Nine Inch Nails fronted by a hot femme singer? Why didn't anyone think of it sooner? That's exaggerating the MO of this electro-pop collective (Trent Reznor, his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, NIN cronies Atticus Ross and Rob Sheridan), but not entirely. Clocking in at 30-plus minutes, this debut EP is a small masterpiece of downtempo sound sculpture, finely detailed and often as gorgeous as it is discomforting. "I feel the skin that separates us start to fade/And when I lie on top of you, I'm afraid," Maandig intones over a crushingly low frequency bass line on "Keep It Together," her ghost-babe vocals joining Reznor's butch croak near the end for a night-sweat duet. The semi-acoustic "Ice Age" sounds like Beck and Tom Waits conjuring a Stevie Nicks song. But imagine its antsy melody, swarming groove and bleak verses presented in Reznor's usual mode – howling industrial psychedelia – and his imprint is unmistakable. More, please. 

Listen to 'An Omen'

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.