Arriving three years after his sole album for Blue Note, a tribute to vintage doo-wop music, Aaron Neville does a complete 180 with Apache, a self-released set of all-original tunes, mostly written with producer Eric Krasno and his partner, Dave Gutter. Neville has never been afraid to try new things, but Apache, which also comes a half-century after his breakthrough single, “Tell It Like It Is,” often feels like a deliberate departure. It’s a decidedly modern-sounding recording, Krasno matching the New Orleans icon’s instantly recognizable pipes with chunkier beats and tougher accompaniments. With a few exceptions, particularly “Stompin’ Ground,” a paean to his Big Easy upbringing, there’s less reliance than usual on that city’s familiar rhythms; instead, the new songs place Neville in more conventional soul settings. “Make Your Momma Cry” and “Orchid in the Storm” could just as easily have come out of Philadelphia in the early ‘70s, while opener “Be Your Man” bears the grit of a Muscle Shoals session. The quasi-spoken-word “Fragile World” could have been an outtake from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. Still, when Neville attaches that voice to a ballad, like this album’s falsetto-fueled “Heaven,” it could be from anywhere and any time, but no way could it be coming from anybody else.