In 2009, Los Angeles singer-songwriter Pete Yorn released a collaboration with Omaha tunesmith Mike Mogis and a disc of duets with Scarlett Johansson. His latest, a team-up with Pixies leader Frank Black recorded in just five days, is the most appealing of the three: a stripped-raw set of guitar-driven stompers sung in a direct, desperate yowl. "Paradise Cove I" and "Always" chug along with a Nineties alt-rock flair, though Yorn saves room for gentler tunes like the lovelorn, acoustic-strummed "Stronger Than." But while Black may have brought out Yorn's inner rocker, he hasn't transformed him into a poet: "Rock crowd, throw your arms around me," he sings earnestly on "Rock Crowd." "I feel glad when y'all surround me."

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“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”