This Cleveland band – singer-guitarist Nicole Barille and drummer-pianist Sam Meister – is at once Rust Belt scrappy and dreamily explosive, like they can't decide if they want to represent their hometown or blow it up. Mr. Gnome's third album evokes the dada bounce of local heroes Pere Ubu, as well as the giddily overheated primitivism of that other Midwestern boy-girl team; they may amble into a toy-piano interlude or let loose an anxious caterwaul over a Sabbath-worthy brick wall of a riff. On "Watch the City Sail Away," Barille sings, "The sky explodes/With a smile," in a voice somewhere between Billie Holiday and Björk – and you get the sense that these two are pretty psyched to see what comes next.

Listen to "House of Circles":

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“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.