Swedish crooner Jens Lekman is never one to shy away from emoting, or playful hyperbole. So it is on his latest offering, “The End of the World is Bigger than Love.” He sings that “A broken heart is not the end of the world,” but a broken heart is bigger than a strange and poetic litany that includes an iceberg, the plume of a geyser, a spider floating in your cider, the stock market, and loose change in your pocket. Perspective is everything, and Lekman plays with it in this layered song, adding strings and ancillary percussion (maybe even a Vibraslap?) to create another signature soundscape.

In typical Lekman style, the second verse is not the same as the first. Lekman takes the listener to Washington, D.C., where he was, presumably on Obama’s election day. He leaves town “content in the world’s direction.” Part of Lekman’s gift is to weave folk-singer like storytelling without all the other trappings that often accompany folk music. His last full-length Night Falls Over Kortedala (2007, Secretly Canadian) included two other great storytelling tracks, “Postcard to Nina” and “Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig.”

It’s been a few years since Lekman melted hearts with his enduring classic “Black Cab.” Still, any new offering from Lekman, even a one-off like “The End of the World is Bigger than Love” is always welcome. Yet on the subject of a new full-length, well you’re still so silent, Jens. I guess having to wait isn’t the end of the world.

Western musical styles have always held the drone at arm’s length. The musical traditions of other cultures–from India to the Middle East to Siberia to Australia–have historically embraced the inherent hypnotic tug of sustained tones, undertones, and overtones slipping and sliding against each other. However, aside from the Scots and their bagpipes, Europeans haven’t been too terribly keen on the drone. It’s generally been relegated to the avant-garde in Western culture, with The Beatles, The Velvet Underground and the shoegaze bands championing it in pop music (but those people have always been considered a bit weird anyway).

So it’s something of a surprise to hear a Brooklyn folkie like Sharon Van Etten building a song atop a drone that could have come straight off a vintage Tony Conrad album. Instead, it’s lifted from her confidently titled new record, Epic, due out October 5th on Ba Da Bing. “Love More” is a mesmerizing thing, a slow, steady, sturdy bedrock upon which other instruments come and go until Etten’s vocals arrive, followed by the guitars and percussion, bringing the elements more commonly associated with Brooklyn folkies.

It’s that unyielding drone in the background that gives the spare instrumentation of the rest of the song feel epic–the muted guitars, Etten’s multi-tracked vocals, and the deliberate drumbeats. As they swell together during the finale of the song, they sell the hard-won lessons of a failed relationship just as effectively with pure sound as the lyrics do with words.

It’s been twenty-two years since the Cowboy Junkies first turned heads by mixing roots music with The Velvets’ ambience. It’s good to hear someone like Sharon Van Etten demonstrate that the combination is still far from played out.

Once upon a time, twee was twee and rock was rock, and never the twain would meet. Enter Marc Cantone, with his battalion of talented musicians, who operate under the moniker The City and Horses. This offering from 2009′s I Don’t Want to Dream brings to mind everything from the underappreciated genius of Kicking Giant to the bedroom stylings of John Darnielle. Wherever the song may wander, Cantone makes sure to adorn it with embellishments befitting the brilliance of popsters like Big Star or Edwyn Collins.

Like a beating heart, the song’s core pulses through the layers of sound at the break as Cantone sings, “Who is city and who is horses? Who writes the words and who sings the choruses?” There are just so many things that Cantone wants to know. And he’d like you to accompany him on his journey by guesting on his next recording, especially if you play the washboard or the pennywhistle. (He actually asks for recruits on their MySpace page.)

Even if you don’t play the pennywhistle, check out the debut from Cantone and his band of merry minstrels, and stay tuned for their sophomore album, which is set to surface later this fall on Paper Garden Records.

Trying to describe the Blonde Redhead’s sound to those who haven’t had the pleasure of listening to their musical trajectory over the past fifteen years is a tricky endeavor. In the anatomy of independent rock music, Blonde Redhead is the connective tissue between Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, creating enchanting and occasionally flummoxing soundscapes which equally embrace the noisy and the melodious. Over the course of seven studio LPs, the New York City trio has gradually tempered their more rambunctious early sound in favor of more melodic pastures. The latest evidence of this trend is their upcoming eighth record, Penny Sparkle, which will be released on September 14th by 4AD.

Our first taste of the band’s first new material since 2007′s 23 is “Here Sometimes,” a steely composition set to a kinky drum loop and surprising synthesizer flares. As the track develops, it acquires an increasing depth of layers, packing in keyboard washes, drum machine tracks, and long, loping guitar notes. Kazu Makino sounds heavenly throughout, her voice almost singlehandedly carrying the listener through the song’s slow building first passage and then soaring through the more dense instrumentation of the sections which follow. “Here Sometimes” is poetry as music, filled with resonant emotions and more “feeling” than structure (although it is not lacking for any of the latter). It is also one of the most accessible moments in the Blonde Redhead canon, one that will hopefully turn some new listeners on to classic efforts such as 1995′s La Mia Vita Violenta.