Sin Fang Bous is one guy from Iceland, Sindri Már Sigfússon, who makes the seductive small-combo pop on Clangour (Morr Music). The close-up vocals, austere overdubs and beach-angel harmonies suggest Beck’s Sea Change with laptops and a light coat of frost. Sigfússon tours here in October and November, so you can see how he does it live.

Of British folk singer-guitarist Bert Jansch’s three mid-Seventies albums, reissued by Drag City, 1975’s Santa Barbara Honeymoon was fine writing overdressed in L.A.-pop rhinestones, and 1977’s A Rare Conundrum featured Jansch’s burred voice and fluid picking with a backing that recalled the concentrated intricacies of his earlier band Pentangle. L.A. Turnaround, from 1974, is the best of this trio: a deft stirring of the English folk revival (Jansch revisits his dark Sixties diamond “Needle of Death”) and true-grit country rock, produced with spare empathy by Mike Nesmith. The album was not the commercial breakthrough Jansch hoped for, but its earthy beauty remains intact.

Louie and the Lovers didn’t come from out of nowhere; it just seemed that way. A band of Mexican-Americans from Salinas, California, singer-guitarist-songwriter Louie Ortega, singer-guitarist Frank Paredes, bassist Steve Vargas and drummer Albert Parra quietly issued one of 1970’s best non-hit singles — “I Know You Know,” a bolt of spangled jangle and smooth garage-soul harmonies that Greil Marcus called, in these pages, “perfect music to wake up to” — and then one of rock’s great overlooked debuts, Rise, produced by Doug Sahm.

The golden-dawn chorus of the title song, the fuzz and funk of “Sittin’ by Your River” and the dusty doo-wop waltz “Driver Go Slow” now sound like a natural bridge from Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Chicano-rock explorations of Los Lobos. The Complete Recordings (Bear Family) reissues that prophetic roots ‘n’ spice with two LPs worth of mostly unreleased 1971-73 material, all rolling with the same class and natural groove.

Sharif wouldn’t like it: Raks Raks Raks — 27 Golden Garage Psych Nuggets From the Iranian 60s Scene (Raks Discos) is a magnetically weird a-go-go of Middle Eastern rhythms, guitars acting like ouds and oddly translated R&B (see Googoosh’s harem-Aretha shot at “Respect”). This was a brief party for bands like the Rebels and Moha Jamin, who aspired to Beatlemania under the shah’s repressive modernism. That copies of these rare singles and EPs also survived Sharia is a miracle.

The Pines — stark-country singer-songwriters Benson Ramsey and David Huckfelt — have a thing for speed: They recorded their fine new album, Tremolo (Red House), in two days, half the time it took them to cut 2007’s Sparrows in the Bell. But there is no undue haste in Tremolo’s quietly gripping tension. A state of emergency runs through these songs (like “the turnstile of greed and fear” in “Pray Tell”), but there is safe haven too, even if it’s just a dream of love in “Shiny Shoes,” and the Pines get there with a warm, drawling poise in their voices and spare, resonant picking.

Photo: Ochs Archives/Getty

Tim Buckley was just 20 and a few months away from making his second Elektra album, the baroque-pop treasure Goodbye and Hello, when he gave the stunning raw-folk performance — just voice and acoustic guitar, taped with a single mike on a machine usually reserved for field recordings — on Live at the Folklore Centre, NYC — March 6, 1967 (Tompkins Square). The intimacy is audible; a few coughs during “Cripples Cry” are a rare break in the hypnotized silence of the audience, three dozen strong in a small room. Buckley sounds emboldened by the setting too, playing mostly new songs (six of them previously unreleased) with robust strumming and an aggressive delight in his rippled-glass cries. A year after this show, Buckley was deep into the liquid writing and improvised-vocal reverie of 1968’s Happy Sad — he never made a studio record this simple and dramatic. A closer parallel: the 1993 solo tapes that became his son Jeff’s debut, Live at Sin-é. In both, you get a Buckley on the verge, stripped bare and spellbinding.

It may seem strange and unfair to describe guitarist Roy Buchanan (1939-1988) as an underachiever. An uncommon master of the Fender Telecaster, Buchanan bonded gospel, blues and country dialects in a lashing-treble lightning-speed attack, with a melodic concentration that almost sounded like wild-animal singing. But Buchanan — a legendary sideman (he played on Dale Hawkins‘ 1958 Chess single “My Babe”) and bar-band star in the Washington, D.C., area before he made his national debut in 1971 on a PBS documentary — was uneasy with fame and never embraced the role of frontman, spreading breathtaking solos across an uneven series of albums. Live: Amazing Grace (Powerhouse) is that career in miniature: snapshots of amazing twang pulled from a decade of gigs with shifting rhythm sections. It is also a blinding catalog of fire and invention — the clucking-chicken sass of 1983’s “Hot Cha,” the breathtaking sorrow of Buchanan’s instrumental prayer “The Messiah Will Come Again” on German TV in 1973, a free-form “Malaguena” from a second PBS show in 1972, an extended orgy of slash-and-curl on “Green Onions” from 1974 — that was never truly fulfilled and demands rediscovery.

The British singer Vince Taylor (1939-1991) was, for a spell, the most dangerous man in early rock & roll: a maniacal union of Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison in head-to-toe black leather with a shocking-for-its-time animal sexuality. A sensation in France, Taylor came closest to true immortality in 1972, when David Bowie used Taylor’s transgressive electricity and flamboyant public meltdown (he went weird at a Paris club show in 1965, declaring himself the new Jesus) as raw material for the doomed glam god Ziggy Stardust.

Later, the Clash covered Taylor’s runaway-rockabilly thriller “Brand New Cadillac” on London Calling. But Jet Black Leather Machine (Ace) is the original mayhem, a machine-gun spray of Taylor’s U.K. singles and French EP tracks — including his original 1959 version of “Brand New Cadillac” — that sounds like a missing link between Presley’s Sun sessions and the crisp, breathless R&B of the early Who. Taylor had a so-so voice but yelped and gurgled with vivid dementia and cut his own versions of U.S. hits (”My Baby Left Me,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Twenty Flight Rock”) with proprietary fury. “Always acceleratin’,” Taylor crowed in his 1960 racer “Jet Black Machine.” Get onboard.

Reasons to give some ear to Black Leather Soul (Nickel and Dime), by the Los Angeles power-rock five Angus Khan: The band’s name is brilliant; guitarist Frank Meyer and bassist Dino Everett were in ace neo-Stooges group the Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs; the album opens with a hot cover of “Midnight Moses,” by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band; and the whiff of AC/DC is strong in Derek Christensen’s son-of-Bon Scott vocals and the chanted choruses. You get some generic put-downs (”Scene Bitch”). But in songs like “Call Me Motherfucker” and “Exile on Mean Street,” you get a lot more meat and moxie.

Kentucky-born singer-songwriter Jim Ford (1941-2007) made famous friends easily with his natural blend of country comfort and deep soul. Bobby Womack had a 1972 hit with Ford’s stoner portrait “Harry Hippie”; Nick Lowe performed Ford’s songs with the bands Brinsley Schwarz and Rockpile. But Ford kept hitting brick walls with his own albums. After 1969’s Harlan County, he made two unreleased LPs finally resurrected as The Unissued Capitol Album and Big Mouth USA: The Unissued Paramount Album (both Bear Family). The former, from 1970, has Ford’s pothead-gait version of “Harry Hippie” and is rife with New Orleans hoodoo. “You Just-A” sounds like Ford cut it at a Dr. John-Sly Stone session. The ‘73 Paramount sessions veer wildly from raging honky-tonk to Cajun fiddle and wah-wah funk. In “If I Go Country,” Ford drawls about splitting the big city over a sleek urban-country groove — like he’s headed for Highway 61 via 110th Street.

Photo: Ochs Archives/Getty

In mid-Sixties Detroit, where cool white R&B bands were as common as cars, the Big Three were Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Bob Seger and the Last Heard, and, from nearby Ann Arbor, the Rationals. You might not know that last name: Think Rational! The A-Square Anthology (1965-1968) (Big Beat), a U.K.-import two-CD set, is the first time the quartet’s seminal garage-rock recordings for their manager Jeep Holland’s A-Square label have ever been officially reissued. But now it’s time to dance and be dazzled.

Ryder had the big national singles; Seger got the long platinum career. But the Rationals — guitarist Steve Correll, bassist Terry Trabandt, drummer Bill Figg and singer Scott Morgan — were the local Rolling Stones, Small Faces and Kinks all in one, cutting regional-hit versions of Otis Redding’s “Respect” and Eddie Holland’s “Leaving Here” as tense, brash pop, with the tightness of a Motown rhythm section. (more…)

By itself, the first disc of the two-CD set Open Strings: 1920s Middle Eastern Recordings/New Responses (Honest Jon’s) is an essential trip: torrid improvisations by local oud and violin masters such as Nechat Bey, Sami Chawa and Abdul Hussein Khan Shahnazi, recorded by EMI in Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Turkey, nearly 90 years ago. What is now casually dubbed freak folk was then the highest classical music. The performances are terse (they had to fit on a 78-rpm disc), but the cumulative effect is an intimate rising rhapsody. The rest of Open Strings is original modal “responses” to that virtuosity by devotees such as Sir Richard Bishop (ex-Sun City Girls), Six Organs of Admittance (a.k.a. Ben Chasny) and Scenic’s Bruce Licher, all stars in their underground and all walking in the shadows of giants.

(Get more from Issue 1084 — August 6, 2009)

“Please check the contents of your head,” singer-bassist Steve Kilbey of the Church announced in his slow-rolling-wave baritone during the Australian band’s New York gig on July 8th. “Items may have shifted during flight.” Only for the better. For nearly 30 years, the Church’s heavenly-treble raptures — driven by charter guitarists Peter Koppes and Marty Willson-Piper — have been one of rock’s most dependable and still-evolving trips. The set list that night captured the constancy and mutation, going deep into the gothic-Byrds peal of 1982’s The Blurred Crusade amid the stately-reverb suspense of “Deadman’s Hand” and the creeping-pop poise of “Pangaea,” both from the new untitled #23 (Second Motion). A hypnotic enigma of measured pace and mounting-ring dynamics, the album is, in fact, the group’s 23rd — a genuine milestone in longevity and psychedelic invention.

(Get more from Issue 1084 — August 6, 2009)

Murdering Oscar (and other love songs) (Ruth St.), the new solo album by singer-guitarist Patterson Hood of roaring Georgians Drive-By Truckers, has a knotty back story. Hood was in rough straits in 1994 — recently divorced, without a band — when he began documenting the emotional wreckage in many of these songs: the sexual vengeance in “Screwtopia,” the war with guilt in the title track. The hell wasn’t all his — “Heavy and Hanging” was Hood’s immediate response to Kurt Cobain’s death — and the darkness lifts in later songs like “I Understand Now.” But Hood, who formed the Truckers with guitarist Mike Cooley in 1996, would not start recording any of this material until 2005. That was our lucky break. What might have been, in ‘94, an album of oppressive self-pity crackles and gallops in the ‘05 sessions with weathered muscle and howling-wolf guitars, like a side road out of the Truckers’ 2004 master blast, The Dirty South. Hood’s band is also hauling big freight this season: Live in Austin TX (New West), a CD-DVD set of the Truckers’ hot 2008 set on Austin City Limits; and a rarities bundle, The Fine Print (New West). The latter opens with a brawling Bob Dylan pastiche, “George Jones Talkin’ Cell Phone Blues,” then closes with the true grit: a cover-on-fire of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

(Get more from Issue 1084 — August 6, 2009)

Singing into one mike, Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey, vocal-guitar pillars of Dixie power-pop icons the dB’s, cut through the bland sound at a recent New York show with the silver-blade harmonizing of their obvious idols Big Star and the Everly Brothers. On the fine Here and Now (Bar/None), Holsapple and Stamey give those sources fresh life with poignant writing (”Broken Record,” the title song) and bracing jangle (”Widescreen World”). Their great live cover that night of the 1968 Everlys B-side “Lord of the Manor” is not on the CD, but you get a warm return to the 1972 Family song “My Friend the Sun.”

[From Issue 1082-83, July 9-23, 2009]