Right, so, Reinis Jaunais. Latvian, guitar-slinger, world-wanderer… makes sense that his new album, "Nest," feels like opening a suitcase overflowing with… things. Not junk, mind you. More like… carefully curated curiosities. Eleven songs, eleven postcards from somewhere just beyond the familiar. https://open.spotify.com/album/5mbemTIWhAYV7fHe5V9562 It's world music, yes, but not in the dusty, anthropological sense. Think more… progressive fusion. A touch of the acoustic guitar played in that...

Sophia Mengrosso’s new album, “Unforgiven”, doesn’t so much start as it does detonate, a thirteen-song treatise on survival. Her voice, a thing clearly trained for gilded halls and velvet curtains, instead wails from within a foundry’s clang and fire. The result is a bizarre and beautiful collision, the sonic equivalent of discovering a lost Caravaggio painting lit by a flickering fluorescent tube in a...