New Music From Chicano Batman, Jay Som, Grandaddy

Never mind Lego Batman. Here’s Chicano Batman. And instead of capes, these crusaders wear vintage suits and ruffled shirts, looking like a ‘70s wedding band. And like the Dark Knight, this quartet is on a mission for justice.

That might not be evident from a first listen and look. On Freedom Is Free, the third Chicano Batman album since the Los Angeles band started in the late 2000s, they mine the sounds of ‘60s and ‘70s East L.A., the soul and funk of Tierra and El Chicano. But just as strong an influence is the quasi-psychedelic swirls of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement of the same era, notably such prime acts as Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso. One highlight, “Flecha Al Sol,” could pass for vintage Veloso, and singer Bardo Martinez favors his same low-key, conversational alto, often sliding into an effectively stretched, vulnerable falsetto.

It's fun stuff, Spanglish nostalgia with some stylish twists. But carried in it are some pointed and poignant messages.  If you saw the ad Chicano Batman did recently for a whiskey company, the band doing a bilingual version of “This Land Is Your Land” shot around their L.A. neighborhoods, you won’t be so surprised. The grand gesture in that regard here is “The Taker Story,” with a subdued War-like groove underscoring a dark decrying of both geographic and cultural imperialism.

But most of the justice being fought for is on a more personal level. “Friendship (Is a Small Boat In a Storm)” calms the waters with an earnest, soulful outreached hand, Martinez’s taking a turn on organ in a little musical dance with co-founder Carlos Arévalo's understated guitar licks. “Angel Child” is an open-hearted portrait, with shifting time signatures.

The funky, bouncy title song, Martinez has explained, takes on the old “freedom isn’t free” catchphrase that's been used in connection with various U.S. military actions. Here Martinez implores people to get outside of their routines and conventions and be free in their own ways. The song’s opening line, “Nobody likes you, nobody cares,” doesn’t seem liberating, maybe. But as someone else once sang, freedom’s just another word for ... well, you know.

Jay Som

There’s a lot of first-person on Jay Som’s debut album, Everybody Works. Every song, for that matter: I this, I that. The very first word of the first song, “Lipstick Stains,” is “I,” emerging from layers of what sound like harps and zithers in an almost Wagnerian revelry as if it’s the very dawn of creation.

The music, too, is first-person. Every note, aside from some background vocals by friends, was sung or played by the artist in her bedroom. It’s kind of ironic, coming from someone who performs under a pseudonym, her real name being Melina Duterte.

But it’s not self-absorption. It’s a point of view. And yes, there can be a very fine line between the two, but Duterte/Som finds a perfect, if sometimes teetering, balance between solitude and connection.

That first first-person song, just six short lines -- three of them starting with “I,” and the first two repeated in the second three-line stanza -- languorously recounts the way a lover’s “lipstick stains the corner of my smile.” It’s at once an entry in a young woman’s diary and vivid, concise poetry. That song has the fewest words, but the album is marked by that economy and directness, at once crisp and wistful, in the moment and yearning for whatever comes next.

The music also teeters between the scruffy lo-fi charm you’d expect from bedroom recordings to some surprisingly sophisticated turns. On one end of the scale is “1 Billion Dogs” with its rushed confusion culminating in a squonky electric guitar solo. On the other end is the first single, “Baybee,” also about relational uncertainty but in a smooth-soul setting album reminiscent of Paul Weller’s sheeny Style Council side trips.

Where “Lipstick Stains” starts the album with its sensual sense of beginnings, “For Light” closes it with a sense of renewal, Duterte taking a walk to “feel the sun against my skin” as she recharges for new challenges, the song ending in strums on an electric guitar, echoing that opening revelry as a new day, or new phase, dawns.

Grandaddy

In the first place, Modesto’s Grandaddy seemed poised for big things with its tantalizing mix of glorious pop craft and idiosyncratic take on structures and sonics virtually upon the arrival of its 1997 debut album Under the Western Freeway.

We’re talking Flaming Lips big things, perhaps even Radiohead big things. Putting-Modesto-on-the-musical-map big things. Also in the second place, third place and fourth place with its three subsequent albums, each one winningly oddball but resonant.

Obviously, it didn’t quite work out that way, and following 2006’s Just Like the Fambly Cat, the group split, with members — particularly Jason Lytel and Jim Fairchild — moving on to various other project.

Well, after dipping its collective toes back in the waters with reunion shows in 2012, Grandaddy is back with a full new album, Last Place.

If commercial expectations may not be as lofty as they once were, the music still is. “Last Place,” whether the title means being behind the pack or gives a sense of just-one-more-time finality, suffers neither from the resignation or desperation coursing through many belated reunions. Rather, it carries the aura of a band that just had to wait a little until the time was right to renew its collective creativity.

And it’s not just a reunion, but also a homecoming, as Lytle made a prodigal return to Modesto after living in Montana and then Portland in recent years. The song “I Don’t Want to Live Here Anymore” was written shortly after his move to Portland, where he also lived through the end of a long-term relationship, echoes of which reverberate throughout the album.

Flaming Lips and Radiohead remain apt reference points, the former in a general quizzical sense of the world’s turnings as in the ghostly, wandering wondering of “A Lost Machine,” the latter particularly prominent in the muted melancholy of “This Is the Part.”

On other fronts, the instrumental interlude “Oh She Deleter” reminiscent of Eno’s “Another Green World,” giving way to the “Ram”-era McCartney-ish pop of “The Boat Is In the Barn.”

Mostly, though, all of these attributes swirl together in a way that is distinct to Grandaddy, as fresh and assured as in the band’s prime, captured in full in the pulsating pop of “Evermore.” Now, we don’t know with Grandaddy if there will be an ever, or a more. But this and the rest of “Last Place” are welcome reminders of why we loved them in the first place.