Trois-Rivières isn't exactly punk rock's ancestral home, but Jim Giguère and his band of scarred romantics have spent a decade proving that geography means nothing when the songs are honest enough. *A New Frame of Mind* arrives not as a victory lap but as a confession booth with a Marshall stack bolted to the door, and it's the finest thing this outfit has committed to tape.

There is a particular kind of quiet that only a solo guitarist can conjure, and Martin Lloyd Howard has bottled it whole on "Highland Mist." This is not music that shouts for your attention; it insinuates itself, the way fog creeps down a glen before you've quite registered that the light has changed. From the opening bars, you sense you're in the hands of a player who has spent a lifetime with wood and string — and indeed you are: Howard trained classically before wandering, magpie-like, through folk, blues and rock, picking up textures from Bream's precision, Simpson's earthiness, and a dash of the acoustic mysticism Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore reserved for their quieter, campfire-adjacent moments.

Twenty-nine minutes, one afternoon, four musicians and a voice that refuses to be tidied up: that's the whole conceit of Syna Awel's Live Acoustic Session, and it turns out to be plenty. Strip away the studio gloss from a record and you usually find out fairly quickly whether the songs were ever more than production. Here, the opposite happens. "Isem-is Amazigh" opens the set sounding less like a performance than a summons — Mahir Bostandzija's percussion arriving like a heartbeat remembered rather than counted, Anis Agrebi's oud curling around Syna Awel's phrasing the way smoke curls around a lamp. You sense immediately that nothing on this session was rehearsed into submission.

Redemption stories are cheap in pop music. Everybody claims one, and most of them boil down to a stint in rehab and a new haircut. Daye Jack's version is stranger and more interesting than that, and it shows in the grain of this record.

Every band claims a story of sweat and underdog grit; Evil Jake happen to have earned theirs. Formed in New York City and fronted by guitarist and songwriter Mike Jacobs, this is a band that learned its trade the honest way — through overdriven amplifiers and rooms too small for the noise being made in them. Released on April 1, 2003, *Be My Ex-Girlfriend* remains the record that put them on the map, and two decades on it still sounds like a band with something to prove and the chops to prove it.