King is a guitar virtuoso whose genre of choice — indie-rock — forces her into an odd middle-ground between dexterous displays of technique and thorny evocations of self-doubt with titles like "Everything Has An End Even Sadness." Her fifth disc is her most songful, suggesting the tense alt-pop of Tegan & Sara by way of Bill Frisell and Leo Kottke. "Death Head" has real punk drive while "Falling Day" is hot goth-rock. She doesn't have a ton of vocal gravitas, and too much of the record is taken up by spirdery guitar explorations; its indicative that the soft, simple break-up lament "Sunnyside" is both the least musically showy thing here, and the most moving.

“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.