rock/pop

"Pizza King," from Strawberry (Shake It), the fourth album from Cincinnati quartet Wussy, begins with New Order-like bass and drums. From there, it bursts into a powerful, atmospheric chorus, the perfect accompaniment for Lisa Walker's evocative lyrics describing small-town desperation. It effectively encapsulates an album in which Wussy — co-fronted by Walker and Chuck Cleaver — expands their sound, while still retaining their tough bar-band appeal. And no one else in indie-rock right now is better at capturing the quotidian with equal parts wit, warmth and snarl. Get it at wussy.bandcamp.com or shakeitrecords.com. —Michael Pelusi

pop/rock

Art-pop high priestess Kate Bush returns to show 'em all how it's done. Except it's never been done quite like this: 50 Words for Snow (Fish People), her second album this year, tackles its titular promise with zestful aplomb but also achieves subtler feats of imagination and expressiveness throughout its seven glistening-gentle, white-flurried powder-puffs of song. —K. Ross Hoffman

jazz

Heart Protector, the debut CD by saxophonist Travis Laplante, is not only solo but solitary. According to Laplante, the music was conceived during a summer spent living alone in a Vermont attic, suffering from vertigo; the disorientation and isolation is palpable in the haunted and manic turns his playing takes, at times lashing out in hostile torrents, at others crying out with an almost desperate fragility. Laplante plays Highwire Gallery on Sunday (Nov. 20, museumfire.com). —Shaun Brady

folk/pop

There's much that's curious about Franco-Finnish twosome The Dø: the baffling band name; the ineffable charisma of Olivia Merilahti's potent, versatile soprano; the way their simple-seeming but naggingly elusive folky/poppy/bluesy Tinkertoy tunes flit from gypsy jazz to junk-yard electronica and somehow feel at once sparse and texturally teeming. Both Ways Open Jaws (Six Degrees), their modest, ambitious second effort, dances its bohemian dances with a Feist-y, casually effortless sophistication that seems primed to court mainstream attention, but without sacrificing a quark of their subtle, innate quirk. —K. Ross Hoffman