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It would take an act of genius for a new British dance-rock band to seem original four years after the debut of an already quotation-conscious Franz Ferdinand. Nicking from Talking Heads and beyond ("On Board" lifts a synth riff via Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principle's house track "Your Love"), these suburban lads make no such claims.

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Devin the Dude's enthusiasms are pretty conventional -- weed, wine, women -- but those are the only conventional things about him. As a rapper, he veers between explicit boasts and self-deprecating wisecracks in a matter-of-fact flow that serves as a pointed contrast to the syrupy coo that he employs when singing his hooks.

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Well respected for sparse, plaintive bummer folk since his 2004 debut, LaMontagne gets a bit more expansive here, gently juking his earthy rasp with Stax-y horns, guitar twang, and lilting lady backup vocals.

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Supporting the Top 10 breakthrough of Combat Rock, but dividing a reggae-and-hits-heavy set list more or less evenly among their first five albums, a garage band graduates from garageland in front of 50,000 Who partisans on October 13, 1982.

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Angela Desveaux rests on the alt-country continuum somewhere between Lucinda Williams and Neko Case, though she's never as intensely brooding as the former or as poppily populist as the latter. The Canadian singer-songwriter's second album loses some of her former twang, going for Pretenders-style rocking ("Hide From You") and twilight wooziness ("Joining Another").

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Former Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachmann has led the folksier Crooked Fingers for nearly a decade, but he still operates in the shadow of his semi-seminal indie-rock outfit, due to an inconsistency that also plagues Forfeit/Fortune.