Metal Blade
Along with Sweden’s The Flower Kings, Los Angeles-based Spock’s Beard represented the cream of ’90s progressive rock. Neal Morse left the Beard to its own devices after fronting it for a decade, and “One” is his second solo album since then and fourth overall.
New West
Miller has been making great albums for 10 years and traditionally has gone the hardcore-country route. Here he takes a stripped-down, almost ambient approach and creates a delightfully dark fusion of blues, gospel and folk.
ATO
The North Mississippi Allstars have three fine albums of deliciously adulterated blues to their credit (four if you count their one-off 2001 project with John Medeski and Robert Randolph, an instrumental blues-gospel group called The Word). But those are all studio albums, and anybody lucky enough to score one of their shows online from sites such as bt.etree.org knows that these guys are even better live.
Frog Pad
These guys be jammin’. In their first two years, Yonder Mountain String Band went from playing Colorado coffee shops with a dozen people in the audience to gigging at prestigious bluegrass and folk festivals and selling out small venues across the land.
