In an ambitious career move, Chan Marshall has decided to release her second covers album, this time paying homage to some of America’s most revered musical heroes, including Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, and Hank Williams. (The album has one original track as well.) On Jukebox, Chan is backed by her new band, the Dirty Delta Blues, featuring members of the Dirty Three and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Watch out for the opening track, a cover of Frank Sinatra’s “Theme from New York, New York”, where Marshall elegantly croons and manages to infuse new life into such a classic song. Although hardcore Cat Power fans might be disappointed by the lack of musical contrast and sonic variety on Marshall’s newest offering, Jukebox is still a hugely enjoyable, confident album. How can you go wrong with a voice like that anyway? (Morgane)

Rip It Off, the latest from Times New Viking, opens with “Teen Drama,” anchored by a rolling, sentimental keyboard line and dual vocals, each element defiantly blown-out. It’s disorienting at first to hear a band this defiantly lo-fi in 2008. Soon, though, it comes together – the sweetness in contrast with the clatter, the hiss and crackle wrestling nascent anthems. It’s the same sort of blend that Bis’s early work pulled off with vigor, and the frenzied energy and changing tempos heard here may very well make Times New Viking’s third album feel every bit as essential. And once you’ve taken in the sometimes cheeky song titles (“Times New Viking Vs. Yo La Tengo”, “Relevant: Now”), it’s worth it to note that Times New Viking can pull off a fine slow burn (“The Wait”, “Drop-Out”) just as well as they can rage. (Tobias)

The cover of the psychedelic Canadian quintet Black Mountain’s second LP looks like it was designed by English artist Roger Dean (of Yes and Uriah Heep fame) with its organic yet precise rows of magma cubes. The music is not half bad too… In the Future is a more mature, less chaotic album than the band’s debut release, with a mixture of apocalyptic classic rock epics and medieval progressive folk-rock hymns. The best track on the record “Queens Will Play” sports gloriously morbid lyrics “blood crawls through the night holes, blood sprawls across the walls”, keyboard licks Keith Emerson would be proud of, and the obligatory fuzz guitar solo. Oh yes, there’s also a bit of Blue Cheer influence thrown in for good measure in the driving blues of “Evil Ways”. If you like big echoing drums sounds and 1970s stadium-rock feel good choruses, go and buy this LP already! (Morgane)

Awesomer, Blood on the Wall’s second album, was a terrific, noisy, howling punk rock record. Liferz, their follow-up, is all of those things but boasts a more cohesive feel throughout: Brad Shanks supplies perfectly timed blasts of feedback, and reports that he seems to have found his inner Mark Arm are, I’d say, accurate. Courtney Shanks’s vocals here lend a yearning, restrained counterpoint to the proceedings, and the space created between the two enlarges the scope of the album considerably. (Witness the one-two punch of “Junkeee…Julieee…” and “Go Go Go”.) There’s something deeply focused about this album, a charging block of energy and fuzzed-out vitality that’s hard to resist. (Tobias)

What a clever, lovable album this is! Baby Dee is a transgender performance artist whose background ranges from the circus to the church to classical harp (small wonder she wound up on Drag City), and on Safe Inside the Day we see the many sides of her musical persona. Overall the album has a smoky cabaret feel to it (“The Only Bones That Show” is the album’s high point for me), with stories of twisted characters and sinister themes giving a Kurt Weill flair to the music. Dee’s voice is remarkably expressive, capable of great emotional range and conjuring all kinds of interesting creatures both human and non. There are two instrumental pieces with lovely touches of the Baroque (“Christmas Jig for a Three-Legged Cat,” “Flowers on the Tracks”) and lots of wonderful journeys along the way, with no filler. With contributions from a surprising range of expert musicians, from Will Oldham to Andrew W.K. to members of Current 93 and Chavez. Fans of Antony, with whom Baby Dee has toured, will love this. Looking for something completely fresh and different? Look no further. (James)

Following up their brilliant debut from two years ago, So Gone, the Evangelicals return with another frenzied, spazzed-out winner. The songs run into each other and move on uncharted paths as they build into a faster spin or collapse altogether (this is a great CD to listen to while biking home late at night). The band manages to be both experimental and fun, mixing an impulsive spirit with wonderfully juvenile lyrics: “Midnight Vignette” channels the joy (and paranoia) of being disobedient, opening with a cocky whisper that “I’m going to stay out late,” only to soon plead, “Please don’t tell my mother, she wouldn’t want to know.” “Stoned Again” is another great track where the Oklahoma trio voices the angst of growing up in the Midwest as they sing, “They’re not my type here . . . I might leave here.” But before they’ve left you might see them “riding shirtless in the back seat of a 93 Suzuki sidekick.” (Margi)

With 2006’s half-hearted stab at attracting VH1 viewers now long past, the Truckers return to gritty portrayals of the New South’s sordid sides, with plenty of slide guitar and pedal steel (and Spooner Oldham adding keyboards to three-quarters of the tracks). It’s an effective country-rock/Southern rock hybrid that coheres wonderfully despite its surprising amount of variety. Titles such as “Daddy Needs a Drink,” “You and Your Crystal Meth,” and “A Ghost to Most” give an idea of the dirty soap operas that play out across this epic album, but the dark wit runs deep through all 19 songs. It’s too bad Jason Isbell’s gone solo, but with his ex-wife Shonna Tucker taking a bigger role, they still have three distinctive lead vocalists, and new guitarist John Neff proves his mettle whether rocking hard or adding shimmering pedal steel to mournful ballads. There are many memorable character portrayals, but none leaves a bigger impression than the Iraqi war vet obsessing about “That Man I Shot,” with Patterson Hood’s ragged voice the perfect vehicle for his expression. This is as dark an album as they’ve ever made, and one of their best. (Steve)

Aside from declaring the most tongue-in-cheek cult ideology since The Make-Up’s “Gospel Yeh-Yeh,” Chicago-based Mahjongg offers a delicious symphony of industrial, Afro-beat, funk, pop, and art-school guffaw on their sophomore effort Kontpab. With tribal beats, electronic drums, and weird chanting, Mahjongg’s debut on legendary K Records, can easily come across obtuse to the impatient listener. But gems such as “Those Birds are Bats,” loaded with musical homage to garage rock as well as to dub and electronica, shows us that these guys are GOOD and that the entity known as K Records knows what’s going on. Why are we even surprised? And, would we be surprised when Kontpab, for all it’s eccentricities, will be lauded and hailed as one of the best albums of this year? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, you will find yourself wanting to surrender to the cult of Kontpab. (Carrie) 

Chhom Nimol is up to three English-language songs on this band’s third album, but the musical flavors remain a freshly exotic hybrid. The back story: Los Angeles band channels Cambodian psych-rock, lucks into genuine star Cambodian singer (Nimol), spices its sound with touches of Ethiopian music (horns, grooves) familiar from the great Ethiopiques reissue series, explodes from local favorites to national cult heroes following better distribution of a two-year-old album. After listening to that CD, their great Escape from Dragon House, practically every day for most of last summer, I wasn’t sure whether a new album could captivate as strongly, but after two plays it had its hooks in me. It’s a more varied, sometimes more subdued (more romantic!) program, with even more musical influences felt at some points, but the swirling organ and throbbing rhythms still carry the listener along a trippy path. (Steve)

After a much-publicized original digital release, the seventh album by Oxford’s art-rock maestros has finally hit record stores’ shelves. Upon first listen, the first single, “Jigsaw Falling into Place,” stands out with its catchy, flamenco-like minor-chord guitar intro, motoring krautrock drumming and haunting, sorrowful chorus of backing harmonies. Okay, so this is not an ultra accessible album, but what transpires here is an opus that gradually reveals complex, expansive layers of sonic textures, as demonstrated on “All I Need” where the glacial electronics are soon challenged by a white noise wall of exploding drum cymbals and processed guitar feedback. In Rainbows is a welcome return to the epic song structures of The Bends and shies away from the splintered experimentations of Hail to the Thief. Die-hard Radiohead fans will not be disappointed. (Morgane)

Do not buy this expecting it to sound like Radiohead just because Greenwood’s their genius guitarist. And I don’t mean that in a Thom Yorke album kinda way, either – this is an orchestral soundtrack heavily influenced by several major 20th-century composers. So buy it expecting it to sound like Krysztof Penderecki and Olivier Messiaen. Or buy it expecting it to sound like the highly accomplished work of a musical talent who refuses to be hemmed in by genre boundaries and expectations. Or buy it because you really, really liked the string arrangement on Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” and want to hear Greenwood go way past that into musical areas that will alternately give you sweet blissful dreams (that’s the Messiaen influence) and sweat-drenched-wake-up-screaming nightmares (Penderecki’s influence). Wow. (Steve) 

It took four years, but finally Nostalgialator is released in the U.S. (it came out in Europe in 2004 on !K7). Since he made this album, he’s had several collaborations with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, so this serves as a reminder of just how original his production is even when he’s the only artist on the album. Ladd covers way more musical ground than most hip-hop artists; there’s even a low-key, gruffly sung adaptation of the folk song “Sail Away Ladies” closing the disc. There’s a lot of political commentary, but Ladd’s wordplay is so witty, and his poetic vision so surreal, that he never sounds preachy. (Steve) 

This estimable series of electronic music courtesy of Belgium’s Sub Rosa label is now up to its fifth volume, and it is once again impressive in its breadth and choice of material. The list of artists has a more international flavor this time around, and the theme is the voice, but don’t expect anything on the tranquil side (they put “noise” in the title for a reason). Here we find the voice in all its raw, screeching complexity, sometimes expressed through roars that make Yamatsuka Eye sound like Melanie. We get everyone from Charlemagne Palestine (“Seven Organism Study”) to Pere Ubu (“Sentimental Journey”) and loads of other unreleased tracks from the early days of electronic music to the more recent, as per previous volumes. Not for the faint of heart to be sure, but for devotees of all things raw, noisy and adventurous, this anthology is as good as it gets. With a beautiful deluxe digipack sleeve and a 54-page booklet. (James) 

Twenty-year-old Kate Nash took the U.K. by storm last year with her debut album, a delightful collection of pop songs overflowing with personality and wit. Armed with a piano and a drum machine, a history of bad relationships, a great voice, and a really cute accent (not to mention a foul mouth), Nash explores the minutiae of life and relationships with humor and insight. She traces the crumbling of a relationship on the irresistibly infectious single “Foundations,” and then tries to convince herself that she can be alone on the peppy but bittersweet “Merry Happy.” Along the way, she makes time for a charming rumination on life’s mundane details (“Mouthwash”), a delicate, country-tinged song (“Birds”), and a big, breezy number driven by classic R&B-style horns (“Pumpkin Soup”). Lily Allen and Regina Spektor comparisons aside, Made of Bricks is the work of a unique and exciting new talent. (Kiri)