Also of interest...in new rock ’n’ roll chronicles

Out of the Vinyl Deeps

by Ellen Willis

(Univ. of Minnesota, $23)

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Out of the Vinyl Deeps “resurrects a nearly lost, vital, invaluable voice” in early rock criticism, said Ken Tucker in NPR.org. Ellen Willis, the first pop-music critic at The New Yorker, brought a distinct and distinctly feminine voice to a genre dominated by such male critics as Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs. “Crafted with an utter lack of fan gush,” her pieces on the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, and others “sound as fresh and appropriate to the present music scene as they did decades ago.”

Electric Eden

by Rob Young

(Faber & Faber, $25)

Most music fans know the story of how Bob Dylan and other artists transformed American folk music into folk-rock, said Tom Nolan in the San Francisco Chronicle. British music journalist Rob Young’s “encyclopedic and often mesmerizing” new book is a “fascinating saga” that charts a comparable movement across the pond, in which such artists as Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and Vashti Bunyan raided British folk-music traditions to bring the past into the psychedelic era.

Enter Night

by Mick Wall

(St. Martin’s, $28)

“Born of working-class American rage,” Metallica emerged in the mid-1980s to create “some of the most powerful and definitive heavy metal ever made,” said Alan Light in The New York Times. The 2004 film Some Kind of Monster set the bar high for Metallica bios, but Mick Wall’s holds its own. The book pivots on the death of bass player Cliff Burton in a tour-bus crash in 1986, which seemed to turn the survivors’ focus toward pure commercial success.

Is This the Real Life?

by Mark Blake

(Da Capo $25)

“It’s surprising that it took 20 years from Freddie Mercury’s death for a major Queen biography to appear,” said Michaelangelo Matos in the A.V. Club. Mark Blake’s attempt isn’t definitive: Despite the participation of two of Mercury’s bandmates, the British rock journalist hasn’t fully captured the band’s 1970s peak and offstage excesses. Still, he’s strong on the later years, offering a “genuinely moving” portrait of an AIDS-stricken Mercury recording furiously as his strength wanes.