New Music by Rod Stewart ("Time") and the Uncluded "Time" (Capitol) Rod Stewart has turned out to be one canny codger. He was in his late 50s when his long string of rock hits stopped, and writer's block struck. So he applied his sandpaper voice to prerock standards, restarting his career and selling at least a million copies of each of the first four volumes of his "Great American Songbook" series in the early 2000s. He also tried rock and soul oldies, then settled into a Las Vegas residency performing "The Hits" - his rock catalog - in 2011. Now, after publishing his autobiography last year, Mr. Stewart has written his first new songs in more than a decade. And with his new album, "Time," he joins the growing list of baby boomer favorites who are making their older-and-wiser albums. Anyone who's been waiting to hear Mr. Stewart sing the word "e-mail" now has the chance. Mr. Stewart wrote half of the album with his co-producer, the keyboardist Kevin Savigar; his band members also share songwriting credits. They're not shy about reclaiming the sound of Mr. Stewart's past while also, with rootsy live musicians underpinned by programming, positioning the new songs alongside Mumford & Sons. "She Makes Me Happy" starts the album with a briskly strummed mandolin to stir memories of Mr. Stewart's early-1970s heyday and hits like "Maggie May." "Finest Woman" goes for the rowdy guitars of "Hot Legs," while the semi-disco beat of "Sexual Religion" is a reminder of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" (and the Eagles" "One of These Nights"). Meanwhile, after years of studio vocals that sounded sedated, Mr. Stewart sings with gusto again, like the soul-loving rocker he was. At 68, Mr. Stewart isn't bleak like Bob Dylan, cranky like Iggy Pop, bemused like Neil Young or avuncular like Paul Simon on their most recent albums. He's a satisfied man living a fortunate life, singing about the trajectory from being "this scruffy, beat-up, working-class teenage troubadour" to a thoughtful, happily married father who's still getting "lotsa sexy loving," as one song puts it, and others determinedly insist. The album has some very vaguely autobiographical songs like "Can't Stop Me Now," which cheerfully shrugs off rejection by a "record company man," and "Brighton Beach," about a long-ago girlfriend who left him for higher-class prospects. Other songs stay more general, like "Time" itself, a hymnlike tune carrying post-breakup resentment, and "It's Over," which strives for a no-fault divorce. In "Make Love to Me Tonight" the narrator worries about his job now that "foreclosure is as common as a lying politician," in a track arrangement that harks back to "Gasoline Alley." Mr. Stewart is long removed from the rough-and-tumble of the 1970s, and the "Time" album always sounds neater and cozier than the songs it echoes. Yet behind the album's considerable calculation, there's a glimpse of a kindly heart. "Hokey Fright" (Rhymesayers) On "Scissorhands," from the Uncluded's first album, "Hokey Fright," the rapper Aesop Rock speaks spookily of "images I don't associate with my awareness anymore/but have recently been daring to explore/instead of bury." He's a weighty rapper, with loads of ballast to his voice, and his words carry a gothic bite. That's especially true when he's talking about deep excavation of dark corners, as he is on "Scissorhands," and as he does throughout this unrelentingly intimate and vivid album that dispenses with comfort almost altogether. The Uncluded is a 50-50 collaboration between the loquacious Aesop Rock, one of the great finds of independent hip-hop's high tide from the late "90s/early "00s, and the nimble postfolkie Kimya Dawson, late of the Moldy Peaches. Together they produced all the music, a combination of noodly folk and cloudy, mildly industrial hip-hop, and they trade verses equitably. Both have extreme, exaggerated voices - Aesop Rock's froggy churn, and Ms. Dawson's cheery whisper - that on their own have been intermittently thrilling and off-putting over the years. But on the affecting "Hokey Fright" these wandering talents find unlikely companionship. The combination of Ms. Dawson's wide-eyed wonder and Aesop Rock's grizzled wisdom makes for eerie stuff, like "Organs," a warm rumination on, more or less, the importance of organ donation, or the genuinely harrowing "TV on 10," about plane crashes, in which Ms. Dawson talks about fear of flying, and Aesop Rock recounts a childhood friend's trauma of losing a parent in a plane crash. Aesop Rock has the grimmest moments on this album; often it's up to Ms. Dawson to leaven the mood ever so slightly. She's the one who tackles love, with characteristic awkward vim: "If you got bit by a viper from the Amazon/I would sneak my dad's X-Acto and cut X's in your arms." And she's the one who cradles this album in hope, making it safe, after all the confession and tragedy, to come out renewed on the other side. On "Teleprompters" Ms. Dawson has a benediction for herself, her partner and anyone else who might be listening: "I sing these messages to you, but now I need to hear them too/I am beautiful, I am powerful/I am strong, and I am lovable."