Buck 65
"Situation"
(Strange Famous)

Timelag-wise, the 1957 concept is as if some '60s songpoet had conceived an album about Armistice Day, influenza, the Palmer raids and Mary Pickford. Only that would have been a milestone and this isn't, which you can blame on heightened aesthetic expectations rather than the potency of this Canadian rapper's literary mojo. Abandoning cabaret dalliances, Buck growls "tenfold"-"Glenn Gould" and "go study"-"Mr. Nobody" over insistent purist-plus beats. He's content to be a bohemian who knows something, like for instance who the "know-nothing bohemians" were. Beatniks, declared outraged 1958 square Norman Podhoretz, who would say the same in 2008 about Richard Terfry if he wasn't so busy bombing Iran. Podhoretz, I mean. Terfry's just bombing him.

Dollar Store
"Money Music"
(Bloodshot)

For the hundreds of us -- nay, thousands of us -- who worry that the Waco Brothers have lost steam, the sturdy writing on this second release from Dean Schlabowske's non-Langford band suggests a reason. Put three or four of these songs -- I'd nominate the anthemic "Money Music," the defeated "Work = Reward," the sarcastic "Reserve the Right," and the nationalism metaphor "Company Town" -- on the last Wacos' album and it would fly to heaven and do its great speckled business on our heads. As rendered by Schlabowske's muscular cohort, the songs' workmanship stays on the ground -- all the better to look us in the eye.

Mariem Hassan
"Deseos"
(Nubenegra)

This strong Saharaui woman is one more singing cynosure whose solo debut proves she needed her band. Without the backing of Leyoad and especially the male counterpoint of Jalihena, she permits herself unaccompanied meditations where she has trouble maintaining the same intensity of concentration, ours and possibly hers. Hassan remains a voice to be heard. But if you start drifting away, cue up the groove tracks "El Chouhada" and "Kalat Leili."

Jens Lekman
"Night Falls Over Kortedala"
(Secretly Canadian)

In a time when pop retro is split between neotrad rat-packers like Michael Bublé and faux-ironic blowhards like Richard Hawley, this Swede traffics in feeling. With their accented lyrics and melodies from wherever, his fact-filled love songs -- foiled picnicker wakes up in a grubby ER with the girl whose sneak hug put him there, minor pop singer falls for the lesbian who enlisted him as her beard while fending off her father with auto-replies -- seem completely innocent of the busy posturing of hepcats and blowhards. Loaded with talent, heart and personality, he's an eccentric who still thinks the world is his friend, and one more sweet argument for the civilized compromises of democratic socialism.

Los Campesinos!
"Hold on Now, Youngster ..."
(Arts & Crafts)

The first words on the first proper album by these giddy, frantic, proudly hyperintelligent Welsh music snobs: "Broken down like a war economy." The seventh title: "This Is How You Spell 'Hahaha, We Destroyed the Hopes and Dreams of a Generation of Faux-Romantics.'" Only they're so giddy and frantic it's impossible to believe they're broken down with no hopes or dreams. They're merely hyperintelligent enough to know that holding on won't get any easier, and strong-minded enough to know that they'd better get a grip right now -- or at least a head start as they leap toward heaven or into the abyss. Like their exclamation-pointed siblings the Go! Team, only with the better songs you'd expect of theoretical dance-pop that emphasizes the second half of the fusion, they believe! A glockenspiel in a guitar band? Freshens up the sound, they think. And they're right.

Kate Nash
"Made of Bricks"
(Geffen)

A lot of these songs don't hold up when you hang in there for every word -- not because they sink into metaphor, but the fellow citizen because their points are softer than you'd hope. In neither wit nor brass does she approach Lily Allen, who figured out that an ordinary girl sticking up for herself could be a template. Nor has she grown into the intricacy of the slightly older Jens Lekman, who did the same for an ordinary guy seeking love without being a sap about it. But Nash has staying power. Whether watching "CSI" or distinguishing pimples from freckles or enthusiastically pronouncing the full titles she feels obliged to render as "D---head" and "S--- Song," she remains a nice kid whose knowledge of her own limitations doesn't interfere with her self-respect. That's not just because the knowledge helps her make catchy music out of it, either. But the music helps.

Setona & African Crossroads
"[Live]"
(Blue Flame)

Fronted by a cheerfully ambitious, deeply entertaining Sudanese henna artist, wedding consultant and practitioner of traditional female perfume and vapor-bath mysteries, this is the rare live album that busts out with a life and energy its studio counterparts only suggest. Evoking both Ali Hassan Kuban funk and the shaabi shaabi of the Cairo where the former Fatma Ali Adam Uthman now makes her home and helms her business, it romps over ordinary standards of genre decorum in pursuit of the greenback euro. Crazy saxes, Nubian accordions and male singers striving to take control faithfully serve and fruitlessly vie with a desert diva who can steal the show at the launch of a shriek.

Toumast
"Ishumar"
(Real World)

Though his name doesn't grace the press release and he doesn't join Tuareg militant Moussa Ag Keyna and Keyna's female cousin Aminatou Goumar on the cover, what distinguishes this desert trance-rock from other desert trance-rock is French film-dance-theater composer Dan Levy, who produced, arranged, engineered, mixed and played 10 instruments on its debut album. Real World has always gone for "accessibility," but in a style this austere, some subtle schlock is a good thing. Rather than Tartit or Tinariwen, neither of whom eschew the theatrical themselves, this is the Tuareg music I'll play for friends after they've had their fill of "Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara."