➤ folk

If there’s room in your life for one more gentle thing, you could do worse than Vancouver/Oregon, band Wake Owl and their Wild Country debut EP (Vagrant). Colyn Cameron’s velveteen voice leads a small warren of softly stroked instruments — violin, acoustic guitar, piano — to create a lush, lovely sound too unrefined to call chamber pop, too pretty to call rock ’n’ roll. Wake Owl plays the First Unitarian’s Side Chapel on Saturday (Feb. 23, r5productions.com). —Patrick Rapa

➤ folk/roots

Those who balked at the Nashville slickness of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s self-covering record may take similar issue with his latest his new collection of Everly Brothers duets sung with Faun Fables’ Dawn McCarthy. But while What the Brothers Sang (Drag City) is earnest, it’s not entirely straightforward. For one, it largely ignores the duo’s ’50s hits in favor of obscurities and B-sides from their late ’60s output. If they can’t always recapture the Everlys’ sublime vocal alchemy, they imbue this overlooked oeuvre with a delightfully understated back-porch looseness. —K. Ross Hoffman

➤ ambient/folk
There are songs on The Man Who Died in his Boat (Kranky) — but only barely. As on her 2008 high-water mark, the just-reissued Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, this collection of previously unheard five-year-old recordings finds Grouper (Portland-based ambient-folk musician Liz Harris) circling around an elusive melting point between song and sound, where her endlessly thrumming acoustic guitars and sumptuously reverbed vocals slough off any definable substance and evanesce into a ghostly, inchoate murmur, lingering just beyond conscious grasp. —K. Ross Hoffman

➤ country
One of Texas’ great lyrical truth tellers returns. Terry Allen’s longtime affinity with the border continues, in the title track from Bottom of the World (Redeye) and especially in “Emergency Human Blood Courier.” The latter brings the drug war into perspective: “Mexico is the story of the world.” Lone Star taste-maker Lloyd Maines adds pedal steel and resonator guitar, while Terry’s boy Bukka brings accordion and keys. Both men share production credit with Allen, keeping it spare, their exquisite playing strictly in the service of Allen’s stories. —Mary Armstrong