Gospel music has always known that the most interesting hour of the soul is the one before the miracle. Noel Johnson NDJ, a one-man congregation from Birmingham (the American one), has built a single around that hour. It is a hymn sung by someone unsure the hymn will be answered, and it is a fine, unsettling piece of work.

Seattle guards its reputation jealously, and that reputation was not built on good manners. London Bridge Studios still seems to hum with Mother Love Bone's swagger, Soundgarden's thunder and Pearl Jam's ten-ton yearning. Booking the room takes nerve, and walking out with a song that amounts to a firm handshake and a sturdy pair of boots takes more. Pete Keating has that nerve. "Louder" uses the room's hallowed acoustics to make a point rather than a racket.

Grief rarely announces itself with drama. More often it arrives as a kind of administrative oddity — the chair still pulled out at the same angle, the mug still hanging on its hook, the world stubbornly refusing to redecorate itself around a hole that's just appeared in it. Koen Ruiter, the Utrecht-trained songwriter who records as Koentakhinte, understands this instinctively, and "When You're Not Here" is built entirely from that understanding.

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.

Texas has produced its share of cautionary tales set to a two-step rhythm, but few arrive with the clear-eyed candour Eric Osterhout brings to "Green Eyed Angel." This is a song that knows exactly what it is doing to you before you do, and that self-awareness is precisely what elevates it above the standard country confessional.

Toronto and Hamilton have quietly been brewing something worth paying attention to, and "Running River" is the proof poured out in full. LeBarons have spent years working the unglamorous seam between alt-country and something rawer, more wounded, and on this single they finally strike a vein of pure gold.

Some songs arrive fully formed and instantly dated, tethered to whatever sonic gimmick happened to be fashionable the week they were tracked. Others get buried for decades and come back sounding like they were always meant for right now. "Please Comfort Me," the new single from The Sonic Travelers, belongs firmly to the second camp — a song written in the late 1970s by George Aiello and John Ingram that has spent nearly fifty years waiting for its moment, and has finally found one worth the wait.

Country music has always trafficked in the sturdiest of metaphors — the open road, the whiskey glass, the mountain you either climb or die trying — and it takes a particular kind of nerve to reach for one so worn and make it feel freshly hewn. David Rader, the songwriter and producer behind the virtual artist Troy Landon, pulls exactly that trick off with "Climb That Mountain," a single that wears its influences (Cash's gravity, Tritt's grit, Kenny Rogers' plainspoken warmth) openly on its sleeve while still managing to sound like nobody's tribute act.

Perth is not a city one associates with vigils. It is a place of light, of distance, of horizons that refuse to end — and yet from this unlikely geography, Nicindie has drawn something closer to a nocturne than a folk song. *A Father's Long Vigil* arrives not so much as a release but as an exhalation, the sound of someone who has been holding their breath for years and finally lets it go, slowly, on tape.

Certain records turn up that refuse to whisper. David Scott Weaver's *Songs of Hope and Resistance* announces itself not with a knock but with a fist against the door, and once you've let it in, it doesn't leave the room until it's said its piece.