Relish Spins

Gigi Dover & The Big Love

The Avocado Sessions (This Side & The Other)

Label: Blue Bubble Records

If you like: Americana and soul, spiked with funk

Song to download: "Poppies"

(out of four)

Gigi Dover, a musician and artist from Charlotte, knows harmony. She created the cover art for The Avocado Sessions (This Side & The Other), her latest collaboration with The Big Love. Like her paintings, Dover's songs seem to have sprung from a palette of complex, vibrant colors. They gel into a coherent unit. And so does the quintet.

The many components of Sessions fail to weigh it down. The overall tone is light. Eric Lovell's guitar is a fine retort to Dover's playful vocal style. The sitar, rebab, tambura, melodica, ukulele, mandolin and glockenspiel help make the album an interesting sonic showcase.

Many of the songs are about living in the present, seizing the moment. On "Love Stone," the listener is reminded that love is dynamic; it's got to find "somewhere to grow." The danger is in neglecting it.

The idea of nurturing love continues on "Poppies," which uses imagery of changing seasons to emphasize missed opportunities.

The soulful "Ode to Barry" has some eight-track advice for an MP3 world: "Talk dirty" and "whisper sweet," because "fear is the enemy when love is all we need."

Dover decries rampant consumerism on "A Better Place" and gives Mother Nature her due, suggesting that "if we don't put back what we take, it'll be taken away someday." There's a thoughtful lesson in humility on both a personal and societal level for anyone willing to learn it.

The album is available at www.gigidover.com and on iTunes.

Menomena

Mines

Label: Barsuk

If you like: Emotional confusion

Song to download: "Five Little Rooms"

The fourth album, Mines, from Portland, Ore., trio Menomena comes 3½ years after their last disc, the brilliantly thorny Friend and Foe, a minor breakthrough in the indie scene.

The band has alluded to "brutal disagreements" and "failed marriages" in explaining the delay, and, fittingly, Mines sounds toiled over. This is partly because of the fractured way Menomena works: Its three members all sing, they use a self-created looping software program to winnow hundreds of loops into songs, and they play some combination of guitar, saxophone and keyboards with herky-jerky, propulsive percussion. A Menomena song is typically composed of minor chords and melancholy, vacillating between sinister knottiness and sensual melody.

Mines is uneven, but it's exhilaratingly unpredictable. It hardly seems the same band, going from the aggressive "TAOS" to, two tracks later, the sentimental ballad "Dirty Cartoons."

Avenged Sevenfold

Nightmare

Label: Warner Bros.

If you like: Mixed-up metal

Song to download: "Buried Alive"

Making good metal music requires commitment. And no one can say that the current members of the metalcore band Avenged Sevenfold don't work hard at their craft. But their latest album, Nightmare, rides the fence on exactly what type of metal it wants to be.

Avenged Sevenfold speeds through most of the songs, driven by the frenetic pace of its drummer, Mike Portnoy. The band's original drummer, Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan, died last year, and this is the band's first album without him on the drums, though his vocals can be heard on one track, "Fiction."

Soaring guitar leads add to the mayhem, and the vocals from M. Shadows are technically perfect. All this from a very technical metal band. But that's where they go astray. Much of "Nightmare" is metal by design. It's mostly overproduced, as on the title track "Nightmare" and "God Hates Us." Nightmare is what happens when highly technical metal musicians dabble in too many sub-genres.

Los Lobos

Tin Can Trust

Label: Shout! Factory

If you like: Hispanic Grateful Dead

Song to download: "West L.A. Fadeaway"

Los Lobos' rootsy sound always explores rich terrain, and that's the case on Tin Can Trust, the group's first collection of new original material in four years. The East Los Angeles quintet draws on its Hispanic heritage to play a cumbia and norteno. They look north to cover the Grateful Dead, summon the spirit of 1950s rock and reach back to the 16th century to sing about an Indian peasant's vision of the Virgin Mary.

Ambitious? Yes. But they pull it off.

Highlights include the Dead's "West L.A. Fadeaway," the bluesy instrumental "Do the Murray" and singer-guitarist Cesar Rojas' two original Spanish-language tunes, "Yo Canto" and "Mujer Ingrata." Lyrically the most creative song is the closing "27 Spanishes," which wryly recounts Spain's conquest of Mexico in 4 minutes, 34 seconds.

Los Lobos has had the same lineup for 36 years, and yet there remains a vitality and freshness to the music that younger acts will never match.