Modern Lore finds Julian Lage playfully flipping the script he followed on his acclaimed 2016 Mack Avenue debut, Arclight. That album - produced, like Modern Lore, by Lage's friend and collaborator, the singer-songwriter Jesse Harris - was his first trio set on electric guitar and found Lage inspired by the sounds and the attitude of the freewheeling, pre-bebop jazz era, when, as he puts it, "country music and jazz and swing were in this weird wild-west period." This time he incorporates the sensibility, if not the outright sound, of early rock and roll, a similarly hybrid form driven by rhythm, personality and a passion for the electric guitar.