — an early high point — is gradually swallowed by the hissing and crackling of vinyl. No matter that, musically, those sound effects conjure the wrong era, it's what they're trying to confer — a sense of age, of endurance, of experience. And besides, how would you replicate the sound of a cassette?

Keyshia Cole Just Like You (Geffen)

Bettye LaVette The Scene of the Crime (Anti-)

Bettye LaVette may as well be talking to Keyshia Cole when she sings, "I was singing R&B back in '62/ Before you were born/ And your mama, too." Like Cole, LaVette and her band — the Georgia outfit Drive-By Truckers — also evoke a forgotten era of R&B, this one the late '60s. But where Cole often errs on the side of superficiality, LaVette and the Truckers are practically pickled in reverence. They strain to get the details right: Crime was recorded at Muscle Shoals' FAME studios — the place where LaVette recorded her unjustly shelved debut 35 years earlier — and features hefty contributions from legendary organist Spooner Oldham. All of this gravity crushes. LaVette's got an astonishing voice, full of sharp edges and unfiltered ache, but it's blunted by the bands' stodgy arrangements. It doesn't help that she's made this record before, and better, with 2005's startling I've Got My Own Hell to Raise. There was a kind of desperation that permeated those songs, making them genuinely haunting. That record projected weariness. This one just sounds overworked.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)

The ache is always unfiltered at www.jedwardkeyes.com.