There’s a rising trend in the music industry: the new, undiscovered band that suddenly explodes into the public eye, seemingly out of nowhere. The Lumineers did it, the Alabama Shakes did it, and now Atlas Genius, an indie-rock band based out of Adelaide, Australia, has earned a coveted spot on this list of overnight sensations. [...]

Josh Ritter The Beast In Its Tracks (Pytheas) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars Josh Ritter has built a sturdy career off the indirect love song. Ritter, who has never had much more to sell than a bright smile and a bunch of great songs, has always let his clever wordplay and literary sensibilities render [...]

Night Beds Country Sleep (Dead Ocean) Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars A cabin in the woods; long nights spent aching over sorrows that only acoustic guitar can salve; and an octave range that cascades into a fine falsetto: Listeners may be forgiven for thinking they’ve stumbled upon a Bon Iver redux when first encountering [...]

Eric Clapton Old Sock (Bushbranch/Surfdog) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars At this late stage in his life, the nearly 70 year old Clapton is content to move from longtime label Warner Brothers to scrappy indie Surfdog, leaving commercial expectations in his wake. He has also abandoned songwriting, filling this 55 minute album with covers [...]

Iron and Wine Ghost on Ghost (Nonesuch) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars Stream the album The days of Iron and Wine as the humble, bedroom-recorded folk project of bearded Floridian troubadour Sam Beam are long gone. He had a good run — two full-length albums and one EP of gently sublime acoustic ditties — [...]

Ben Harper with Charlie Musselwhite GET UP! A happy merging of two great talents, this duo album serves up much great blues and soul material in a wonderfully raw setting. It starts with “Don’t Look Twice,” which opens with essential soul etched in one voice, one guitar and Musselwhite’s monumental harmonica, which breathes with the [...]

Free Energy Love Sign (Free Energy Records) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars Go ahead, pull out that “More Cowbell” ’80s era t-shirt from the back of your closet because Free Energy is here to fill the bill as your newest retro-styled guilty pleasure. Along with cowbell, the quartet’s bell bottomed, skinny jean attack features [...]

Jamey Johnson Living For A Song: A Tribute To Hank Cochran (Mercury Nashville) Rating: 3 ½ stars Born in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression, raised in an orphanage in Memphis, and traveling the West as an itinerant worker in his teens, Hank Cochran was an unlikely country music legend. Once he finally settled in [...]

Angel Snow Angel Snow (Self Released) Rating: 3.5 stars There are two Angel Snows. On one hand, there’s the sweetly sensitive singer-songwriter – an obvious niche for a one-time Nashville open-mic hustler whose big break arrived penning lyrics for Alison Krauss. On the other hand, there’s the mystical, brooding siren – citing musical influences like [...]

Andre Williams Life (Alive) Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars Andre Williams’ third album of 2012 begins with a lewd homily: “You can’t be happy on every fucking thing.” Happiness doesn’t figure very prominently in Williams’ shaggy-dog confessions of miscalculation and misadventure. With Life, Chicago soul music’s spriest living national treasure shares personal failings and [...]

Donald Fagen Sunken Condos (Reprise) Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5 Calling Donald Fagen a singer/songwriter is a somewhat limiting description of what he actually delivers, both as frontman of Steely Dan and on his occasional solo albums. His latest, Sunken Condos, is a typical multi-tasking effort: He not only wrote the songs (with the [...]

Ian Hunter When I’m President (Slimstyle) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars The ex-Mr. Mott the Hoople hasn’t let age (he’s 74) mellow his always incisive attack. The voice isn’t as sturdy as in his young dude days but even on the few ballads mixed into these eleven firecrackers, he’s inspired and raging against the [...]