blues/folk

The live-blues corner of the ’60s folk revival — people like Tom Rush or tradition-bearers like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee — has been in danger of drying up. Charlie Parr’s self-released Barnswallow, recorded live in one or two takes, recalls those guys and others, like Koerner, Ray and Glover. National guitar, the funkiest of the resonator family, buzzes and growls beneath Parr’s singing while Dave Hundreiser’s mouth harp screams like a wounded animal, alternately running and charging. Mikkel Beckmen’s extraordinary percussion on washboard and other improvised items urges the music forward. Listening to the three together feels like running a footrace with a freight train. —Mary Armstrong

dvd/blu-ray

John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (20th Century Fox) is best remembered as the film that beat Citizen Kane in 1941, but the satin gleam of its images, explicitly framed as memories of a Welsh childhood, makes its Best Picture win seem less like a glaring injustice and more like a defensible choice. —Sam Adams

rock/pop

With an impossibly twee moniker — When Nalda Became Punk — and a genre-legendary producer (Ian Catt) and label (Shelflife) behind their debut album, this Galician duo have a rock-solid indie-pop pedigree. A Farewell to Youth, therefore, offers plenty of delights but few surprises, except perhaps its refusal to prioritize either guitars or synthesizers, opting instead for both, full throttle. It festoons its classically cuddly melodies with both jangles and twinkles, gleefully scrappy power-chord churning and go-for-broke drum machines. “I wanna build a factory of happiness,” croons Elena Sestelo; she’s got her foundation already set. —K. Ross Hoffman

folk/indie pop

Anyone still sighing softly over the dissolution of English pastoralists The Clientele will find no shortage of solace in The House at Sea (Merge), the second full-length fruit of Alasdair MacLean’s partnership with sprightly Spanish-born sweetie Lupe Núñez-Fernández (of Pipas) as Amor de Días. It’s a fuller effort than their debut, with stronger, more varied songwriting applied to the same gracefully insubstantial palette of mood and memory, lush with wispy nylon-string guitars, whispery vocals and a sun-faded, bossa-based lilt. —K. Ross Hoffman