Nick Lowe
Quiet Please: The New Best of Nick Lowe
Yep Roc

Quiet Please bears the subtitle "The New Best of Nick Lowe," making no attempt to disguise the fact that it's been a full 20 years since Nick's last hits collection, Basher. That "new" designation is also a subtle indication of the editorial slant of Quiet Please, how it shifts away from the frenzied new wave rocker toward the swinging songwriter of the '90s and 2000s, and not just because the second disc of this double-disc set is devoted to the mellow, deeply felt country-rock and torch songs that have been Lowe's specialty since 1994's The Impossible Bird.

Willie Nelson
Naked Willie
RCA Nashville/Legacy

In the late '80s, Ted Turner caused a furor by colorizing old black-and-white movies, claiming that this colorization modernized ancient artifacts for an audience that just couldn't bear to see shades of grey on their television set. It was modernization through addition, a misguided venture that never found its contemporary audience because it was trying to seduce an audience that never would have been interested in the first place. About 20 years later, Willie Nelson and his harmonica player Mickey Raphael did a kind of reverse colorization on Willie's '60s recordings for RCA, stripping away the strings, backing vocals, horns -- any of the accoutrements that sweetened Nelson's basic combo.

Kelly Joe Phelps
Western Bell
Black Hen

Guitarist and songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps has always traveled an iconoclastic, enigmatic path. Since the release of his debut album, Lead Me On in 1995 on the tiny Burnside imprint, through his amazing Rykodisc recordings from the late part of that decade and the middle of the first part of this century, he's wound his way through covers and his own songs with a particular sense of place and rough-hewn elegance. Western Bell is Phelps' first record since 2006, issued on the Vancouver indie Black Hen Music.

Wavves
Wavvves [De Stijl]
De Stijl

22-year-old San Diego slacker turned noise artist turned highly touted blog sensation Nathan Williams thrives on rebelling with a volcanic, punk rock, "I don't give a rip" attitude. If there's an opportunity to alienate people, he takes it. Case and point: his discography. There's the confusing spelling of Wavves and its multifaceted usage as the name of his solo project, the title of his debut album, and that album's third (and potentially best) song.