There's a struggle on Paul McCartney's new album, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," and it's one that pays off. On one side is Sir Paul's gift for easy, bubbly melody - tunes that are so shapely that in the past he has often settled for finishing them as harmless little ditties. On the other side is his urge to experiment with sounds and structures and to recognize some darker thoughts - a smaller, but still significant part of his song catalog. For this album, on Capitol, Sir Paul chose a producer who favored the experimental side: Nigel Godrich, who has worked with Radiohead and Beck. Sir Paul also lined up his best backup band since the Beatles: himself.

Except for some string-section arrangements, he plays nearly every instrument on the album. That's something he hasn't done to this extent since he made his first solo album, "McCartney," back in 1970, and it makes the songs more intimate and less conventional. In talking about the album, Sir Paul has said that Mr. Godrich pushed him to deepen the songs, and he followed the advice. "How Kind of You" could have been a simple thank-you note, but the music transforms it. Sir Paul sets it to keyboards - reedy harmonium chords and overlapping stereo piano ripples - that make it eerie and insecure, bringing out lines like "I thought that I was lost."

At 63 he no longer has the voice of a young man, or the unalloyed optimism. "This Never Happened Before" pulls vows of love out of negations like the title. "Riding to Vanity Fair" is one of the most pensive songs he has ever recorded: a wounded response to a rejected friendship, with strings tugging downward as an undertow.

"At the Mercy" uses its harmonies to seesaw between uncertainty and determination; the melody starts by leaping down a tritone, an unusual choice, and the chords keep turning minor and diminished while the lyrics confess, "Sometimes I'd rather run and hide/ Than stay and face the fear inside." Sir Paul has always been an instinctive songwriter, and he sounds as surprised by these songs as his listeners may be.

There are unabashed echoes of the Beatles all over the album, like the "Lady Madonna" piano bounce of "Fine Line," the "Blackbird" acoustic guitars of "Jenny Wren," or the "Golden Slumbers" expansiveness of "Anyway," which begs for a simple phone call. Yet if anyone is entitled to draw on the Beatles, Sir Paul is. On "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," he doesn't use the Beatles touches for easy nostalgia. They're the foundation of a musical identity that's not content, this time, with silly love songs.

Paul Wall
"The Peoples Champ"
(Swishahouse/Asylum/Atlantic)

Compared with many other Southern hip-hop scenes, the one in Houston might seem pretty unassuming, if only it weren't so fertile, and - this year, anyway - so visible. Whereas rappers in other Southern cities sometimes gravitate toward flashy, frenetic, futuristic dance tracks, Houston hip-hop tends to be rambling and slow. Paul Wall is the latest Houston rapper to make a major-label debut this year, and while he has never clamed to be the city's deftest rapper, his persona captures part of what makes Houston hip-hop so seductive. On "The Peoples Champ," he portrays himself as a genial, hard-working fellow. Like all of us, he's trying to make an honest buck, though unlike many of us, his aim is to convert that honest buck into diamonds that he can use to further bejewel his teeth. The task is made easier by his other job: as well as being a rapper and D.J., he's also an entrepreneur in the booming field of dental gemology.

Paul Wall is also a white rapper, although he knows he has nothing to gain from rapping about it. This is a consistently entertaining CD, not counting a pair of duds near the end. And he spits leisurely rhymes in the Houston style (lots of triplets and extended syllables), with lyrics that are charming variations on a high-carat theme: "I got a deep freezer up on my neck/ And snow cones up in my ears/ A ice tray up in my mouth/ I'm looking something like a chandelier." Elsewhere, he promises a potential lover, "I'll be the cream in your coffee."

"The Peoples Champ" also includes the woozy Kanye West collaboration "Drive Slow" (you can also find it on Mr. West's new album), plus an entire song built around Wall's most famous catchphrase. "I got the Internet going nuts," he once bragged, and on "Internet Going Nutz," he goes online - to sites like blackplanet.com, it should be noted - in search of offline companionship; maybe this time, he shouldn't mention coffee. KELEFA SANNEH

Devendra Banhart
"Cripple Crow"
(XL)

Devendra Banhart is amazing. No, he's annoying! Amazing! Annoying!

Mr. Banhart is American by birth, a folksinger and visual artist by temperament, a naif by will, a burst water-main of song by compulsion.

On 76 recorded tracks in only three years, he has proven that he has absolutely nothing to do with Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. Excellent: there's been too much of that among our folksingers whom we take the most seriously. He has more to do with Donovan, which isn't so excellent.

But ultimately Mr. Banhart seems to circle back to the same American source that Donovan probably came from: the early beat poets. One of the best songs on "Cripple Crow," the most ambitious and complicated of his four albums, is called "Dragonflys." (Dig the misspelling.) It is 52 seconds long, with only guitar and voice, the lyrics aspirated in traded-off phrases with the singer Matteah Baim. "I don't owe me any money," they sing. "I don't owe me a thing/ When we drink beer/ Dragonflies appear/ Dragonflies appear." It's totally dippy, but the lines are lit by real charisma. You could make fun of it from a distance, but not when you're actually taking it in.

Mr. Banhart, who performs Wednesday at the Bowery Ballroom as part of the CMJ independent music marathon, has lived a few more lives than most artists do before his mid-20's - born in Texas, a childhood and adolescence in Venezuela, stretches in Paris and San Francisco. He is a gifted, precise acoustic guitarist, he writes songs in English and Spanish, and he's got an unusual voice for a man, with a vibrato as fast and trilling as Grace Slick's.

In the past, it was all you could do to understand him as a voice-and-guitar entity; the format got down to the bones of him. But most songs on "Cripple Crow" have some kind of band - guitar and bass, sometimes piano or cello or steel guitar. And they can take a simple idea too far. "Sawkill River" is a focused, minor-key solo acoustic-guitar song, but it comes after a five-minute woolgatherer called "Chinese Children," one of three tracks about what his children will be like when he has them.

Taking the onus off his guitar playing dilutes Mr. Banhart's talent, and sometimes "Cripple Crow" makes of him what some people perhaps want him to be: a simulacrum of an obscure 1960's musician, a maker of albums that were so rare they never existed. But innocence is his great asset: he seems armored against all that his small-but-deep indie cult projects on him. "Some people ride the wave of generosity," he sings in "Some People Ride the Wave." "Some people ride the wave of mediocrity/ Me I ride the wave of never-gonna-drown/ Oh, just fooling around." BEN RATLIFF