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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“IRM”

Fashioned to mimic the sound of a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, "IRM" (the French designation for the brain scan) grew out of Gainsbourg’s love of the sound of the clickety-clack of medical machinery. The IRM album project also marked the fulfillment of two goals for the singer: to document a traumatic experience, and to record an album with Beck. Though her co-creator and producer didn’t necessarily know the details of her water-skiing accident and resulting cerebral hemorrhage (which lead to the IRM of the song's title), he somehow knew how to handle the material. "Beck had a way of guessing what I was thinking and feeling without me telling him," said Gainsbourg. "We never discussed these things explicitly."