This singer-songwriter summit — John McCauley of Deer Tick, Dawes' Taylor Goldsmith, Delta Spirit's Matthew Vasquez — is an alt-country round robin, with raw harmonies and punk-rock sentiment as unforgiving as a prison shiv. "I know my days are numbered, but I'm bad at math/I got a dick so hard that a cat couldn't scratch," howls McCauley on "Middle Brother." Half the songs on Middle Brother involve drinking and the rest hangovers of the heart, and on Paul Westerberg's "Portland," everyone chimes in on the line "It's too late to turn back, here we gooooo" — they're certain of trouble ahead, and relishing it.

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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."