Take Jack Horton, a Portland-based singer-songwriter whose path to folk-Americana included stops at Japanese law school, Tokyo piano bars, corporate boardrooms, and government offices. His latest EP, "Imperfections," feels like finding someone's private journal set to music. And that someone happens to write really, really well. The five-song collection opens with "Set Me Free," a piano-driven confession that might surprise anyone expecting typical breakup bitterness. Horton...

Post-punk and corporate jargon have seldom been this intimate. When Charts and Graphs dropped "Assume the Position," I wasn’t expecting them to twist a cubicle-bound lexicon into something that dances around your brain like your 1984 office nightmares had a rhythmic pulse. But here we are, shoulders bouncing while existential dread whispers in the ear. It's synthetic, it’s tangible, but it’s also claustrophobic. It's...