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This deeply satisfying 21-song tribute was devised to help recently widowed singer-songwriter Mark Mulcahy (ex–Miracle Legion, Polaris) raise his young twin daughters and get on with life. (Grab a hankie before reading the liner notes.) Some artists -- a creepy Thom Yorke murmuring "All for the Best," a lunatic Frank Black bellowing "Bill Jocko" -- twist the material.

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Times New Viking have truly mastered the no-fi game: No matter how they defile their sound (with razor blades, broken glass, tape hiss), they make sure there's bubblegum at the center. Here, TNV intensify the sweet and the abrasive.

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Ex-Concretes frontwoman Victoria Bergsman sings as if she never leaves her windowsill, let alone her native land. But this shy Swede (whose voice was the female counterpoint on Peter Bjorn and John's "Young Folks") recorded her album with local Sufi musicians in Pakistan.

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Most alt-country fetishizes cowboy days, but Langhorne Slim’s third full-length does so while swiping tricks from this decade’s best rock bands. The joyful chorus of “Say Yes” could have been shouted by Arcade Fire, while “I Love You, But Goodbye” walks the same line between loveliness and dissonance as Wilco.

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Garage-punk mensch Greg Cartwright has been refining the Reigning Sound's frayed, soulful bleat since the band's 2001 debut (after his rowdier crew, the Oblivians, screeched their last). And here he's at his most tenderly heartworn yet.

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Von Oswald has been at the vanguard of electronic music for almost two decades, remaking German techno into something befitting a supercollider -- spacious, echoing, metalencased -- with Basic Channel, Maurizio, and Rhythm & Sound.