X Smoke & Fiction (Fat Possum) — It’s unnervingly close to fifty years since that late nineteen-seventies day when John Doe and Billy Zoom decided that if Doe was going to keep bringing his girlfriend Exene Cervenka to band practice then she might as well join them. D.J. Bonebrake slipped behind the drum kit not lot after that. Soon enough, the quartet that called themselves X started making an unlikely yet convincing case that they were the best rock ‘n’ roll band to ever come out of the city of Los Angeles. Smoke & Fiction, the band’s ninth studio LP and officially declared their last, is a ferocious, compelling closing argument. Without ceding an iota of volume-up power, X are downright moving as they directly address their own long, roving history across several songs. Romping lead single “Big Black X” might be most overt as a memoir you can pogo to: “Drivin’ state to altered state/ Holdin’ foldin ‘ maps/ On another pay phone break/ A big black X on a white marquee.” It’s not just there, though. Elegiac celebrations abound: “Sweet Til the Bitter End,” “The Way It Is,” “Winding Up the Time,” and others. None of that nostalgia would matter if the new material wasn’t up to snuff, but it certainly is. Smoke & Fiction is up to the lofty standards set in X’s nineteen-eighties heyday, meeting or exceeding the quality level of the albums that followed the monumental debut Los Angeles. “Struggle” might even have the blistering moxie to merit inclusion on that first fantastic record. If X are going to deliberately dim the light on their storied career, they are going to go out raging. Mark the spot with the following cuts: “Ruby Church,” “Flipside,” and “Face in the Moon.”

VELOCITY GIRL UltraCopacetic (Copacetic Remixed and Expanded) — Velocity Girl wanted a do-over. The Maryland-based band was signed to Sub Pop in the early nineteen-nineties and recorded their debut album, Copacetic, with producer Bob Weston. This was around the same time that Weston was pitching it to help his Shellac bandmate Steve Albini record Nirvana’s In Utero, so Velocity Girl were in capable hands. As they later lamented, the band simply didn’t have the experience to articulate to Weston how they wanted the record to sound. More than three decades later, fortified in large part by guitarist Archie Moore’s years of audio engineering work in the intervening years, the band decided to take another crack at it. UltraCopacetic is largely comprised of a remixed version of that Velocity Girl debut. Less a radical reinvention that a clearing of foggy murk (which, it should be noted, was certainly fashionable at the time), the album is a proper revitalization of material that was fundamentally strong in the first place. The added crispness to album opener “Pretty Sister” makes it clear that the band was doing their own version of the Pixies’ loud-quite-loud formula, and the impressive intricacy of shoegaze-y “A Chang” is more apparent. Velocity Girl was tagged as one of the poppier bands on the Sub Pop label, which they address on the sweet and funny cut “Pop Loser”: “I wrote a song in my car last night/ I almost finished but I saw the green light/ I’ll play my la-la shit for you anytime/ La la la la la.” They knew their way around a pop hook, to be sure, but they’re equally convincing as a pure rock band; “Lisa Librarian” is like Eleventh Dream Day in its immaculate messiness. Rounding out the reissue are rare and unreleased tracks, including the propulsive “Creepy,” and a quintet of tracks recorded for a John Peel session. Go joyfully Ultra with the following tracks: “Crazy Town,” Living Well,” “Catching Squirrels,” and all of the lovely Peel session tracks.