After making a name for herself as a featured vocalist on hits by French rappers Diam's and Dadoo, French pop singer/songwriter Vitaa made her chart-topping album debut with À Fleur de Toi (2007). The 15-track album was co-written by Mounir Maarouf, with the exception of a few songs co-penned by Street Fabulous, most notably the hit single "Ma Soeur." Other highlights of the album are "À Fleur de Toi," "Toi," and "Pourquoi les Hommes?"© Jason Birchmeier /TiVo

As a guitarist in the beloved band Big Thief, Buck Meek traffics in a precious brand of indie folk. On his own, the former busker with a distinctive twang is informed by the country sounds of places he’s lived, including Southern California’s Topanga Canyon and central Texas. There are traces of Gillian Welch and Townes Van Zandt in both his songwriting and storytelling. There’s also a sunshiny brightness to his Americana, as on the spirited "Cyclades." Guitars get raucous, like colts kicking up dust, as Meek recounts family lore about his father driving a motorcycle around a Siskiyou County, California forest and running into a gang of elk, and his mother playfully letting go of the steering wheel in Greece and sliding across the line toward a truck. "Secret Side" is beautiful and gently tumbling, as Meek sings about coming home and unexpectedly hearing your partner singing in a voice you've never heard before, singing words you've never heard before—and how none of us can ever wholly know another person. His voice cracks, a sort of exclamation point, as he marvels, "I saw you feel without a reason." Spare and simple, "Lullabies" lets Meek’s poignant voice shine against the quietly strumming guitar as he describes watching the agony and otherworldly delirium of childbirth, lifting lines from "You Are My Sunshine" while Mat Davidson's fiddle weeps quietly in the corner. The title track, co-written with Jolie Holland, is an amiable amble; the music is rustic and sunny (thanks in part to Davidson’s pedal steel) and the lyrics like a dreamscape: "Every dewdrop on this haunted mountain/ Is like a tiny crystal ball/ Early in the morning/ I peer into the living leaves/ And prophesy with the light of dawn." "Paradise" is lazy Sunday morning soulful, with Meek stretching to reach falsetto heights. "Didn't Know You Then" is a sweet country jangle with the beautiful looseness of R.E.M. covering Velvet Underground songs (see: Dead Letter Office). "Undae Dunes" finds Meek playing with dynamics—a determined, Flaming Lips-ish marching beat; howling, confused guitar—as he spins a tale about a boy who willingly goes up off with extraterrestrials: "Blue eyed boy, shining like a movie/ In corduroys kissing Susie … UFO touched down/ Climb on Jim/ "Please don't go" she begged/ But he was gone with the wind." © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

Difficult births are no stranger to Evanescence. Nothing ever quite seems to come easy for Amy Lee, yet the five years separating Evanescence’s 2006 sophomore effort The Open Door and its eponymous 2011 album were relatively quiet, the band undergoing some lineup changes -- not to mention a switch of producers, from Steve Lillywhite to Nick Raskulinecz -- but nothing comparable to the messy departure of Ben Moody between the group’s first two albums. Such comparative calm is reflected within the grooves of Evanescence, which is less tortured tonally even if it remains quite dramatic. Lee’s default mode is to sing to the rafters, her operatic bluster sometimes overbearing when her settings are gloomy, but Raskulinecz pulls off a nifty trick of brightening the murk, retaining all of the churning drama but lessening the oppression by brightening the colors and pushing the melody. While there’s hardly a danger of Amy Lee removing her thick mascara, she’s not pouting all the time; there’s some shade and light here, some variety of tempos, enough to give Evanescence the illusion of warmth, not to mention a fair share of crossover hooks. It’s aural candy for aging goths and tortured tweens alike.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The Screaming Trees one-upped their major-label debut, Uncle Anesthesia, with this solid, vastly underrated effort. Sweet Oblivion's lead single, the jumpy hard rocker "Nearly Lost You," proved itself a highlight on the hugely successful, Seattle-themed Singles soundtrack. But even though the Screaming Trees stacked up quite well against their more famous peers in that particular showcase, the exposure didn't make them stars. Perhaps it was because Sweet Oblivion had been released several months before Singles, and the band thus couldn't build a sense of anticipation for a new album release, the way Alice in Chains and Smashing Pumpkins did for Dirt and Siamese Dream, respectively; nor could they capitalize on the extra publicity that goes along with new releases. For whatever reason, Singles didn't push sales of Sweet Oblivion, as the latter only scraped the lower reaches of the Billboard charts. And that's a shame, because the record is quite good -- the best songs here are easily among the best in their catalog, and the songwriting was their most consistent yet. "Nearly Lost You" is a standout, of course, but "Dollar Bill," "Shadow of the Season," and "Butterfly" are nearly as impressive. Mark Lanegan's raspy voice conveys a weary wistfulness that adds an unexpected dimension to the group's otherwise macho garage-psych grunge. The Trees no longer sound all that punkish, trading in some of their early, noisy fury for a more '70s-indebted hard rock sound, but it's done with a graceful power that proves they were at least the equal of their more famous fellow scenesters. Unfortunately, the four-year hiatus between Sweet Oblivion and its follow-up, Dust, ensured that the band would be forever relegated to cult status.© Steve Huey /TiVo

Before starting his quartet, Patrick Watson explored a variety of musical forms, from rock to electronica, and though Close to Paradise is clean indie pop, these other influences show up in the album frequently. A Coldplay for the hipster crowd (that's X&Y-era Coldplay, not Parachutes Coldplay), Watson and his band write lush, ethereal, spacey melodies that swell into Jeff Buckley-esque symphonies or relax into measured shoegazer riffs; there are hints of ambient too, the way everything tends to swirl and coalesce, the occasional subtle drum programming, the stuttering loops, but there's also chamber pop in the string arrangements and piano arpeggios and even, at times, a tendency toward cabaret. But despite all these things happening, the album never comes across as busy or overwhelming. In part this is thanks to the Canadian folk influence -- the moan of the lap steel, the flitting banjo -- that sweeps over everything like a prairie wind, Neil Young allusions and all, grounding the pieces in simple chord changes or wisping lines, but it's also very much because of guitarist Simon Angell (from Watson's high school ska band Gangster Politics), who adds his lightly distorted electric guitar at just the right moments, just when the dreamy piano seems to be moving too far outward into unstructured territory. In "Drifters," for example, Watson's trippy vocals echo off one another, but before it becomes too dancey, Angell comes in with strong, classical chords, pulling the piece toward something lush and orchestrated like what the Dears, rather than BT, might do. With "Slip into Your Skin" he uses his instrument to different effect, waiting until the song is more than halfway done before he plays his slow but frantic-sounding riff; it's sparse but it's deliberate and necessary, short lines of dialogue that bring the plot together with the characters and the setting. In fact, Close to Paradise plays like a film soundtrack more than anything else, from the Cirque du Soleil vamping of "Weight of the World" to the Peter Pan-esque twinkling of "Daydreamer," backing the story of some sunken-shouldered traveler as he walks, or floats, across the plains. Entrancing, to say the least.© Marisa Brown /TiVo

The subject matter of this collection of classic music from (mostly) Hollywood seems a major departure from violinist Daniel Hope's previous focus on music contending with the Nazi cultural orbit, but actually it's a logical step: a great deal of Hollywood film music was composed by refugees from Germany, and the stylistic world they created continues to resonate today. There are several good recordings of this repertory by young violinists, but Hope's stands out. Partly it's because Hope's big, richly sentimental sound fits this repertory well. Partly it's because he varies the program effectively with the full Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35, of Erich Korngold, and an appearance by none other than Sting in Hanns Eisler's The Secret Marriage, while still finding the core that connects all these pieces. Partly it's that Hope finds some unusual things that connect with the rest of the program: a couple of German film scores from the early 1930s, and the German melody better known as As Time Goes By, from the film Casablanca. And partly it's the variety and sequence of arrangements running from Jascha Heifetz down to the present day. The result is a fine outing that will satisfy anyone in the mood for big film themes, but also those who are seriously interested in film music.© TiVo

After making a bid to become the '80s version of Steely Dan on the delightful Flaunt the Imperfection, China Crisis offered a fuller and more pop-oriented follow-up the next year. With the duo of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley (replacing Walter Becker) sharing the producer's chair, the songs on What Price Paradise feature warm, intricate arrangements and prominent brass and strings. But while more than one Langer/Winstanley offering of this era overwhelmed its subject with such treatment -- Elvis Costello's ill-fated Goodbye Cruel World is a good example -- the sophisticated and melodic songs here prosper from the attention to detail. The Motown-ish bounce of "Worlds Apart" and "June Bride" is made even more infectious by punchy horn charts, while "Hampton Beach" offers sweeping melodrama, as Gary Daly's delicate vocals are surrounded with just the right touches. Even the songs that hint at the previous album's jazzy complexities, like disc opener "It's Everything," are more accessible and inviting here and, on "Arizona Sky," China Crisis seemed to have the big American hit that singles like "King in a Catholic Style" didn't quite deliver. Released at a time when many of the group's U.K. new wave contemporaries were being flushed off the charts -- most for good -- What Price Paradise was yet another strong outing from this too-often underrated band.© Dan LeRoy /TiVo