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After the success of 2005's spiky, straightforward debut, Silent Alarm, Bloc Party took an undeserved thumping for last year's more textured, politically minded, and ultimately better A Weekend in the City.

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In a climate noisy with hip-hop, shiny R&B, bashful indie, and rockers who exploit grunge's worst traits, Snow Patrol stand out as staggeringly straight-arrow, playing spacious rafter-rock that practically begs to be loved. In fact, these Irishmen have only one real contemporary: Coldplay.

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These swooning, Smiths-worshipping Canadians set aside the overweening sadness of their early recordings for 2006’s fantastic Gang of Losers. But troubled sessions for Missiles led to the departure of most of the band, leaving married couple Murray Lightburn and Natalia Yanchak to indulge in some claustrophobic soul-searching.

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This Manchester band had a storied career -- Factory Records alumni, contemporaries of the Smiths, loads of U.K. hit singles, not-unreasonable cries of "the next U2" -- but worldwide fame rose and fell with the title track of 1993's Brian Eno– produced Laid, and they split in 2001.

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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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Getting past Raymond Raposa's world-weary façade -- big beard, deliberately grizzled voice, atmospheric instrumental interludes -- takes a willful suspension of disbelief not unlike what Will Oldham requires, but City of Refuge often rewards that patience.