LINDA THOMPSON Proxy Music (StorySound) — On the 2014 album Family, which brought the whole performing Thompson clan together, Teddy Thompson sang, “My mother has the most beautiful voice in the world.” That wasn’t merely familial pride; he could have found a lot of co-signers on that proposition. So it’s an especially cruel turn that Linda Thompson can no longer sing, the result of her longstanding struggles with spasmodic dysphonia. Linda Thompson is not one to give up, though. On the cleverly titled Proxy Music, she recruits a bevy of trusted collaborators to handle the vocalizing on an impressive set of songs she wrote or co-wrote. The album is a clear, unsentimental document of Thompson’s own situation, beginning with opening track “The Solitary Traveller,” sung by her daughter Kami, that opens “I had a voice clear and true.” Kami understandable comes close enough to mom’s stylings that she could have taken the whole songbook and provided a reasonable simulation. Or the album could have filled with nothing but true kindred vocalists, such as Eliza Carthy, who does right by the proper Irish folk of “That’s the Way the Polka Goes.” Thompson instead takes pleasure in the sly, creative variety offered by the album’s conceit, whether in Rufus Wainwright’s lovely, lounge-y “Darling This Will never Do” or John Grant doing a more homespun version of his usual John Grant thing on the track “John Grant” (which includes the lyrics “John Grant took my heart away to Reykjavik/ I hope he takes care of it”). If Linda Thompson has to borrow voices, she has damn well earned the right to borrow any one she wants. Cue up these genuine articles: “Bonnie Lass” (trilled by the Proclaimers), “I Used to Be So Pretty” (sung by Ren Harvieu), and “Mudlark” (with the Rails), and the folk family feud of the playful “Those Damn Roches” (featuring Teddy Thompson).

REDD KROSS Redd Kross (In the Red) — Redd Kross hardly seems like the likeliest contender to endure long enough to be a legacy act, and yet here we are. The California band formed by brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald put punk and pop together in a way that comes across as blissfully disposal. No matter how artfully constructed a song might be, the headlong boisterous of Redd Kross’s playing always makes it seem like its set to shake apart like a backyard treehouse attempting reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Amazingly, that somehow true of even their slower tunes, such as the power ballad “The Witches’ Stand,” off of the band’s new self-titled double album. It’s polished as can be and yet infused with so many tension that it feels dangerous to ride. Redd Kross have absolutely endured, notching their forty-fifth anniversary and inspiring the recent feature documentary Born Innocent. The tight sprawl of Redd Kross — eighteen tracks in all — makes a stirring, dizzying display of everything that band can do. sure, they mostly lock into a garage-stained, power-pop mode, but there’s a surprise around practically every turn, whether the hoedown they break out at the end of “What’s In It for You?” or the rocket-ship rock ‘n’ roll excess of “Stunt Queen.” They are arguably most luminous when they lean into their psychedelic underpinnings: “Candy Coloured Catastrophe” is rattly acoustic guitar and dream-state boisterousness, like Love and Rockets before they got so alive, and “Good Times Propaganda Band” expertly echoes all those cadets who took their basic training under Sgt. Pepper in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies. More than anything else, Redd Kross knows how to lock in a hook. Listen to the smashing single for undeniable proof of that. Maybe they can last forever. Stay in the Redd with the following cuts: “Cancion Enojada,” “Back of the Cave,” “Simple Magic,” and “Emmanuelle Insane.”