Sarah Borges

Opening with a tuff-gurl's kiss-off to a back-of-the-club jerk, which kicks like the best Joan Jett song in years, Sarah Borges' third album smartly shifts her Boston cowpunk band toward hard rock. Highlights include a hot-blooded sex number that slavers like the Syndicate of Sound in '66, plus remakes of pub-power-pop obscurities from Any Trouble and NRBQ that sound so new wave you'll need a skinny tie. In between, there's lots of understated romantic neurosis, some of it borrowed from Magnetic Fields and the Lemonheads, the sweetest of it a lovely revival of a lost 1981 Smokey Robinson hit.