Lambchop is a genre of one. Eleven albums and two decades into its career, the Nashville band, led by singer-guitarist Kurt Wagner, still belongs to no movement, no category, no trend; they're confirmed weirdos. On Mr. M, the music, as usual, has ancestral ties to Sixties and Seventies countrypolitan, but the slow, airy, at times quite beautiful ballads float away from any obvious stylistic anchor, into their own enchanted realm—a dreamy swirl of strings, heavily-reverbed guitar,and Wagner's clipped rumble of a voice, intoning lyrics like "The sky it opens up like candy/And the wind don't know my name." The album is dedicated to the late Vic Chesnutt, and it’s a worthy tribute to that iconoclast: ethereal, melancholy, and just plain strange.

Listen to Lambchop's "Gone Tomorrow":

Related
• Photos: Random Notes

“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?'"