Mockingbird

Here’s a fun little miracle: a covers album that purported to test the limits of what kinds of music could be reworked into soul revivalism, and then revealed that those limits didn’t even exist. Can “Black Hole Sun” be moody, spacious, delicately yet intensely sung psychedelic soul? Whew, can it. What about “Karma Police”? Oh, that’s easy. Yeah, but “Ride the Lightning”? It was made for it. Kendra Morris shines as a sly-voiced singer-songwriter paying iconoclastic, genre-agnostic homage to a half century’s worth of pop canon from Bowie to Timberlake. Whether the source material’s an “of course”-level gimme (“Miss You” retrofitted for a pre-disco Mayfield milieu) or a confounding transformation (“I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” as a borderline-menacing funky death trip), it knocks the dust off even the most familiar pop and rock standards.