Costa Rica is not, on paper, a natural home for Galician folk music. And yet Terra Nai — Diego Alfaro on voice, gaita and acoustic guitar, Keith Guerrero on violin and illustration — have spent the past three years proving that geography is no obstacle to devotion. Their reading of "Foliada de Berducido," the traditional tune from the Galician village of Berducido best known through Milladoiro's celebrated 1980s arrangement, arrives as a small triumph of cross-continental fidelity: a Costa Rican duo bottling the spirit of northwestern Spain and somehow losing none of the original's mist and mischief in transit.

Psychedelic jazz-rock fusion is a genre tag that tends to promise more than it delivers, a shorthand for noodling indulgence dressed up in kaftans and reverb. Dan Webb, mercifully, ignores the tag entirely and just gets on with the business of making something genuinely strange and genuinely good.

Rock and roll doesn't need reinventing this year — not when a BC guitar man with two decades of mileage under his belt can plug in, count off, and remind everyone why the format never needed fixing in the first place. *Living the Dream Right Now* is Steve Montgomery's ninth studio outing under the SkipRock Music banner, and it lands like a bar-room encore: sweaty, grinning, and utterly unbothered by fashion.

Folk-rock built for optimists doesn't come along often enough, and when it does, it tends to arrive wrapped in irony, as if genuine cheerfulness were somehow embarrassing. Paul Martin refuses that particular hedge. On "A Beautiful Thing," the New Zealand songwriter commits fully to warmth, and the record is all the sturdier for it.