Neko Case turned up forty years or so too late to be one of the great country voices of the Fifties — hearts break whenever she hits one of those seraphic high notes. The songs on her fourth studio album, though, are vastly weirder than her precursors': You'll find evocative story fragments about profound alienation written in the dense language of contemporary poetry ("the sledge of tectonic fever"); chorusless rambles with one long free-form verse; oblique songs about songs that suggest she's been studying her New Pornographers bandmate Dan Bejar's stuff; and folk-song lines about John the Baptist. But from her luscious, aching croon, and her ensemble's solemn high-mesa twang and groove (the crew includes members of Calexico and the Band's Garth Hudson), you'd never guess she wasn't covering Patsy Cline standards.

“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"