Technically speaking, Mathlouthi is an astonishingly powerful, individualistic singer, maintaining an almost otherworldly clarity from the depths to the heights of what could be a four-octave range, whether with a ghostly whisper or a gale-force wail. Few other singers in the world have so much raw power at their disposal. With that kind of voice, Mathlouthi can afford to be straightforward, and she usually is, although the two most exhilarating moments of the concert were when she hit a rapidfire, serpentine Middle Eastern glissando, and when she went to the absolute top of her register during a riveting, angst-fueled rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that put to shame any other version including the original.

Emotionally, Mathlouthi vents a venomous contempt for and hostility to oppression, but more than anything else, she gives voice to longing. But the longing she evokes isn’t a solipsistic desire for attention or affection: it’s a longing for freedom – and a chance to transcend the hellish experience of the battle for it. She wasted no time in disdainfully explaining that the reason that the audience was seeing only a trio onstage was because that two of her Tunisian bandmates had been denied US visas. But at the end of the show, after a poignant, dynamically bristling version of her folk rock-flavored signature song, Kelmti Horra  (Freedom of Speech, one of the iconic anthems of the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring) she backed away from the mic, retreated toward the piano and then twirled, jaunty and triumphant, knowing that she was about to dance away victorious.

Ornate and intricately intertwining as her songs are, they’re not art for art’s sake. Mathlouthi knows that she and others like her are a dictator’s worst enemy, and she revels in that, if with an understandable bitteness. “The pen and paper are the strongest, most powerful things in the world,” she reaffirmed as the band launched into a broodingly swaying minor-key ballad. Although what she was doing with pen and paper endangered her life in Tunisia to the point of forcing her into exile, ultimately they saved her and others like her. She dedicated the shapeshifting anthem Ethnia Twila (The Long Road), with its middle period Pink Floyd sweep and majesty, to “the brave and courageous people who fight for freedom and dignity.”

As the show went on, Mathlouthi mimicked oud voicings on her guitar via a series of nimble pull-offs, used a series of loop effects to sing Bjork possibly better than Bjork does herself, brought to mind Randi Russo or early PJ Harvey with a hypnotic, insistent, slow-burning anthem and eventually took the intensity to a searing peak with Ma Ikit (Not Found). “I cannot find a melody strong enough to break human hatred,” she intoned before building the song to an imploring, exhausted crescendo. Whether or not the audience understood the lyrics -and many did, and spontaneously clapped along in several places – it was impossible not be drawn into the drama of a battle whose conclusion is ultimately ours to either concede, or to join in with Mathlouthi and reach for victory.

It’s the best of the four, in fact, one of the best albums of the band’s celebrated career, even with the reinvigorated “classic” lineup of guitarists Tobin Sprout and Mitch Mitchell, bassist Greg Demos and drummer Kevin  Fennell. With their two-guitar attack, especially, there was always a hint that they were about to head in more of an art-rock direction, and this is the album where they finally do that. Which makes their ever-more anthemic sound even more intriguing, considering that none of the album’s sixteen songs go on for much more than two and a half minutes, if that. Frontman Robert Pollard is as inscrutable and sometimes frustrating as ever, but he’s still pretty unsurpassed as a surrealist visionary: among the unexpected lyrical gems here are a creepy recurrent theme of “friction in Japan,” a “fishtank with black sails” and a shout out to Zero Mostel, possibly the first ever in a rock song. Behind him, the band plays with fury and drollery and a rich, mentholated, reverb-toned resonance.

They get off on a good foot with the first single, Xeno Pariah, a post-Kinks romp with a tricky tempo and the gorgeous guitar sonics that will linger throughout all the other fully fleshed out songs here (impressively, most of them are). Know Me As Heavy works a solid backbeat drive, like Oasis with a sense of humor in lieu of insufferable attitude. Island (She Talks in Rainbows) rises from a hushed tiptoe to a killer four-chord hook, psychedelic 60s Britpop spun through Pollard’s wryly fractured lens. Trashcan Full of Nails pulses like mid-70s Who as it reaches for a tongue-in-cheek stadium rock swagger, while Send to Celeste (And the Cosmic Athletes) follows a trajectory up from elegant chamber rock, like the Church but with a smirk.

Quiet Game stomps along on a hypnotic riff in a gritty Steve Wynn garage rock way. Noble Insect is a dead ringer for apprehensive late 70s era Wire, except that it has a groove. The most nebulous, traditionally indie thing here is Crybaby 4 Star Hotel, which works because of the lyrics, followed by Flunky Minnows, which looks back to the Beatles and Kinks for a tune but gives the lead line to the bass.

Birds is dreampop as the Church (them again) would have done it if dreampop had existed in 1982. The Sudden Death of Epstein’s Ways is a Brian Epstein reference, given away by the gorgeously ornate Sgt. Pepper tune: what it means isn’t clear. The Fab Four are also referenced on Taciturn Caves, which is like Hey Jude with guitars, while the final track sounds like the Clash done as powerpop. Admittedly, there are a trio of what appear to be solo Pollard sketches featuring a disastrously out-of-tune piano that were unwisely included here. But that’s a small price to pay for tunesmithing this offhandedly brilliant. Count this among the best albums of 2013. To all the Bushwick and Wicker Park blogs who dissed this album: up yours.

One of the originators of art-rock, Manzarek was one of the first to bring elements of classical music and jazz into rock, as influenced by Chopin as he was by Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the blues. A technically gifted performer, during his time in the Doors he juxtaposed ornate, intricate, rapidfire righthand melodies against simple lefthand riffs that he played on a keyboard bass.

In the band’s late 60s heyday, a writer once called Manzarek’s keyboard work “Balkan funeral music.” Manzarek liked the description so much that he adopted it. Although his playing often had a puckish wit – best exemplified by the droll classical and jazz quotes in the long solo in Light My Fire – his most memorable moments were his darkest. His coiling organ lines in The End and raw, feral blasts in When the Music’s Over, his saturnine piano in The Crystal Ship and misty, nocturnal Fender Rhodes introduction to Riders on the Storm long ago became standard repertoire. It’s hard to think of a rock keyboardist who hasn’t been influenced by Manzarek in some way.

Although his 1981 art-rock version of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana was arguably the high point of his solo career, Manzarek didn’t limit himself to that genre. Before joining the Doors, he played blues, jazz and surf music. After the Doors broke up, he explored soul music and jazz, produced four albums by Los Angeles punk rock band X and played piano and organ on their recordings, most notably the macabre organ on Nausea, from their 1981 debut Los Angeles. In his later years, he turned his focus to electronica.

Manzarek was complicated. Fiercely proud of his legacy, he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He had a short fuse, yet was generous to a fault. A dedicated stoner, he had a youthful enthusiasm and a boundless, almost childlike sense of wonder. Part Eastern mystic, part hard-bitten blue-collar Chicago kid, part ageless hippie, he had a voracious appetite for what interested him, from philosophy, to painting, to literature (he wrote two memoirs as well as a novel, The Poet in Exile). An articulate raconteur, he would inevitably find himself having to correct misconceptions about his Doors bandmate Jim Morrison, whom he remembered fondly not as an incorrigible drunk but as a gentle, sensitive soul. “We were hippies: we laughed a lot,” he often said.

Moist Paula Henderson (whose nickname stems from her longtime leadership of legendary instrumental trio Moisturizer) has been the standout baritone saxophonist in the New York downtown scene for several years. Her own work has an irrepressible joie de vivre and wry humor; her new album with her latest project, Tzar, recorded live at the Stone this past February takes a turn in a considerably different, much darker direction. Here she’s joined by Ithaca, New York musicians Brian “Willie B” Wilson on drums, electronics and bass pedals (who really gets a workout, playing everything  simultaneously, it seems) and Michael Stark on keyboards. Their intriguing multi-segmented pieces blend elements of trip-hop, downtempo, noise and the edgy jazz that Henderson has pursued more deeply in recent years. It’s a deliciously mysterious, eclectic ride. The whole thing is streaming at their Bandcamp page.

The first track, There’s a Prayer for That opens with a raw, bitter piano theme and variations against rumbling drums, Henderson’s stark, biting swirls enhancing the smoky ambience. Funereal organ then replaces the piano and the piece morphs into creepy trip-hop. Begin At Sunset maintains the vibe, sax mingling suspensefully with layers of uneasy synth and squiggly eleectronic EFX, then takes an unexpected turn into dub reggae. The most improvisational-sounding number is Ambient Subtraction, Henderson’s otherworldly, harmonically tingling polytonalities blending into a morass of textures as the storm builds to an ominously insectile rumble. By contrast, the cheery go-go theme Hibachi Sushi Dance sounds like a Moisturizer outtake, but even more minimalist. The album winds up with Knuckles & Milk, juxtaposing surreallistic, mechanical menace a la Pink Floyd’s Welcome to the Machine with noisy, paint-peeling synth squalls over a martial beat, Henderson raising the tension with a marvelously terse, chromatically-charged interlude before turning it over to Wilson’s misty cymbals. Play this one with the lights out. Recommended equally for fans of jazz, psychedelia and dark rock.

The concert began with the slow, reverberating beat of a gong, the house lights all the way down, the stage in darkness except for the lights on the music stands, the string section opening with a slow, pulsing, nocturnal theme. About two hours later, the show ended with a delirious audience clapalong on what could be termed a minimalist art-rock dancefloor vamp. This was definitely not foreshadowed, either by the latest album, or by anything that preceded it on the bill – but the crowd responded with a lusty standing ovation.

The show followed a slow upward trajectory interrupted by two unexpectedly fiery, clenched-teeth interludes, the orchestra going full steam and absolutely explosive on the second one. Einaudi’s brilliance is in how he shifts moods, sometimes drastically, with very subtle melodic changes. The influence of Philip Glass was evident from the first notes; Angelo Badalamenti’s David Lynch soundtracks also came to mind. Einaudi’s orchestration is packed with neat textural touches like having one of the percussionists harmonize with the piano using a mbira, or by rubbing the inside of a steel pan for a lingering, keening sustain. From moody, dusky late summer apprehension – the date night part of the show, which went on for quite a while – the strings finally rose with an agitatedly shivery isnistence. From there they backed away while Einaudi took his time working back into the shadows, the orchestra again rising with a vintage ELO swirl as one of the cellists added wispy overtones run through a reverb patch for extra ghostliness. This would recur to even more potently eerie effect late rin the show. For his part, Einaudi rigs his piano with several reverb effects, from an fast echo similar to what U2′s The Edge uses on his guitar, to a subtle tremolo, to a practically never-ending sustain.

From there Einaudi went into a solo interlude and latched onto a theme that reminded of [what is that awful, cloying 1986 album by the Cure that all the indie bands rip off?], and wouldn’t let it go. Was he setting up a contrast? Actually, yes, but there wasn’t enough substance in the tune – a simple, seemingly random series of rigthhand variations around a central note – to make anything interesting out of it. He finally let it go, and the music rose mightily, to an anthemic romp that evoked breezy mid-70s ELO and then a theme that reminded a lot of the Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. By this point, it was a rock show. Pretty cool, considering how raptly and carefully the group had been playing for most of the night. Einaudi brought back the menace with a rippling, chromatically spiky vamp that he finally took over the top with a gleeful glissando: gotcha! Einaudi’s current US tour continues, winding up in San Francisco in early June, then he’s on the road in Europe this summer.

The opening track, Vivi the Flea unfolds in a down-and-out New York milieu evocative of Mark Steiner at his gloomiest, Cingl’s soaring violin contrasting with the lingering resonance of Shoenfelt’s guitar. The second track, Twisted, has Cingl playing through a wah effect to raise the psychedelic factor. The Irish-flavored Saviour’s Day reminds a lot of Nick Cave – the irony of the title is not lost in a doomed gothic context.

Cingl switches to eerily reverberating electric mandolin, Shoenfelt fingerpicking his twelve-string on Black Rain for a majestic, sweeping ambience. Shivers Inside brings to mind Mark Sinnis at his most darkly seductive, while The Gambler works a menacing two-chord vamp, Cingl’s violin taking the intensity to redline. Alchemy sounds like a Lee Hazelwood theme taken forty years forward in time to Transylvania; Martha’s Well mines a bitter, abandoned theme.

The aphoristic Darkest Hour brings Sinnis to mind again, but in full-blown angst mode. Angel Street has some neat guitar/violin tradeoffs; Shoenfelt’s sepulchral croon rises to a casual menace on Black Venus, a traditional tune with new lyrics and a deliciously ringing mandolin solo. With its echoey violin, Hospital has Cingl looking over his shoulder at the Smiths’ How Soon Is Now. The album winds up with Letter From Berlin, which manages to be both elegaic and sympathetic: at the end of the song, the narrator offers to walk the suicidal girl home. Fans of Shane MacGowan, Leonard Cohen and the other troubadours of doom will eat this up.

The new album’s second track, Sparklerella takes a sludgy Cramps riff and speeds it up, with a dead-cheerleader chorus in the background.  Lazy Ascension is a Lynchian 60s Nashville gothic pop anthem done rough and ragged for extra menace, right down to a long, haphazardly reverberating electric piano outro. From there the band segues into the funereal, marching Waltz for Eldritch, shiveringly twangy guitar set to a zombified acoustic guitar-and-piano tune.

A slightly out-of-tune Link Wray riff suddenly modulates as White Bats gets underway. The shortest track here, Bryant St. Death Cult sets paint-peeling layers of Stoogoid wah guitar over a slow, hypnotic minor-key riff. They follow that by juxtaposing a faux-tender doo-wop theme with an out-of-breath Texas roadhouse stomp. The final cut, A Long Way From Cerrillos works an uneasy, skittish, Doors/Radio Birdman theme up to a surreal, dirgey grandeur.

It’s refreshing to see that the album is also available on vinyl and cassette. It’s worth owning in either format and it’s one of the best to come over the transom in the past several months, a welcome, creepy companion to similar efforts by New York outfits Ulrich Ziegler, Twin Guns and Beninghove’s Hangmen.

Their album is titled Revolution: their kind of revolution is a good-natured, upbeat one. It’s a generous fifteen-track mix, the resonant ring of the dulcimer blending with the undulating bass and a thicket of percussion. Sometimes the dulcimer and bass double each others’ lines; other times they play off each other, or trade places, dulcimer anchoring a trancey groove as the bass sails overhead. There’s often a layer of dirt in the tone of the bass, and Fukushima uses all eight strings, especially if he takes a rapidfire guitar lead. Sometimes the beats are straight-up, other times they’re more tricky. That it’s often hard to tell who’s playing what speaks to the intricacy of the arrangements and the chemistry in the band.

A couple of the numbers work variations around a central tone as in indie rock, one of them rising to a big, insistent, anthemic stadium-rock crescendo, the other going into unexpectedly moody, ominous territory. Another track has a swaying triplet rhythm and a warm Mediterranean feel. Sound of Impermanence works around spiraling upper-register licks on the highest strings of the bass, while Sabula rises to a majestic, spacious atmosphere, Max ZT choosing his spots. The album’s most energetic cut, Agnolim, has the dulcimer machinegunning over a nonchalantly catchy, low-key groove – and then the bass goodnaturedly takes over. The closing track, Ball in Cage sets spacious Asian riffs over interwoven loops in both the lows and the highs from the bass. There’s also a terse rainy-day theme and a brief interlude that sounds like a resonator guitar solo but clearly isn’t.

McNally has a history of collaborating with underrated New Orleans figures, most recently her intense 2011 Americana album, Western Ballad, with Mark Bingham. Though credited to her, you might consider this a great lost Night Tripper record. As you would imagine, it’s pretty funky. As you also might imagine, Charles’ songwriting turns out to be considerably more interesting than the top 40 fluff he’s best known for: his aphoristic turns of phrase have a surrealistic humor akin to Dr. John’s. It must be a New Orleans thing.

The opening track, Street People, sets a funky tone with bubbly organ and punchy horns courtesy of legendary New Orleans arranger Wardell Quezergue, an octogenarian at the time who has sadly left us since. McNally’s wry vocals dignify the hobo narrator’s point of view, soberly observing that “Some poeple would rather work: need people like that!”

The cynical country shuffle Can’t Pin a Color pairs the guitars of John Fohl with guest Luther Dickinson. “Tell a friend your deepest darkest secrets, watch how fast it spreads all over town,” McNally drawls. String of Hearts, an absolutely gorgeous, sophisticated duet with Vince Gill, has a lush string chart and some equally gorgeous piano from Mr. Rebennack. I Spent All My Money is a honkytonk song with a laid-back, funky edge courtesy of bassist David Barard and drummer Herman Ernest that contrasts with McNally’s vitriolic vocal.

Cowboys and Indians starts out as a rather somber take on American Indian-flavored rock a la Apache and then goes scampering with some surprisingly focused slide guitar from guest Derek Trucks. Will Sexton teams up with McNally on guitar on the sad, alienated country ballad Homemade Songs; then McNally picks up the pace on Long Face, a jaunty duet with Dr. John.

The slinky title track is a matter-of-fact commentary on petty jealousy. I Don’t Want to Know takes an outlaw country ballad and gives it a little slink as well: the tradeoffs between McNally’s tremoloing guitar and Dr. John’s piano are one of the album’s high points. Arguably Charles’ most-covered song, (I Don’t Know Why I Love You) But I Do gets a purist swing jazz treatment. Love in the Worst Degree, another one of his more popular tunes, gets a ranchy, Stonesy interepretation. Save Me Jesus has the feel of a Vietnam War era song, an unexpectedly cynical, apocalyptic spin on a swaying gospel organ groove. The record winds up with Smile (So Glad), a  soul shout reinvented as a classic Dr. John piano/organ romp, and  the lush, jazzy, 70s style soul ballad I Must Be in a Good Place Now.

Does this album have legs beyond the old hippie/Relix/WFMU crowd? Absolutely. It’s a lot of fun and a good look at a songwriter whose more substantial side was overshadowed by his early success. And it’s noteworthy for being the final release by Dr. John and this version of the Lower 911, considering that Fohl and Barard are no longer in the band.

Another cool thing about this record is that aside from Martin’s jagged guitar on the haunting, Otis Rush-influenced fifth track, The Bet, the rest of the album is all Singleton. He’s a one-man blues army, sometimes wailing with a slide, sometimes fingerpicking, sometimes slashing and roaring as he builds a doomed, menacing ambience. The album’s opening track, AM in Chicago sets the tone, an evil, reverb-drenched roadhouse vamp over tumbling drums: “A structure fire in the tower of song, a prisoner’s wish before he’s gone.” That the Leonard Cohen reference isn’t absurdly out of place speaks for itself.

“If you won’t believe me, I’ll keep telling you lies,” Singleton smirks over tasty layers of steady, shuffling slide guitar on Gasoline, then adds a sly, funky edge that reminds of Jon Spencer on the pulsing Something to Do. If there’s anything here you could call a hit single, it’s the wickedly catchy Satellite, bringing in a rare, upbeat major-key vibe.

Vasseline is a swirling, Steve Wynn style desert rock stomp. The title track, a snide portrait of a status-grubbing groupie type, opens with bit of feedback, early 70s stoner metal throuth the prism of punk, and then goes scampering. The exasperated I’m Gonna Be Your Man has distant echoes of the early Yardbirds and cool reverb on the vocals and the drums. The album winds up with the menacingly swaying Long Way Down, a hypnotic Howlin’ Wolf style groove, resonator guitar carrying the brooding tune over a wash of eerie distortion.