Regret, Lady Antebellum, knows it well

Lady Antebellum

‘Need You Now’

Capitol Nashville

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In today’s real American South, Jello shots are just as prevalent as Jack Daniels, and a game gal like Hillary Scott is as likely to lust after a guy “in black pearl buttons, lookin’ just like Springsteen” as she is a Johnny Cash type. After all, the New Jersey rocker copped his style partly from the Man in Black.

Lady Antebellum -- the rising country-pop trio in which Scott shares vocal duties with the perpetually pearl-buttoned Charles Kelley and Dave Haywood, who handles background vocals and guitar -- is a product of the post-Faith and Tim New South of two-career marriages and relatively guilt-free premarital hook-ups. But its impressively well-considered second album reveals a connection to the craftsmanship and flair for sordid detail that’s served country artists since the heyday of George and Tammy and Dolly and Porter.

Country music always has been about the collision between contemporary life and the old ways. Lady Antebellum updates the genre’s formulas in the usual manner, spicing them up with rock riffs and unapologetic lustiness. What’s most interesting about “Need You Now,” which already has spawned a huge hit with its title track, is the album’s focus on one timeworn theme: regret. This young band is making some old-soul music, dressed up in the latest fashions.

That title song raises the album’s curtain and dictates the terms. It’s maybe the most romantic song ever written about a drunken booty call. Singing about the draw of an old beau on a lonely night, Scott is emotional but not too dramatic: a Carrie Bradshaw type, making do with diminished expectations. Answering her, Kelley sounds more old-fashioned. He croaks, he growls, he spits out the crow he’s eating.

The song’s effective arrangement -- Lady A, as the trio is known, co-wrote this track and most of the others here, and co-produced the album with Paul Worley -- updates the sound of heartache, as a minimalist New Age piano couplet echoes over some classic soft-rock guitar.

Beyond the title track, “Need You Now” keeps exploring the subtleties of the sadder but maybe-wiser life. “American Honey” wallows in nostalgia. “Love This Pain” is a romantic masochist’s lament. “Hello World” presents a full-on midlife crisis; Kelley hams it up, though he misses the chance to do a Porter Wagoner-style recited verse.

The group’s extremely solid, polished sound leaves little room for fanciful flights, but despite the slickness of the arrangements, Lady A delivers an emotional punch.

It’s unlikely that Lady A intended “Need You Now” to be a concept album, but it does cohesively describe the moment in young adulthood when wild promise starts to give way to more realistic expectations. Scott has a gift for strongly expressing tentative feelings, like cautious hope on “Perfect Day” and recovered self-respect in “Ready to Love Again.” Kelley is far less subtle, and his meaty gestures often threaten to overwhelm the fine material. But Lady A is making progress in its effort to balance comforting clichés with new realities.

-- Ann Powers Sultry, with an existential edge

Charlotte Gainsbourg

‘IRM’

Because Music/Elektra Records

* * * 1/2

The third release from the French actress most recently acclaimed for her performance in “Antichrist,” Charlotte Gainsbourg’s “IRM” is designed for hip, smart girls in crisis. Sultry rock with an existential edge, the intelligently composed songs flirt with catastrophe but never surrender.

Given the shabby-chic texture of the album, infused with elements of folk and terse electronica, it’s apparent that Beck produced, composed the music and co-wrote the lyrics. The elegance that served him well in “Modern Guilt” and “Sea Change” is an even better fit for the always unruffled progeny of perv-artiste Serge Gainsbourg and muse-collaborator Jane Birkin.

But it’s the singer’s recent brush with death in 2007 from a water-skiing accident that substantiates the album’s spectral mood. The title song, named for the French acronym for magnetic resonance imaging, thrums with heartbeat-like rhythms and buzzing monotones borrowed from the ER. She uses the medical lexicon to explore the psychedelic borders between the physical and the spiritual.

Throughout the follow-up to her 2006 album, “5:55,” Gainsbourg never sounds out of her element, no matter how the music shifts underneath her feet. “Trick Pony” rumbles like some nasty love child of Jon Spencer and Goldfrapp circa 2003’s “Black Cherry,” yet Gainsbourg rides it with gracefully lean vocals. On the enigmatic “Me and Jane Doe,” she meditates on a desert landscape that could be read as the Wild West of the afterlife.

Gainsbourg seems to intimately understand that the lines of existence, like the lines of genre or tone, can never truly be known, but yet she’s at home wherever she goes.

-- Margaret Wappler Testing folk’s boundaries

Magnetic Fields

‘Realism’

Nonesuch Records

* * 1/2

There are few albums that would rhyme gyroscope and kaleidoscope in a song called “The Dada Polka,” but such is the Magnetic Fields’ territory, where wide-eyed wonder is buttressed against a conceptual art movement and a pervasive sense of arch camp.

Conceived as a companion piece to 2008’s “Distortion,” songwriter-frontman Stephin Merritt’s homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Psychocandy,” “Realism” is a folk album that aims to test the ideas of authenticity and sincerity, which have been automatically associated with the genre since the first troubadour wandered the hills with a guitar.

The experiment of the Fields’ ninth record sometimes rewards, but too often struggles for urgency and warmth. In the album’s 13 songs, genteel instrumentation -- fluegelhorn, violin, the mildest tablas ever recorded -- tip-toes around stiffly polite vocal performances mostly from Merritt and Claudia Gonson. The liner notes pointedly state “no synths,” but oddly enough, the stereotypically cold electronics that Merritt previously has used to great effect might’ve warmed things up.

In “We Are Having a Hootenanny,” no one sounds like they’re about to cut a rug any time soon. In “I Don’t Know What to Say,” Merritt’s voice is so buried in the production, it threatens to slip under.

There are times where the detachment works. The closing number, “From a Sinking Boat,” is a gorgeously sorrowful resignation. It’s an instance where Merritt’s disinterest sounds like self-protection, as if he were steeling himself for the impending loss.

-- Margaret Wappler