At its core “Skinny Cow Blues” is a teenage pick up song that could have been plucked from Richard Linklater’s classic Dazed and Confused. You can almost hear Matthew McConaughey’s character saying, “You’ve got a nice last name / ask me to say it again / in the car.”

Instead it was written by David Dewese and Jerry James, two guys who call Texas and Nashville home, and for “Skinny Cow Blues,” geography is destiny. With pacing that is reminiscent of Pavement’s twangy “Gold Soundz,” the song uses piano and layered background vocals to soften the scratchy distortion of the lead vocals. The artful balance of acoustic melody and fuzzed-out electric guitar lines build tension as “Skinny Cow Blues” reaches its coda.

Dewese and James christened themselves The Foxymorons back in the mid-1990s when the two friends started making music together. The duo’s fourth long player, Bible Stories, will be released August 24th by Philadelphia label Heatstroke Records.

Shreveport, Louisiana’s Dylan LeBlanc wouldn’t seem to have had much choice when it came to careers–he had to be a musician. A name like Dylan LeBlanc would’ve been wasted on an orthodontist.

Fortunately, then, destiny seems to have smiled on young LeBlanc by making him rather good at his inevitable calling. On “If Time Was For Wasting,” he displays a surer hand with windswept, world-weary country-rock than any 20-year-old would seem to have a right to. The song deploys keening pedal steel over an easy, upbeat shuffle while LeBlanc spins a yarn about his troubles with a girl named Julie Anne in a voice that splits the difference between Jeff Tweedy and David Gray and builds into one of those classic country-rock choruses about locking the doors on one another. It’s a pretty ridiculously mature and accomplished track and bodes well for his upcoming debut on Rough Trade.

If history holds true, LeBlanc has picked a good time to launch his career. Over the last century give or take, the odd-numbered decades have been banner eras for rootsy Americana – bluegrass & old timey music in the 30s, rockabilly in the 50s, California country-rock in the 70s and the alt-country explosion of the 90s. If the twenty year cycle is preparing to lift country-rock to the top of the heap once more, Dylan LeBlanc should be positioned to ride the wave to the top.

At the age of sixteen, Doug Burr heard his calling; he picked up a guitar and hasn’t looked back. Since then, the Denton, Texas resident has led (and disbanded) a group called The Lonelies and released three albums under his own name, most recently 2007′s critically lauded On Promenade. On May 4th, Burr will let loose his fourth LP courtesy of Velvet Blue Music. The intriguingly titled O Ye Devastator is a stirring collection of eleven new songs dotted with slide guitar, banjo, and Burr’s spectral vocals–a surefire pleaser for fans of both the Son Volt/Jayhawks school of rootsy alt-country as well as those partial to the folksy reinventions of artists like Devendra Banhart and Mark Kozelek.

“Red, Red” is the fourth cut on O Ye Devastator and begins with a clatter of drum sticks and the tartness of banjo strings. Burr’s voice soon cuts through the mix with its tremulous inflections, his timbre colored by an emotive and distinctive quavering. As “Red, Red” moves through its first passages, Burr and his associates stealthily tighten the musical backdrop. By the time the listener is treated to the snare drum’s cannonade, more than halfway through the song, the build up and accompanying climax is of a hefty, satisfying sort. It is a quintessential example of how to create drama and release in songcraft–not through bombast or orchestral layering, but through simple intensity and musical acumen. Doug Burr is a shrewd songwriter but he’s also a gutsy one, crystallizing moments into notes which resonate long after they’ve fallen silent.

This month, My Morning Jacket‘s Yim Yames (elsewhere known as Jim James) and former MMJ guitarist Johnny Quaid are launching a new record label called Removador Recordings and Solutions, a brand that promises to deliver listeners not only “some of the coldest music they ain’t never heard,” but also “problem solving, sports, rehab, recreation, vacation planning, vaccinations, ghosts, and social networking.” Thankfully, at least the first part is definitely true, as one of their first releases will be the debut full-length from Quaid’s new act, The Ravenna Colt. Slight Spell is slated for a February 16th release and is positively overflowing with golden melodies in the glorious Americana tradition.

In 2004, Quaid left behind his native Kentucky, making his destiny manifest in the form of a new lifestyle in the Golden State. On “South of Ohio,” he sings “I lost my drawl in California,” but especially against the backdrop of slide guitars gentle percussion, the listener knows such a statement to (thankfully) be false. The Ravenna Colt’s sound is immediately familiar and cozy, built as it is on the shoulders of giants like Uncle Tupelo and The Jayhawks, but it is also distinctive in its frictionless glide. One doesn’t typically think of words like “elegant” and “effortless” in conjunction with the often scrappy alt-country classification, but such descriptors clearly befit The Ravenna Colt. “South of Ohio” is a poetic reflection on travel and personal identity that positions The Ravenna Colt as one of the new leaders on the Americana scene.