Another slog through Europe, and Dean Wareham, respected, almost-famous singer and guitarist, is finally realizing that elusive rock ’n’ roll fantasy. An Andalusian beauty with a “fantastic chest” is making eyes at him through the whole show. Afterward, she takes him home. She’s a flight attendant, and rather than slip into something more comfortable, she actually dons her uniform for the night’s proceedings. His conscience goes missing as they cavort until dawn. His penance begins when she sings him her favorite song: “More Than Words,” by Extreme.

Black Postcards, Mr. Wareham’s memoir about strumming away in relative obscurity, is full of anecdotes like this one. Every setup is followed by a letdown, every hope answered with embarrassment or frustration. That’s probably because over a couple decades in the business, Mr. Wareham, with his two critically lauded zero-hit wonders, Galaxie 500 and Luna, may have earned “greatest band you’ve never heard of” status from Rolling Stone and a berth on Pitchfork’s favorites from the 80’s list—but he’s seen little in the way of profits and a fair measure of grief.

So don’t expect too many rosy pictures: If there’s a message scrawled across Black Postcards, it’s not “wish you were here.” There are no moments of lasting glamour in these pages, a lot of interpersonal pitfalls and a great view of a dysfunctional recording industry.

A lot like Mr. Wareham’s music: kind of a downer, but compelling.

THE BOOK BREEZES through Mr. Wareham’s birth in New Zealand and youth in Manhattan. He feels like an outsider at rich-kid Dalton, where he meets future Galaxie 500 drummer Damon Krukowski. His high-school crew revels in a New York scene that mattered (and apparently carded less stringently)—CBGB, the Mudd Club, Talking Heads, the Ramones. “We were … part-time punks,” Mr. Wareham admits, “private-school kids dressing up as something we were not.” He makes it to Harvard, doesn’t study very much and expands his tastes beyond punk and new wave.

A couple years after college, he hits on the dreamy, meandering guitar sound and adenoidal twang that will define Galaxie 500. The arty, mopey trio allows him his first glimpses of indie success—a small but devoted following, hyperbole from the U.K. music mags. It also reveals a downside: hours upon hours with the same few people crammed into rehearsal spaces, unreliable vans and dingy venues.

Tension with Mr. Krukowski (whose girlfriend, Naomi Yang, is the bassist) gnaws at him until he instigates the first big breakup of the book. It’s clearly a torturous decision for him—one for which he has been vilified—and he writes about it defensively. His ex-bandmates and fans assume his sudden departure is driven by greed and ego. He instead paints Mr. Krukowski as a control freak and himself more like a passive luftmensch who just couldn’t stand the cult-like dynamic of the trio.

Eventually, fans and critics forgive him, around the time Luna, his catchier follow-up band, release their second album. There are interesting characters from this period, too—another surly drummer, a second guitarist who obsesses over every note of his solos—but the most remarkable thing about the Luna story is the way it maps the sad trajectory of the record industry.

MR. WAREHAM EXPLAINS how in the late 80’s, “the lean years of hair metal and John Cougar Mellencamp,” bands like his were indie because there was no other option. Post-Nirvana, though, the majors go on a frenzy, hoping to score the next alt-rock stars. “Bands were signed left and right and stores were selling a ton of CDs.” Elektra signs Luna, ushering them into the world of recoupable advances, royalty agreements and excessive studio budgets, all tied together with the industry’s byzantine brand of loopy accounting.

One night, legendary record mogul Seymour Stein wines and dines the band. He lisps a grievance about the state of the industry: “So many little boats, the big boats can’t get out to sea. It’s terrible.” (Given today’s situation, as boats of all shape and size sail freely from pier to pier with nary a thought of bandwidth, I’ll bet Mr. Stein wouldn’t mind returning to that quaint overcrowded harbor.)

Too delicate for grungified MTV, too cerebral for VH1’s “adult alternative,” Mr. Wareham helms a little boat for Elektra. While the rest of the industry rides to its late-90’s crest on the backs of boy bands and tween-worshiped temptresses, Luna is ahead of the rest, already sliding down to the uncharted trough. Without a radio hit to their name, they’re dropped by their label, their publisher and, most insultingly, their accountant. They persevere through personnel changes (Britta Phillips joins as new bassist/home-wrecker), dwindling returns and difficult tours.

Their slow fizzle stands in contrast to the earlier blowout, but as the end draws near, you see the writing on the wall: A rock band is a breakup waiting to happen. And you wonder if Mr. Wareham’s guilty assessment of his little Spanish fling might not apply to the whole game: “You have to pay for the good times.”

I-Huei Go lives in Brooklyn. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

DeFonte’s, 379 Columbia Street, Brooklyn, Monday to Saturday, 6 a.m. to 4 p.m.

First it’s “careless love,” and then, over a distant, ominous rumble of drums and paired with an eerie high harmony, Mr. Oldham sings, “I’ve found the hard way love is true.” It’s his favorite subject: Often treacherous, sometimes forbidden (he’s even penned ballads about unnatural attraction between brother and sister), love is finally the only shot at redemption.

On his latest L.P., Mr. Oldham confronts obsession of the doomed variety in the driving, minor-key waltz of “Strange Form of Life” and in the bluesy wail of “Cursed Sleep.” But salvation, fleetingly glimpsed, is clearly audible on other songs. The foreboding swells of a string quartet introduce the nocturnal verses of “Love Comes to Me,” but the gorgeously spare bridge proclaims, “I’m longing to be born for you that’s her”; the last few notes of the song ascend unexpectedly to a brighter place. Similarly, the tense, sinister march of “No Bad News” is relieved by the suddenly tender coda of “Hey, little bird, thank you for not letting go of me when I let go of you.”

The Letting Go is Mr. Oldham’s first album of new solo studio material since the gently arresting Master and Everyone (2003), which consciously evoked a living-room setting (with stray chair squeaks and foot-tapping) and surrendered almost completely to conventional beauty in its melodies and arrangements. For the new record, he’s assembled perhaps his most accomplished backing band, and he achieves a fuller, richer and at times more challenging sound. The vocal harmonies of Faun Fables singer Dawn McCarthy provide the most conspicuous texture: She sounds like a ghost from an Alan Lomax field recording. Just as crucial, though, are the tremulous strings, the sinuous electric guitar parts of Emmett Kelly, and the expert percussion from Jim White (of the Dirty Three), one of rock’s most inventive and sensitive drummers.

Mr. Oldham’s lyrics explore tricky, eccentric territory on The Letting Go. At times the odd diction, faux-rural coinages and surrealistic imagery are too opaque, but the mystifying moments can be pleasing, too. Witness the striking resolution of “God’s Small Song”: Amid otherworldly crescendos, Mr. Oldham pronounces, “In each I there is an apple / Buried there before the eye / And out of sockets come the branches / And from the branches dangle I.” It’s a strange, hallucinatory allegory of forbidden fruit, a twisted cycle of burial, birth, punishment. Add to Mr. Oldham’s list of accomplishments the invention of a new genre: gnostic gospel music.

WE'VE COME A LONG WAY SINCE SATIE TRIED to score sonic wallpaper (it didn’t work; audiences back then weren’t used to ignoring music). Eighty years later, Eno strung together some soothing tape loops for harried travelers at LaGuardia to pay no attention to—an easier sell in the 1970’s, but still pretty arty. Nowadays, Marissa and Julie sit down for dinner on The O.C. to the strains of carefully crafted instrumental rock, and our ears automatically tune to the feeble dialogue. Finally, success.

Ambient music is nothing if not adaptable. At its worst, it’s just innocuous; at its best, it’s strong but elusive like the memory of a long-gone sensation. The Album Leaf (the name of Jimmy LaValle’s solo instrumental project) makes quietly evocative music, and the latest record, Into the Blue Again (Sub Pop) continues on that same trajectory, with songs constructed out of simple but lushly layered Fender Rhodes piano melodies and atmospheric washes of guitar and synthesizer.

Mr. LaValle (who’s done stints with the bands Tristeza and the Black Heart Procession) may never again attain the austere, meditative beauty of “Another Day,” first heard on the split E.P. A Lifetime or More (2003) and then in a revised form with programmed percussion on In a Safe Place (2004). Using little more than a single insistent piano phrase—the muted, bell-like tone of the Rhodes ringing over placid drones—he somehow suggested late-afternoon sun filtering in through an open window.

“The Light,” the first track on Into the Blue Again, does a decent job of recapturing that feeling. A synthesizer murmurs and pulses rhythmically throughout, and—as usual—delicately interlocking Rhodes parts convey most of the melody, with violin and more keyboards stepping in to embellish the tune. Elsewhere, Mr. LaValle repeats his signature combination of legato soundscapes and jittery, fractured electronic beats that twitch their way into the foreground.

He’s good at wringing emotion out of the abstract building blocks of music. He’s less assured when supplementing a few tracks with listless vocals and fuzzy lyrics about difficult relationships. On one song about a romantic failure to communicate, he sings, “Writings on the wall—they’ll speak to me / Writings on the wall—they’ll sing to you.” The finest moments on Into the Blue Again scrub the words off the wall and let the wallpaper do the singing.

First it’s “careless love,” and then, over a distant, ominous rumble of drums and paired with an eerie high harmony, Mr. Oldham sings, “I’ve found the hard way love is true.” It’s his favorite subject: Often treacherous, sometimes forbidden (he’s even penned ballads about unnatural attraction between brother and sister), love is finally the only shot at redemption.

On his latest L.P., Mr. Oldham confronts obsession of the doomed variety in the driving, minor-key waltz of “Strange Form of Life” and in the bluesy wail of “Cursed Sleep.” But salvation, fleetingly glimpsed, is clearly audible on other songs. The foreboding swells of a string quartet introduce the nocturnal verses of “Love Comes to Me,” but the gorgeously spare bridge proclaims, “I’m longing to be born for you that’s her”; the last few notes of the song ascend unexpectedly to a brighter place. Similarly, the tense, sinister march of “No Bad News” is relieved by the suddenly tender coda of “Hey, little bird, thank you for not letting go of me when I let go of you.”

The Letting Go is Mr. Oldham’s first album of new solo studio material since the gently arresting Master and Everyone (2003), which consciously evoked a living-room setting (with stray chair squeaks and foot-tapping) and surrendered almost completely to conventional beauty in its melodies and arrangements. For the new record, he’s assembled perhaps his most accomplished backing band, and he achieves a fuller, richer and at times more challenging sound. The vocal harmonies of Faun Fables singer Dawn McCarthy provide the most conspicuous texture: She sounds like a ghost from an Alan Lomax field recording. Just as crucial, though, are the tremulous strings, the sinuous electric guitar parts of Emmett Kelly, and the expert percussion from Jim White (of the Dirty Three), one of rock’s most inventive and sensitive drummers.

Mr. Oldham’s lyrics explore tricky, eccentric territory on The Letting Go. At times the odd diction, faux-rural coinages and surrealistic imagery are too opaque, but the mystifying moments can be pleasing, too. Witness the striking resolution of “God’s Small Song”: Amid otherworldly crescendos, Mr. Oldham pronounces, “In each I there is an apple / Buried there before the eye / And out of sockets come the branches / And from the branches dangle I.” It’s a strange, hallucinatory allegory of forbidden fruit, a twisted cycle of burial, birth, punishment. Add to Mr. Oldham’s list of accomplishments the invention of a new genre: gnostic gospel music.

WE'VE COME A LONG WAY SINCE SATIE TRIED to score sonic wallpaper (it didn’t work; audiences back then weren’t used to ignoring music). Eighty years later, Eno strung together some soothing tape loops for harried travelers at LaGuardia to pay no attention to—an easier sell in the 1970’s, but still pretty arty. Nowadays, Marissa and Julie sit down for dinner on The O.C. to the strains of carefully crafted instrumental rock, and our ears automatically tune to the feeble dialogue. Finally, success.

Ambient music is nothing if not adaptable. At its worst, it’s just innocuous; at its best, it’s strong but elusive like the memory of a long-gone sensation. The Album Leaf (the name of Jimmy LaValle’s solo instrumental project) makes quietly evocative music, and the latest record, Into the Blue Again (Sub Pop) continues on that same trajectory, with songs constructed out of simple but lushly layered Fender Rhodes piano melodies and atmospheric washes of guitar and synthesizer.

Mr. LaValle (who’s done stints with the bands Tristeza and the Black Heart Procession) may never again attain the austere, meditative beauty of “Another Day,” first heard on the split E.P. A Lifetime or More (2003) and then in a revised form with programmed percussion on In a Safe Place (2004). Using little more than a single insistent piano phrase—the muted, bell-like tone of the Rhodes ringing over placid drones—he somehow suggested late-afternoon sun filtering in through an open window.

“The Light,” the first track on Into the Blue Again, does a decent job of recapturing that feeling. A synthesizer murmurs and pulses rhythmically throughout, and—as usual—delicately interlocking Rhodes parts convey most of the melody, with violin and more keyboards stepping in to embellish the tune. Elsewhere, Mr. LaValle repeats his signature combination of legato soundscapes and jittery, fractured electronic beats that twitch their way into the foreground.

He’s good at wringing emotion out of the abstract building blocks of music. He’s less assured when supplementing a few tracks with listless vocals and fuzzy lyrics about difficult relationships. On one song about a romantic failure to communicate, he sings, “Writings on the wall—they’ll speak to me / Writings on the wall—they’ll sing to you.” The finest moments on Into the Blue Again scrub the words off the wall and let the wallpaper do the singing.

Another songwriter who’s been plugging away for some time, who can match meaningful verses with quietly gorgeous melodies, is Bonnie “Prince” Billy (the nom de disque of Will Oldham). The Letting Go is Mr. Oldham’s first album of new solo material since the spare, melancholy folk of Master and Everyone (2003). The new album’s first single, “Cursed Sleep,” features pretty strings and harmonies, but puts a little more swagger into the strumming and singing.

For another solo artist masquerading behind a band name, try Sparklehorse’s first album in five years, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain. A spell of hibernation may have been just what Mark Linkous needed to refresh his sleepy psychedelia.

On Oct. 3, Beck gives us a new album produced with Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich, who also helped polish the ballads on Beck’s syrupy Sea Change. The new album, The Information, promises to be livelier—a better match for Beck’s electro-funk hipster-hop chic.

Also on Oct. 3, the Decemberists make their major-label debut with The Crane Wife, a concept album based on a Japanese folktale about a man who marries an injured crane with an arrow stuck in her. The crane is actually a beautiful silk-weaver, overworked at her loom by her husband. Or the crane is actually a crane, and it flies away. Or something like that. Capitol Records funded the whole production. (If there’s any justice in this world, the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy will be scoring the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie.)

And capping off an amazing musical day for gangly heartland teenagers and the balding thirtysomething men who enunciate their ennui, the Hold Steady release their third album, Boys and Girls in America. The title hints that the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minneapolis quintet—already so literate and literal—might finally be embracing its destiny as this millennium’s Springsteen, though anyone who’s heard pale, portly, bespectacled front man Craig Finn sing-scream live knows the truth: This guy might just be one of the best rappers in the game.

Later in October, Squarepusher greets the world again with Hello Everything. Pushing buttons, twiddling knobs and shredding on bass like an over-enthusiastic robot turned onto Bitch’s Brew, the veteran electronic-music whiz is still churning out moody soundscapes and manic man-versus-machine freak-outs. The blippy tune of one sneak-peek single sounded like someone spilled a can of Coke onto the Atari during a particularly heated climax of Asteroids.

Less excitedly, Kanye West–endorsed crooner John Legend plays a mean piano and guest-stars a mean Gap ad, so don’t be surprised to see respectable older couples bopping along to tunes from Once Again next time you find yourself in an Upper East Side elevator.

Young harpist Joanna Newsom ushers in an eccentric November with Ys, her sophomore album. Her innocently excessive falsetto can sound like a kid in a bathtub, though her elegant harp and dreamland songwriting make up for rookie folksiness. Ys has five tracks but stretches to nearly an hour. No one could fill in all that space more luxuriously than arranger Van Dyke Parks, the man who co-wrote the Beach Boys’ “Heroes and Villains,” rewrote Trinidadian pop—on Discover America (1972)—then sprinkled orchestral glimmer over Rufus Wainwright’s debut album decades later. He’ll shine again here.

Just before Thanksgiving, members of Destroyer, Frog Eyes and Wolf Parade band together as Swan Lake, in what amounts to a pas de trois for some of Canadian indie rock’s finest. Expect literate, possibly obscure lyrics set to shambling, chiming guitars and organs on this appropriately titled collaboration, Beast Moans.

Speaking of moaning, Tom Waits digs out what he calls his “scared, mean, orphan songs of rapture and melancholy.” Orphans is the title of his new box set of rare songs: Its three CD’s are called Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards. How better to summarize the hoariest troubadour since Billie Holiday? If Brawlers fits Mr. Waits’ smarmy 70’s shtick (“Warm Beer and Cold Women”), then Bastards suits his 80’s alter ego Frank (who “hung his wild years on a nail / that he drove through his wife’s forehead”). But his Bawlers are always the best: tattered, velvety, unironic and maybe all-knowing.

Further afield, we can look forward to an as-yet-unnamed effort, in the not-unbearably-distant future, by Andrew W.K., which, if nothing else, will restart the eternal debate: Is Mr. W.K. a sincere hard-partier or somebody’s art project? Seems terribly unfair that no one asks that question about, say, Matthew Barney. Or Axl Rose—Guns N’ Roses’ much-delayed Chinese Democracy is scheduled (again) for release this fall. Call the Guggenheim.

Another songwriter who’s been plugging away for some time, who can match meaningful verses with quietly gorgeous melodies, is Bonnie “Prince” Billy (the nom de disque of Will Oldham). The Letting Go is Mr. Oldham’s first album of new solo material since the spare, melancholy folk of Master and Everyone (2003). The new album’s first single, “Cursed Sleep,” features pretty strings and harmonies, but puts a little more swagger into the strumming and singing.

For another solo artist masquerading behind a band name, try Sparklehorse’s first album in five years, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain. A spell of hibernation may have been just what Mark Linkous needed to refresh his sleepy psychedelia.

On Oct. 3, Beck gives us a new album produced with Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich, who also helped polish the ballads on Beck’s syrupy Sea Change. The new album, The Information, promises to be livelier—a better match for Beck’s electro-funk hipster-hop chic.

Also on Oct. 3, the Decemberists make their major-label debut with The Crane Wife, a concept album based on a Japanese folktale about a man who marries an injured crane with an arrow stuck in her. The crane is actually a beautiful silk-weaver, overworked at her loom by her husband. Or the crane is actually a crane, and it flies away. Or something like that. Capitol Records funded the whole production. (If there’s any justice in this world, the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy will be scoring the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie.)

And capping off an amazing musical day for gangly heartland teenagers and the balding thirtysomething men who enunciate their ennui, the Hold Steady release their third album, Boys and Girls in America. The title hints that the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minneapolis quintet—already so literate and literal—might finally be embracing its destiny as this millennium’s Springsteen, though anyone who’s heard pale, portly, bespectacled front man Craig Finn sing-scream live knows the truth: This guy might just be one of the best rappers in the game.

Later in October, Squarepusher greets the world again with Hello Everything. Pushing buttons, twiddling knobs and shredding on bass like an over-enthusiastic robot turned onto Bitch’s Brew, the veteran electronic-music whiz is still churning out moody soundscapes and manic man-versus-machine freak-outs. The blippy tune of one sneak-peek single sounded like someone spilled a can of Coke onto the Atari during a particularly heated climax of Asteroids.

Less excitedly, Kanye West–endorsed crooner John Legend plays a mean piano and guest-stars a mean Gap ad, so don’t be surprised to see respectable older couples bopping along to tunes from Once Again next time you find yourself in an Upper East Side elevator.

Young harpist Joanna Newsom ushers in an eccentric November with Ys, her sophomore album. Her innocently excessive falsetto can sound like a kid in a bathtub, though her elegant harp and dreamland songwriting make up for rookie folksiness. Ys has five tracks but stretches to nearly an hour. No one could fill in all that space more luxuriously than arranger Van Dyke Parks, the man who co-wrote the Beach Boys’ “Heroes and Villains,” rewrote Trinidadian pop—on Discover America (1972)—then sprinkled orchestral glimmer over Rufus Wainwright’s debut album decades later. He’ll shine again here.

Just before Thanksgiving, members of Destroyer, Frog Eyes and Wolf Parade band together as Swan Lake, in what amounts to a pas de trois for some of Canadian indie rock’s finest. Expect literate, possibly obscure lyrics set to shambling, chiming guitars and organs on this appropriately titled collaboration, Beast Moans.

Speaking of moaning, Tom Waits digs out what he calls his “scared, mean, orphan songs of rapture and melancholy.” Orphans is the title of his new box set of rare songs: Its three CD’s are called Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards. How better to summarize the hoariest troubadour since Billie Holiday? If Brawlers fits Mr. Waits’ smarmy 70’s shtick (“Warm Beer and Cold Women”), then Bastards suits his 80’s alter ego Frank (who “hung his wild years on a nail / that he drove through his wife’s forehead”). But his Bawlers are always the best: tattered, velvety, unironic and maybe all-knowing.

Further afield, we can look forward to an as-yet-unnamed effort, in the not-unbearably-distant future, by Andrew W.K., which, if nothing else, will restart the eternal debate: Is Mr. W.K. a sincere hard-partier or somebody’s art project? Seems terribly unfair that no one asks that question about, say, Matthew Barney. Or Axl Rose—Guns N’ Roses’ much-delayed Chinese Democracy is scheduled (again) for release this fall. Call the Guggenheim.

Midlake is a quintet from the talent-incubator town of Denton, Tex. Their newly released sophomore LP, The Trials of Van Occupanther (Bella Union), achieves a sophisticated balance of past and present. It boasts the kind of serious songwriting, arranging and instrumental chops that hark back to the heyday of the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills & Nash—a mellow moment before punk made proficiency taboo. The album is full of lush, resonant acoustic guitars and warmly overdriven electrics, lilting pianos and vintage keyboards, soaring vocal melodies paired with honeyed harmony parts and orchestral touches.

Yet it never succumbs to the slickness or blandness that can plague the genre. That’s probably because the band adopted the indie-rock approach, playing virtually all of the instruments and producing the album themselves. With its complex arrangements and dense layers of overdubs, The Trials of Van Occupanther has a rich, organic ensemble feel.

Lead singer and songwriter Tim Smith’s supple, mellifluous tenor could easily be exploited for operatic gestures, but he’s careful not to hog the spotlight. There are wailing, honest-to-goodness, classic-rock drum fills and guitar solos, most notably in the infectious “Head Home,” but they fall in all the right places, supporting rather than overwhelming the songs. It all adds up to a generous rush of feeling, conjuring up a pleasant (sometimes gloomy) place to get lost.

Lyrically, it’s an eccentric vision. Mr. Smith evokes an invented past much more distant than the Me Decade, painting a landscape of hillsides and forests populated by villagers and hunters. “Roscoe,” the propulsive and hypnotic lead track, imagines rural life at the end of the 19th century; the first verse is about mountaineers traveling far to fix someone’s leaking roof (an odd motif that reoccurs later in the album).

Like many of the songs, “Bandits” doesn’t follow an easily identifiable verse-chorus structure, but it’s an immediately poignant and engaging mid-tempo ballad. Mr. Smith asks, “Did you ever want to roam around with bandits, / To see many places and hide in ditches?” Then he tempers that romantic image of the carefree outsider, singing, “It’s not always easy,” before invoking the need to find shelter when the winter comes.

These are fairy tales minus the happy ending (most just trail off without concluding at all). In “Van Occupanther,” the title character is a shy scientist who’s shunned by his neighbors. He seems on the brink of revealing an important discovery, but instead cries out (to gorgeous harmonies), “Let me not be too consumed with this world.” And in “Chasing After Deer,” an affectingly artless description of tragic, unrequited love, a deer, frightened of a pursuer who’s already given up the chase, runs headlong off a cliff into the sea. It’s that kind of mixed emotion—a compound of sadness and beauty—that Midlake captures on this quietly stunning record.

—I-Huei Go

LIKE JOHNNY CASH'S FIFTH VOLUME OF THE American series, another of this year’s finest albums, Ali Farka Touré’s Savane, was released posthumously (Touré, who was in his late 60’s, died in March). But if Cash’s last record is a collection of casket lullabies, the Malian guitarist’s final songs have a teeming lushness—a lively, organic beauty—that makes it difficult to imagine that he was suffering from bone cancer when he recorded them.

Touré’s crystalline guitar buoys his music, even on gluey, hot-sun hymns like “Ledi Coumbe,” or on the funereal title track. But nothing here floats by sadly: These songs knead together that pristine guitar with heart-grabbing harmonies, slender instrumental echo and bucolic percussion. This is an album of pure molasses melody. It’s intoxicating because of its wide landscape: The panorama created by Touré and his collaborators is verdant yet dignified and demure. Its yogic reiterations evoke the splendor of Lee (Scratch) Perry’s dub reggae, yet this album matches the dreamy lilt of dub without the nuisance of nonstop reverb or tyrannical bass lines.

Not a single note here oversteps its bounds, even when the tracks add a second guitar—or a choir of wiry n’goni lutes. By filling the spaces behind and beneath one another, these musicians build up limited alternations on slow themes into electric crescendos.

Touré has been memorialized as “the Bluesman of Africa”—but that nickname backwardly confuses which hemisphere the genre’s roots grew in. Savane is not the stuff of wannabe Delta barroom blues, and it’s not hard to hear why.

Touré is best known for 1994’s Talking Timbuktu, his Desert Island Disc–worthy collaboration with Ry Cooder, the Californian slide-guitar divinity. Like Mr. Cooder’s more popular international collaborations with Buena Vista Social Club, Timbuktu is immediately likeable for its swaggeringly pretty hooks.

The prettiness of Savane is much less important than its lastingly beautiful craftwork: The caramelized growl of Little George Sueref’s harmonica on the opener, “Erdi,” melts into the quintuplet vocal harmonies of “Machengoidi” and “Soko Yhinka”; vintage James Brown bandleader Pee Wee Ellis plays a late-night barfly tenor sax on “Beto” to match the translucent flute of “Banga”; on “N’Jarou”, the album’s last and most magnetic track, Touré’s stately acoustic soloing hypnotizes the brass and African lutes beneath it.

His guitar—sometimes a crisp acoustic, sometimes a crisper electric—has often done the talking for him. But Touré’s languid charcoal vocals on Savane are a weighty addition. Though the lyrics are sung in Malian dialect, with a few gushes of French, only jealous Anglophones will be disappointed. The vocals are so melodious and percussive that it’s a pleasure listening to them merely as abstract expressions of emotion. At their core, Touré’s velvety moans and elderly grumbles are never unintelligible. Muddiness has never sounded clearer.

His singing is always eloquent, but the flickers of spoken incantation on “N’Jarou” are supreme. These vocals dance above an ebullient seven-note guitar riff, which eventually relaxes into free-flowing improvisation. Contrasted against the airy, paced breaths of Pee Wee Ellis’ tenor saxophone, the alternating outbursts of voice and guitar are cataclysmic.

To insist that any such piece of music has its own inherently global and globalizing voice is the stuff of colonialist choir teachers: Touré’s music isn’t fratty or gleeful enough to be universal. Nonetheless, he reportedly sang in all three dialects of northern Mali as a gesture of unity.

There’s something in Savane’s transcendent Malian songs that demands hyperbole: Its quiet jangle blossoms into pure elegance, getting richer and lovelier as it rolls along.

—Max Abelson

Midlake is a quintet from the talent-incubator town of Denton, Tex. Their newly released sophomore LP, The Trials of Van Occupanther (Bella Union), achieves a sophisticated balance of past and present. It boasts the kind of serious songwriting, arranging and instrumental chops that hark back to the heyday of the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills & Nash—a mellow moment before punk made proficiency taboo. The album is full of lush, resonant acoustic guitars and warmly overdriven electrics, lilting pianos and vintage keyboards, soaring vocal melodies paired with honeyed harmony parts and orchestral touches.

Yet it never succumbs to the slickness or blandness that can plague the genre. That’s probably because the band adopted the indie-rock approach, playing virtually all of the instruments and producing the album themselves. With its complex arrangements and dense layers of overdubs, The Trials of Van Occupanther has a rich, organic ensemble feel.

Lead singer and songwriter Tim Smith’s supple, mellifluous tenor could easily be exploited for operatic gestures, but he’s careful not to hog the spotlight. There are wailing, honest-to-goodness, classic-rock drum fills and guitar solos, most notably in the infectious “Head Home,” but they fall in all the right places, supporting rather than overwhelming the songs. It all adds up to a generous rush of feeling, conjuring up a pleasant (sometimes gloomy) place to get lost.

Lyrically, it’s an eccentric vision. Mr. Smith evokes an invented past much more distant than the Me Decade, painting a landscape of hillsides and forests populated by villagers and hunters. “Roscoe,” the propulsive and hypnotic lead track, imagines rural life at the end of the 19th century; the first verse is about mountaineers traveling far to fix someone’s leaking roof (an odd motif that reoccurs later in the album).

Like many of the songs, “Bandits” doesn’t follow an easily identifiable verse-chorus structure, but it’s an immediately poignant and engaging mid-tempo ballad. Mr. Smith asks, “Did you ever want to roam around with bandits, / To see many places and hide in ditches?” Then he tempers that romantic image of the carefree outsider, singing, “It’s not always easy,” before invoking the need to find shelter when the winter comes.

These are fairy tales minus the happy ending (most just trail off without concluding at all). In “Van Occupanther,” the title character is a shy scientist who’s shunned by his neighbors. He seems on the brink of revealing an important discovery, but instead cries out (to gorgeous harmonies), “Let me not be too consumed with this world.” And in “Chasing After Deer,” an affectingly artless description of tragic, unrequited love, a deer, frightened of a pursuer who’s already given up the chase, runs headlong off a cliff into the sea. It’s that kind of mixed emotion—a compound of sadness and beauty—that Midlake captures on this quietly stunning record.

—I-Huei Go

LIKE JOHNNY CASH'S FIFTH VOLUME OF THE American series, another of this year’s finest albums, Ali Farka Touré’s Savane, was released posthumously (Touré, who was in his late 60’s, died in March). But if Cash’s last record is a collection of casket lullabies, the Malian guitarist’s final songs have a teeming lushness—a lively, organic beauty—that makes it difficult to imagine that he was suffering from bone cancer when he recorded them.

Touré’s crystalline guitar buoys his music, even on gluey, hot-sun hymns like “Ledi Coumbe,” or on the funereal title track. But nothing here floats by sadly: These songs knead together that pristine guitar with heart-grabbing harmonies, slender instrumental echo and bucolic percussion. This is an album of pure molasses melody. It’s intoxicating because of its wide landscape: The panorama created by Touré and his collaborators is verdant yet dignified and demure. Its yogic reiterations evoke the splendor of Lee (Scratch) Perry’s dub reggae, yet this album matches the dreamy lilt of dub without the nuisance of nonstop reverb or tyrannical bass lines.

Not a single note here oversteps its bounds, even when the tracks add a second guitar—or a choir of wiry n’goni lutes. By filling the spaces behind and beneath one another, these musicians build up limited alternations on slow themes into electric crescendos.

Touré has been memorialized as “the Bluesman of Africa”—but that nickname backwardly confuses which hemisphere the genre’s roots grew in. Savane is not the stuff of wannabe Delta barroom blues, and it’s not hard to hear why.

Touré is best known for 1994’s Talking Timbuktu, his Desert Island Disc–worthy collaboration with Ry Cooder, the Californian slide-guitar divinity. Like Mr. Cooder’s more popular international collaborations with Buena Vista Social Club, Timbuktu is immediately likeable for its swaggeringly pretty hooks.

The prettiness of Savane is much less important than its lastingly beautiful craftwork: The caramelized growl of Little George Sueref’s harmonica on the opener, “Erdi,” melts into the quintuplet vocal harmonies of “Machengoidi” and “Soko Yhinka”; vintage James Brown bandleader Pee Wee Ellis plays a late-night barfly tenor sax on “Beto” to match the translucent flute of “Banga”; on “N’Jarou”, the album’s last and most magnetic track, Touré’s stately acoustic soloing hypnotizes the brass and African lutes beneath it.

His guitar—sometimes a crisp acoustic, sometimes a crisper electric—has often done the talking for him. But Touré’s languid charcoal vocals on Savane are a weighty addition. Though the lyrics are sung in Malian dialect, with a few gushes of French, only jealous Anglophones will be disappointed. The vocals are so melodious and percussive that it’s a pleasure listening to them merely as abstract expressions of emotion. At their core, Touré’s velvety moans and elderly grumbles are never unintelligible. Muddiness has never sounded clearer.

His singing is always eloquent, but the flickers of spoken incantation on “N’Jarou” are supreme. These vocals dance above an ebullient seven-note guitar riff, which eventually relaxes into free-flowing improvisation. Contrasted against the airy, paced breaths of Pee Wee Ellis’ tenor saxophone, the alternating outbursts of voice and guitar are cataclysmic.

To insist that any such piece of music has its own inherently global and globalizing voice is the stuff of colonialist choir teachers: Touré’s music isn’t fratty or gleeful enough to be universal. Nonetheless, he reportedly sang in all three dialects of northern Mali as a gesture of unity.

There’s something in Savane’s transcendent Malian songs that demands hyperbole: Its quiet jangle blossoms into pure elegance, getting richer and lovelier as it rolls along.

—Max Abelson

Mr. Stevens acknowledges as much on his latest release, The Avalanche (Asthmatic Kitty), a vast collection of outtakes, most of them entirely new songs, left over from the sessions for last year’s justly acclaimed Illinois (the second in his plan to record 50 albums devoted to each of the 50 states). In the middle of The Avalanche, he throws in what he labels an “adult contemporary easy listening version” of “Chicago,” one of the standout tracks on Illinois. But though the whispery delivery of the lite-rock rendition is somewhat exaggerated, it’s otherwise not that different from the original or from the rest of Mr. Stevens’ work.

That’s not necessarily a complaint. His sketches and interior monologues are written mainly in domestic-confession mode and punctuated with resigned sighs. In the state of Sufjan, everyone’s always having an epiphany about human imperfection, crying about something or murmuring, “Oh my God.” But though his melodramas are often overwrought, they can be wrenching, too. And they mesh well with the gently haunting melodies he decorates with simple banjo, guitar and piano, buoyant strings, winds and brass, and lush hypnotic pulses.

It’s a tender, fragile sensibility, bittersweet and melancholy, pretty enough for a big audience. Predictably, a few critics have assumed a permanent-backlash position with respect to Mr. Stevens. Which makes releasing a full-length album of outtakes a weird career move.

In the old days, a performer in a similar situation (adulation in the press, a hungry fan base) would have put out an E.P. of four or five songs. These days, a band might give away the leftovers for free on their Web site—something Mr. Stevens says he considered doing. But he decided instead to make the whole trove available on an album that’s even longer than its predecessor. What, me overexposed?

There’s a great E.P. buried in The Avalanche. The rest feels unfinished, unrealized. Many of the shorter pieces are insubstantial—“Saul Bellow” is basically a two-line chorus repeated over and over. And the longer tracks lack the epic sweep that carried Illinois.

There are moments on The Avalanche—discordant outbursts of sloppy electric guitar, parts left unpolished—when it feels as though Mr. Stevens is trying to break out of a style that’s grown too polite for him. The most convincing of these comes at the end of “Pittsfield,” a tearjerker narrated by a latchkey kid, delinquent—but sensitive, of course. Hushed intimacy builds to a stirring pageant of trumpet and overdriven drums but then dissolves into abrasive noise (the sound of an engine in winter, unable to start) before suddenly slipping back into a few quiet solo piano chords. It’s sentimental, but it’s also moving and transcendent, and it might point the way to another state on the map.

—I-Huei Go

JUST BEFORE THEY RELEASED THEIR LAST ALBUM, The Wedding (2005), Oneida announced to the press that they were constructing the “largest music-box on the east coast,” with over 70 saw blades. It was a hoax eagerly swallowed: The band is notoriously “unpredictable”—they live, after all, in Brooklyn.

ZIP-code zaniness aside, Oneida are now certifiable veterans: Happy New Year (Jagjaguwar) is their eighth full-length in nine years. Skilled Oberlin-trained musicians who’ve worked tirelessly on their previous seven albums, tweaking the minutiae of their measured, rather intellectual sound, they’ve acquired a reputation for chaos and spontaneity in part because of their eccentric monikers—Fat Bobby, Kid Millions, Double Rainbow and the splendidly bald Baby (Hanoi) Jane—and a Web site featuring a mostly unreadable blog. Their supposedly eclectic sonic mix—the sound palate and phrasing of 70’s drug rock and the rhythmic discipline of Krautrock—is hardly different from that of their label-mates Black Mountain.

And yet Oneida are standouts at Jagjaguwar—not a distinction awarded for effort. Their fictitious music box was more than just an annoying publicity stunt (all the more infuriating because it was such a great idea)—it was a mental exercise in making music. The music Oneida actually makes can sound much simpler than it is: They play a range of instruments so hard and so well that the instruments assume percussive functions. Massive, muscular guitar work resolves into walls of vibration; on “The Adversary,” from the new album, chords pulse fuzzily, emerging from sonic depths along the drum line with hypnotic, high-pitched flourishes.

The first half of Happy New Year, which climaxes with eight minutes of “Up with People,” is sweatier, more aggressive and more satisfying. The second half has more acoustic instrumentation and a markedly slower tempo. Though often mesmerizing, it lacks the momentum and grit of the band’s stronger guitar work. Even the jarring bells and insistent, high-pitched piano clangings of “History’s Great Navigators” sound as much short-circuited as subtle.

The album’s opener, “Distress,” adopts a technique familiar to Oneida: distill the album’s agenda into one song, then slow it down. We get a contrast of tempos and textures laid bare. The vocals, slow, rich, almost medieval in their tonality, summon a solemn percussive march over the sparse, arrhythmic void—the sonic equivalent of squiggles. It’s not so much a battle as a slow grind of ultimately impotent opposites, and the resulting tension marks the apotheosis of Oneida’s powers.

Slowing down Oneida’s tracks has the unfortunate side effect of revealing their primary weakness, which lies in the content of the hypnotic, compelling chants. “Distress” repeats a four-line ode to the seasons: “So fades the lovely blooming flower / Frail, smiling solace of an hour / So soon our transient comfort flies / And pleasure only blooms to die.” In an album of texture, technical experimentation and sweaty guitars, tombstone lyrics are little more than a campy gesture.

Happy New Year is meant to mark a new beginning for the band. The trio has found a fourth member in Double Rainbow; they’ve started their own record label—Brah—and this album marks the 100th release by Jagjaguwar, their rightly adored Indiana label. But the album is more remarkable as a diversion into one small subset of Oneida’s noise than for its overriding ambition or scope.

Crank them up and they’ll play it again.

—Alex Gartenfeld

Mr. Stevens acknowledges as much on his latest release, The Avalanche (Asthmatic Kitty), a vast collection of outtakes, most of them entirely new songs, left over from the sessions for last year’s justly acclaimed Illinois (the second in his plan to record 50 albums devoted to each of the 50 states). In the middle of The Avalanche, he throws in what he labels an “adult contemporary easy listening version” of “Chicago,” one of the standout tracks on Illinois. But though the whispery delivery of the lite-rock rendition is somewhat exaggerated, it’s otherwise not that different from the original or from the rest of Mr. Stevens’ work.

That’s not necessarily a complaint. His sketches and interior monologues are written mainly in domestic-confession mode and punctuated with resigned sighs. In the state of Sufjan, everyone’s always having an epiphany about human imperfection, crying about something or murmuring, “Oh my God.” But though his melodramas are often overwrought, they can be wrenching, too. And they mesh well with the gently haunting melodies he decorates with simple banjo, guitar and piano, buoyant strings, winds and brass, and lush hypnotic pulses.

It’s a tender, fragile sensibility, bittersweet and melancholy, pretty enough for a big audience. Predictably, a few critics have assumed a permanent-backlash position with respect to Mr. Stevens. Which makes releasing a full-length album of outtakes a weird career move.

In the old days, a performer in a similar situation (adulation in the press, a hungry fan base) would have put out an E.P. of four or five songs. These days, a band might give away the leftovers for free on their Web site—something Mr. Stevens says he considered doing. But he decided instead to make the whole trove available on an album that’s even longer than its predecessor. What, me overexposed?

There’s a great E.P. buried in The Avalanche. The rest feels unfinished, unrealized. Many of the shorter pieces are insubstantial—“Saul Bellow” is basically a two-line chorus repeated over and over. And the longer tracks lack the epic sweep that carried Illinois.

There are moments on The Avalanche—discordant outbursts of sloppy electric guitar, parts left unpolished—when it feels as though Mr. Stevens is trying to break out of a style that’s grown too polite for him. The most convincing of these comes at the end of “Pittsfield,” a tearjerker narrated by a latchkey kid, delinquent—but sensitive, of course. Hushed intimacy builds to a stirring pageant of trumpet and overdriven drums but then dissolves into abrasive noise (the sound of an engine in winter, unable to start) before suddenly slipping back into a few quiet solo piano chords. It’s sentimental, but it’s also moving and transcendent, and it might point the way to another state on the map.

—I-Huei Go

JUST BEFORE THEY RELEASED THEIR LAST ALBUM, The Wedding (2005), Oneida announced to the press that they were constructing the “largest music-box on the east coast,” with over 70 saw blades. It was a hoax eagerly swallowed: The band is notoriously “unpredictable”—they live, after all, in Brooklyn.

ZIP-code zaniness aside, Oneida are now certifiable veterans: Happy New Year (Jagjaguwar) is their eighth full-length in nine years. Skilled Oberlin-trained musicians who’ve worked tirelessly on their previous seven albums, tweaking the minutiae of their measured, rather intellectual sound, they’ve acquired a reputation for chaos and spontaneity in part because of their eccentric monikers—Fat Bobby, Kid Millions, Double Rainbow and the splendidly bald Baby (Hanoi) Jane—and a Web site featuring a mostly unreadable blog. Their supposedly eclectic sonic mix—the sound palate and phrasing of 70’s drug rock and the rhythmic discipline of Krautrock—is hardly different from that of their label-mates Black Mountain.

And yet Oneida are standouts at Jagjaguwar—not a distinction awarded for effort. Their fictitious music box was more than just an annoying publicity stunt (all the more infuriating because it was such a great idea)—it was a mental exercise in making music. The music Oneida actually makes can sound much simpler than it is: They play a range of instruments so hard and so well that the instruments assume percussive functions. Massive, muscular guitar work resolves into walls of vibration; on “The Adversary,” from the new album, chords pulse fuzzily, emerging from sonic depths along the drum line with hypnotic, high-pitched flourishes.

The first half of Happy New Year, which climaxes with eight minutes of “Up with People,” is sweatier, more aggressive and more satisfying. The second half has more acoustic instrumentation and a markedly slower tempo. Though often mesmerizing, it lacks the momentum and grit of the band’s stronger guitar work. Even the jarring bells and insistent, high-pitched piano clangings of “History’s Great Navigators” sound as much short-circuited as subtle.

The album’s opener, “Distress,” adopts a technique familiar to Oneida: distill the album’s agenda into one song, then slow it down. We get a contrast of tempos and textures laid bare. The vocals, slow, rich, almost medieval in their tonality, summon a solemn percussive march over the sparse, arrhythmic void—the sonic equivalent of squiggles. It’s not so much a battle as a slow grind of ultimately impotent opposites, and the resulting tension marks the apotheosis of Oneida’s powers.

Slowing down Oneida’s tracks has the unfortunate side effect of revealing their primary weakness, which lies in the content of the hypnotic, compelling chants. “Distress” repeats a four-line ode to the seasons: “So fades the lovely blooming flower / Frail, smiling solace of an hour / So soon our transient comfort flies / And pleasure only blooms to die.” In an album of texture, technical experimentation and sweaty guitars, tombstone lyrics are little more than a campy gesture.

Happy New Year is meant to mark a new beginning for the band. The trio has found a fourth member in Double Rainbow; they’ve started their own record label—Brah—and this album marks the 100th release by Jagjaguwar, their rightly adored Indiana label. But the album is more remarkable as a diversion into one small subset of Oneida’s noise than for its overriding ambition or scope.

Crank them up and they’ll play it again.

—Alex Gartenfeld