I bet I'm not alone in saying that most of us didn't see this one coming. I mean, this smelled like a vanity project from the go: top model asks her rock star boyfriend to produce an album for her? I mean... How could they make this work and not be ridiculed? Amazingly, that's just what happened. And astoundingly, it's one of the year's best. Ladies and gentlemen, make way for a significant new artist has just walked into town.

Karen Elson is her name and she sings of things both ancient and timeless. She carries the weight of all female suffering with her and her soft and sometimes sandpaper-y voice casts spells on whomever makes an effort to really listen to her. She sings of lost loves, new loves, contradictory loves, timeless loves. And she cradles you while doing so. It's hard to imagine how effortlessly she does all this and how genuinely she does it. You just couldn't tell that by looking at her pretty pictures from her other day-job. What a pleasant surprise. And we want more, Ms Elson!

Listen to Lusana and gently fall in love with her.

I just love it when I listen to a new band or sound and it instantly clicks. That's exactly what it happened with Austin, Texas based band Shearwater. They've recently released a new album but I'm still going through their back catalogue and finding a bounty of reasons to write about each and every one of them in here. Today, I'm focusing on their second album proper, Rooks.

Rooks finds Shearwater perfecting their preciously woven sound with even greater epic sounding songs and wide scope-like musical canvas. And then there is that voice. My God. It's been a long time since I've heard such a crystalline sounding male voice, perfectly in command of the song's emotional curves and thematic arches, frail and delicate one second and brave and commanding the other. I'm hooked.

I'm going to leave you with one of its grander moments, The Snow Leopard. Please enjoy it.

This is Emily Bindiger's first and only album on a career that encompassed music, film, TV and stage. Really worth your while, too and a shame that she didn't produce more of this wild, spiritual and brave music.

There hasn't yet been a CD reissue of this, her eponymous album with a cover that is strangely reminiscent of another one I posted here earlier. Bindiger singing and songwriting is very coherent throughout the record, with a voice and melodic style that both reminds us of country and irish traditional music. I guess it must be in her genes or something because she is able to travel back and forth these two musical sources with extreme ease sometimes in the course of a single song.

Take a listen to Jesus Said, a wild journey into religion and spiritual freedom and see what you think.

Bridget St. John's voice is an acquired taste. But one that you get accustomed to quite easily, such is the alluring quality of the smoky way she delivers her deep-felt lyrics.

Again, a singer-songwriter that started her career at the tail end of the 60's and only managed to produce a very limited number of records, before she disappeared from the eye of the public, that are now treasured as something quite inspiring and magical. The one I'm recomending to you on this very rainy day is her second one, Songs For The Gentle Man, which I find to be melodically better than her debut and musically more accomplished.

I leave you then with Early Morning Song, one of the songs from that sophomore release. Listen and slowly let her get to you.

As I tend to watch a lot of movies, sometimes it's easier for me to find myself listening to recording artists that I wouldn't normally come across by even if I was deliberately trying to find something new and fresh to my ears. Such was the case with Linda Perhacs. I happened to listen to her while watching Daft Punk's amazing retro-sci-fi movie ELECTROMA, a movie with no dialogues whatsoever and with a soundtrack compiled by the french electro-dance duo entirely from tracks they loved or found that best suited the movie. I was completely mesmerized by the track you can listen to below - If You Were My Man - and played it over and over again when I finally got the DVD until I realized I had to further investigate this mysterious artist that noone seemed to know about. And so I got the album.

Parallelograms was Perhacs first and only album (again, my penchant for artists with very short careers on full display here...) and it's a beauty with songs that range from the beautifully introspective to the exquisitely arranged. If she recorded more albums, she could have been a contender with Joni Mitchell for one of the best female recording artists of the 70's, because even on this, her debut, she already showed signs of songwriting greatness. As proof, the song below is a sort of B-side as it wasn't even included on the album itself when it came out. Now you can imagine the quality of the other ones. Highly recommended, of course.

There are very few bands that are able to get such high accolades and recognition with their first album. American debuters Fleet Foxes have done just that. And for once, the praises are completely worthy.

Their self-titled first album is simply that: an instant classic. Perfect songs, beautifully sung, exquisitely performed and lovingly produced. I wonder if they already feel the pressure of the dreaded sophomore album syndrome. I honestly hope not because I can only see them going even bigger from here, actually. Debut single, White Winter Hymnal is one of the most bizarre first singles ever released: barely 2 1/2 minutes long, almost no instrumentation whatsoever, big vocal harmonies and a sound that is everything but hip. Yet it worked wonders and still sounds great after many listenings. Brave little bastards, they are.

The rest of the album continues the trend: not a dud in sight, and although the influences are reasonably obvious (Neil Young, Bob Dylan, etc.), their sound is unique and distinctive. I leave you with the album opener proper: Sun It Rises.

A pleasant discovery I made while digging through the incredibly rich and varied world of late 60's to early 70's british folk music.

Heron were an all-male band that put out only two albums in their recording lifetime (again, the penchant I have for artists with small discographies is in full display here...) but be that as it may, those two records were sufficient to put them on the folk map and on the hearts of everyone who listened to them. Gentle melodies gently sung and played on strictly acoustic instruments are the main ingredients of their particular magic. One interesting note is that, apparently, those two albums were recorded in a field - I'm sure you'll agree with me if I say that you cannot get more pastoral than that!

The cover that you see above is for a compilation that was released in 2006 that collected their entire recordings onto a 2 CD album. Everything is there including an E.P. and some rare covers too. But for now, take a listen to Yellow Roses, the track that opens their debut album and gently fall in love with their sound.

I've been listening to this record at least once a week ever since I discovered it. The more I read about them, the more I'm sorry this was the only record they put out. Today, it's considered somewhat of a flawed masterpiece but such was not the case when Mellow Candle first released SWADDLING SONGS to an unsuspecting buying audience.

Backed up by two amazing female singers - Clodagh Simonds and Alison O'Donnell - the songs range from up-tempo folk-rock meteorites to exquisitely arranged melodic reveries. Simonds was also the main songwriter and it's really a shame she stopped composing because she was still very young when SWADDLING SONGS came out and she already displayed very advanced songwriting skills. It's the kind of music that transports you to another time and space. Magical ones, in fact. Listen to Silver Song.