Spins

Conor Oberst

Conor Oberst

Label: Merge

If you like: Bright Eyes, Townes Van Zandt

Song to download: "Lenders in the Temple"

Conor Oberst hasn't done an album under his own name since the early '90s, establishing his reputation as the defining songwriter of his generation under the Bright Eyes banner.

This return to his original billing on the new Conor Oberst doesn't signal a radical reinvention. The album mingles folk rock, country, pop and rock in a way similar to Bright Eyes' broad turf. It's a little looser, sometimes a lot looser. A minute into the anthem-like "Souled Out!!!," there's a sudden interruption followed by laughter, and then a quick question to the musicians. This song is Oberst flying by the seat of his pants in the spirit of the Replacements, and he sets the album's freewheeling tone by using this flawed take rather than a proper performance.

The album's spontaneity and musical ambitions are scaled back, but it's not slight or a throwaway. Oberst remains engaged in his quest to make sense of a world that he describes in one song as "a cruel and elaborate hoax." Oberst generates a sense of constant physical and psychic motion, plotting his journey with geographical detail. He cruises through pockets of melancholy and mayhem, tenderness and tragedy. His melodies curl to drive the stories, while his lyrics illuminate the road with a sometimes dazzling light.

As he examines big themes -- loss of innocence, longing for security, a hunger to understand his destiny -- Oberst considers scientific tables and the astral plane, but ultimately realizes that "there's no system, there's no guarantee."

Death might be the inevitable condition, but it has rarely been pondered in such an upbeat way.

Inara George With Van Dyke Parks

An Invitation

Label: Everloving

If you like: The Bird and The Bee, Van Dyke Parks

Song to download: "Idaho"

Chanteuse Inara George is the daughter of the late Lowell George, the founder of Little Feat and a man of fearless musical initiative. So it's right that she would hook up with Van Dyke Parks, a close family friend and a musical absurdist of grand intellect. The exotic fruit of this union is An Invitation, an orchestral song cycle of dizzying creativity that is as gorgeous as it is odd and ambitious.

Parks' hophead American Gothic orchestrations are crowned by George's meticulously adventurous and beautiful singing to create a song cycle that is equal parts musical theater, abstract cabaret and gonzo cerebral cartoon. Every song is an experience, a crazy-cool slice of life vignette that veers between playful narrative and lysergic observation.

This is each musician doing what he or she does best, without so much as a nod at commercial viability. It's lovely, startling and strangely alluring music that reaches high, firmly grabs the trapeze, and soars, ambitious in ways that contemporary pop -- which is ostensibly what this is -- rarely achieves.

Yung Berg

Look What You Made Me

Label: Epic

If you like: The Dream, Soulja Boy

Song to download: "Where Do We Go"

First there was "Sexy Lady," an exuberant, hard-to-hate slice of pop-rap on which Yung Berg, a Chicago rapper, briskly catalogs the women who fall victim to his charms. They're divas. They carry Louis Vuitton bags. They enjoy a nice meal at Benihana. But no matter their charms, they're never quite enough.

Soon after came "Sexy Can I," a delirious collaboration between Yung Berg and intimacy-obsessed singer Ray J. Together, they neatly capture the mischief of young men at play.

These songs are highlights of Look What You Made Me, Berg's debut album -- a disc that scrupulously sticks to "sexy" themes, often without the two singles' charm. Berg is likable but dull, rapping with nursery-rhyme cadence and simplicity. When he attempts intricacy, his words fall all over one another, scrambling for footing. Only in fleeting moments does he threaten to advance the sexy movement. And even then, as on "One Night," with the singer Trey Songz, Berg is again leaving when he has only just arrived.

Joan as Police Woman

To Survive

Label: Cheap Lullaby

If you like: A songwriter that sweeps from Kurt Weill to Joni Mitchell to Roberta Flack

Song to download: "Furious"

Joan as Police Woman is the somewhat iffy performing moniker for Joan Wasser, a classically trained violinist of remarkable voice who has worked with Antony & The Johnsons and Rufus Wainwright.

To Survive is her excellent second album, by some measure a creative leap forward from Real Life, her substantial 2006 debut. Wasser has emerged as a singer and songwriter of emotional reach, fusing elements of jazz, R&B, even a hint of hip-hop swing, within stripped-down pop song structures that are sophisticated in subtle ways.

The album, made in the wake of Wasser's mother's death, is a eulogy to love of overarching melancholy, spiked with tender affirmations of hope. Each song is a marvel, with simple melodies wrapped around piano-driven arrangements that are given slow-boil funkiness and texture by horns, background vocals, strings and percussion.

Wasser's voice is malleable and evocative enough to convey the shifting emotions inherent to each song, turning a portrait of mourning into musical majesty.

Carrie Rodriguez

She Ain't Me

Label: Manhattan/Back Porch

If you like: Lucinda Williams, Kathleen Edwards

Song to download: "Grace"

Carrie Rodriguez was once a classically trained fiddler who did some singing, but her second solo album, She Ain't Me, shows her growth as a singer. Her slight Texas twang is effective rather than annoying, and her voice has blossomed into a versatile, nuanced instrument that's equally appealing on a swaggering rocker or love lament.

"Rag Doll" opens with Rodriguez singing falsetto, accompanied only by tenor guitar, and it's one of the album's highlights. She mimics her fidgety fiddle on "Absence," then wails -- with harmonies by Lucinda Williams -- on "Mask of Moses." Rodriguez also blends beautifully with Gary Louris when singing the two tunes they co-wrote.

Producer Malcolm Burn occasionally applies too much sweetener, and Rodriguez's fails to sell her R-rated naughty talk on "Let Me In." But such minor transgressions do nothing to keep She Ain't Me from affirming that Rodriguez is a major talent.

Crooked Still

Still Crooked

Label: Signature Sounds

If you like: Bluegrass with a twist

Song to download: "Did You Sleep Well?"

The boundaries of bluegrass music are tested with great frequency nowadays, and one of the most listenable acts at the genre's outer fringes is Crooked Still. Still Crooked, the group's enticing new album, strongly evokes the simple pleasures of mountain music even as it expands them with careful, if offbeat, design.

The group builds restless, almost agitated arrangements in which pieces bubble forth into dense acoustic patchworks. The breathy, lustrous vocals of Aoife O'Donovan are the straw that stirs these drinks -- elegant on "Tell Her to Come Back Home," smooth on "Pharaoh."

Tragic, dark stories common to bluegrass tradition are comfortable fits, whether the casually haunting "Low Down and Dirty" with Gregory Liszt's banjo backbone, or the propulsive "Poor Ellen Smith." Whatever it does, the group energizes without sacrificing fundamental bluegrass appeals, still leaning modern enough to stretch interpretation.