NEW ALBUM RELEASES

The Sea and Cake deliver an album with the freshness and energy of a new band, and the ease and musicianship that can only come with experience. Runner began as the companion piece to 2011’s The Moonlight Butterfly, and using that album’s sonic experimentations as a starting point for a new process of writing and recording, became something completely new. Songs that began as synthesizer experiments in Sam Prekop’s home studio were reimagined by the other members, and eventually recorded and mixed by John McEntire at Chicago’s Soma Studios. The result is an album that feels like a private travelogue. Start listening at one place, and end up some place else. Cherish the unexpected mysteries around every corner.

ohn Darnielle keeps busy. After delivering All Eternals Deck just last year, Darnielle and the Mountain Goats return with Transcendental Youth, a contemplative record with themes of anxiety and longing. Opener “Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1” marches on ambling drums, forceful strums and Darnielle’s distinct, high-pitched vocals, while “White Cedar” burns bright and slow with tense horn arrangements and soft piano caresses. But Darnielle keeps things varied on Youth, rocking unabashedly with piano chord jabs and pure power-pop flair on “The Diaz Brothers.” “There’s always a lot of pleasure in my life,” Darnielle told Rolling Stone last month. “But what I do is find dark things to sing about and try and infuse them with some sort of triumphant power.”

With her first three recordings, 2003’s The Love EP, 2005’s breezy twentythree and 2008’s Hello, Tristan Prettyman parlayed her smoky alto voice and laid-back surfer-girl-from-San-Diego charm into an eight-year career studded with highlights that included Hello’s No. 2 position on the iTunes Digital Albums chart and headlining tours across the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

Diana Krall’s extraordinary new album, ‘Glad Rag Doll’ is an exhilarating and adventurous exploration of new sounds, new instrumentation and new musicians. It stars a singer and piano player, filled with mischief, humor and a renewed sense of tenderness and intimacy.

Beth Orton’s fans have been waiting for years for a record like Sugaring Season that makes good on the promise of her early recordings. It’s hard to believe that it was over a decade and a half ago that Orton first attracted widespread attention in her native England by singing on a William Orbit remix of John Martyn’s classic “I Don’t Want to Know About Evil.” Her first two albums Trailer Park and Central Reservation—along with David Gray’s White Ladder—are classics of the era whose groundbreaking blend of folk, pop and electronica textures has aged surprisingly well.

The subtitle of Van Morrison’s new album, Born to Sing: No Plan B, indicates the power that music still holds for this living legend. “No Plan B means this is not a rehearsal,” says Morrison. “That’s the main thing—it’s not a hobby, it’s real, happening now, in real time.”

Since they formed in December 2007, the members of Mumford & Sons have shared a common purpose: to make music that matters, without taking themselves too seriously. Four young men from West London in their early twenties, they have fire in their bellies, romance in their hearts, and rapture in their masterful, melancholy voices.

They call New Orleans a melting pot. When one thinks about it like that, it’s hardly surprising that this is where CALEXICO reconvened to record their seventh full-length album, ALGIERS. Joey Burns and John Convertino have long called upon an extended range of musical influences, blending them together so distinctly that the results have almost become a genre of their own.