The main signifier is Peyroux's sound, now as downhome as a chicken shack and artfully haunted as a Cassandra Wilson session. Tasteful.

Loud guitars are everywhere, bucked by riffing horns, and the general vibe is testosteronal and sleeveless. He is a rippingly good player.

All diva froideur and drum machine snap, it nevertheless transcends pastiche via a pervasive air of murky ambiguity.

While nothing grates, all it really achieves is to make you want to hear Hank sing them.

Desperately, painfully arty but worthy of your recollection.

This is another acting job, in a sense, and Laurie's faux-Southern drawl grates a little, but he's assembled a band of N'awlins old hands to add authenticity.

Composer Joe Acheson seems more interested in texture than development and you can long for a discordant voice, but as head-nodding experiences go, this is pretty good.

His second solo album, while often truly horrible, is also fascinating and funny.

It borders on the twee. That it doesn't cross the frontier is the reason this is worth your attention.

The effect is softly inclusive without being entirely bland, and even if Holland's poetry doesn't ring your bell as poetry, then it certain works in this context as sound-art.

It's a little too polished for the Oh Brother... crowd, but fans of Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss should take note.

By Ben Gibbard's own admission "a much less guitar-centric" record than usual, it is therefore, if only by default, the closest thing yet to a follow-up to Give Up by Gibbard's other concern, the Postal Service, although it's more about pretty pianos than effervescent synths.