WILCO Cousin (dBpm) — By the time a band gets to lucky album number thirteen, complacency would be understandable. That’s especially the case if the band has a songwriter who can evidently dash off accomplished new tunes as easily a seasoned grill cook plates up pancakes. So give a little extra credit to Wilco for embracing their more experimental side on their new album, Cousin. To help discourage themselves from flopping into the easy chair of more straightforward y’allternative crooning, they bring in Cate Le Bon to serve as producer, the first time in more than ten years that someone other than longtime collaborator Tom Schick has taken on that task from outside the band. Le Bon bringing a sonic tinkerer’s impishness that achieves some of the same welcome discombobulation that happened when Jim O’Rourke ruffled them across the successive albums Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born. It’s not at all the case that Wilco’s known creative personality gets subsumed by this strategy. Jeff Tweedy’s songs are too sturdy for that to be the case. Instead, the tracks have intriguing layers of texture. “Ten Dead” relays the modern sensation of being exhausted by the regularity of news coverage leading with a mass shooting (“Turn on the radio/ This is what they said/ No more, no more/ No more than ten dead”), doing so with rich undercurrents of tone that recall the restless invention of Abbey Road. Keeping with the mop-top vibe, “Evicted” has the worldly lope and warping guitar lines of vintage George Harrison. Those comparisons offer a potential forecast as to how Wilco will ramble on further into venerable act status: mature and rascally at the same time. Keeping studying this knotty family tree with “Infinite Surprise,” “Levee,” the archly eddying “A Bowl and a Pudding, the title track, and “Meant to Be.”

SAY SHE SHE Silver (Karma Chief) — Silver, the sophomore album from Brooklyn-based trio Say She She, has an ocean-like vastness. Clocking in as a double album with more than an hour of music, Silver finds official members Piya Malik, Nya Gazelle Brown, and Sabrina Mileo enlist a slew of collaborators, including producer Sergio Rios, to bolster their sound into a whirligig feast of modern dance and R&B. The disco tang of opener “Reeling” is terrific and yet truly only the beginning. While firmly maintaining their own identity and point of view, Say She She zigs and zags through soulful, scintillating, and slithery tracks. They hold back from slicking up the material too much (“Never Say Never” is not all that dissimilar from early Best Coast, if Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno used Rihanna as their touchstone), which gives it all a stealth earthiness that makes it hit the gut harder than it otherwise might. The threesome trade lead vocal duties like smoothies in a heist, and that make it all the most radiant when they merge into harmonies. The cut “Entry Level” is what it might sound like if a girls group descending from the heavens in a beam of light. In addition to the tracks already mentioned, go for the gold with “C’est Si Bon,” “Passing Time,” “Echo in the Chamber,” and “NORMA.”