This Rhode Island band plays despairing songs at crippled-spirit speed, in stridently antique tones: long sighs of pump organ; the soprano warble of a bowed saw; the rusted-Leonard Cohen whisper of singer-songwriter Ben Knox Miller. Smart Flesh is also magnificent sadness. The Low Anthem render the ghosts and damaged souls in these songs with delicate precision — the swirling pedal steel guitar in "Apothecary Love," the pregnant spaces and sternly strummed banjo in "I'll Take Out Your Ashes" — steeped in echo. It's as if the Band stripped their prairie-gothic majesty down to Tom Waits' early barfly essentials. There are few happy endings here, but the wounded have plenty of room to roam and waltz.

Listen to "Ghost Woman Blues":

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“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?'"