Rain Machine

The Very Best
Rain Dance (Green Owl)
With M.I.A. joining the always-exuberant Esau Mwamwaya on vocals over a polyrhythmic beat, there’s no way this African head charge could fail to please, and it doesn’t.

The Purrs
Stay Here With Me (Big Damn Deal)
Even though the Emerald City is home, the Purrs are so ’60s Britain, they’d impress those cavemen from Oasis. For that truly authentic experience, take with a tab of Orange Sunshine while wearing a vintage mohair suit and a bobby hat.

Raveonettes
Last Dance (Vice)
Girl-group pop pastiche with a druggy undertone: "Every time you overdose/I rush to intensive care". Now, if that ain’t love, we don’t know what is.

Eternal Summers
Lightswitch (Independent)
This is guitar-pop primitivism at its most elemental (imagine if Austin Wiggin had actually sprung for a music lesson or two for his benighted offspring), but it’s sweeter than a kitten curled up with a bunny on a cotton-candy blanket.

Emily Neveu
I Wonder If the Children Know (Lefse)
We tend to think that every ivory-tickling female singer sounds like Cat Power, but in fairness to Emily Neveu, it’s only her mournful voice that reminds us of Chan Marshall. The stately piano is more like Erik Satie playing Chopin.

Califone
Funeral Singers (Dead Oceans)
An autumnal and appropriately dirgelike effort from these indie veterans, built mostly out of insistent acoustic-guitar strumming and some of the saddest sad-guy singing you’re likely to hear this week.

The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir
Sixteen Is Too Young (Bloodshot)
Backed by low-key strings, singer Elia Einhorn makes a heartfelt confession—namely, that she had her head wedged in her ass back when she was 16. Morrissey himself won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Irma Thomas
Back Water Blues (Rounder)
New Orleans soul queen Irma Thomas recorded this antiquated gem in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Bessie Smith version dates back to 1927. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t written on August 29, 2005.

William Fitzsimmons
After Afterall (Mercer Street)
Here’s something different: a singer-songwriter (and grade-A beardo) with a breakup tune that somehow doesn’t sound like a limp version of something at least 50 songwriters did better back in the ’70s.

Jack PeNate
Let’s All Die (XL)
Rocking a falsetto and backed by what may or may not be the brass section of a small carnival, Jack Peñate manages to make the idea of snuffing it seem like more fun than a Farrelly brothers film festival.

Rain Machine
Smiling Black Faces (Anti-)
The human Chia Pet known as Kyp Malone takes a leave of absence from TV on the Radio to bring us this quietly powerful freak-folk meditation on what being black in America means in 2009.