Album Review: Free Yourself Up by Lake Street Dive

Rachael Price's voice comes at you like a muscle car of music history, blues and bebop detailing on a classic soul 'n' rock chassis, and her band's latest set comes with songcraft grown tighter and more polished, shrewdly conjuring retro pleasures per usual. The funky-pop strut "Shame Shame Shame," for example, isn't the 1974 Shirley and Company proto-disco hit. But it might make for an excellent mash-up with it, and like its predecessor, can be read as a timely dress-down of a barefaced President on impeachment's brink, though it also works fine as general-purpose bad-dog-scolding.

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"If you're gonna tell them everything/ Tell 'em I'm a good kisser," demands singer Rachael Price two songs into Lake Street Dive's "Free Yourself Up." It's a defiant stance for a breakup song, at once a reclamation of her now-wasted time, a reminder of what her ex is giving up, and a statement of intent about whoever's next. It's one of the highlights on an engaging, slightly inconsistent album by a band that — having formed as students at the New England Conservatory and experienced its breakthrough moment via a video of a live street-corner performance of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" that went viral — is jazz-trained but pop-besotted. Lake Street Dive releases "Free Yourself Up" Friday.

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