Antony Hegarty

One of the most acclaimed new bands of the year has no drums, no big amplifiers. Just an acoustic guitar, an electric bass, a cello and a violin and, sitting at the piano, a bohemian Buddha with an otherworldly voice and a dead aim at the hearts of his listeners.

Hercules and Love Affair "Boy Blue" Sometimes on an album, there's one song that reaches the dream ideation of a band's sound, and the rest of the songs only blanche in comparison. "Boy Blue" from Hercules and Love Affair's problematic sophomore effort is such a song. The musical project spearheaded by New York's Andy Butler first turned heads in 2008 with its melancholy disco debut, memorably centered on vocals from the saddest swan of the dance floor, Antony Hegarty. On Hercules' latest, "Blue Songs," Butler and crew try to find the meditative pulse in the otherwise frenetic beat of deep house music ripped straight from the Frankie Knuckles era, with mixed results.

Hercules and Love Affair "Boy Blue" Sometimes on an album, there's one song that reaches the dream ideation of a band's sound, and the rest of the songs only blanche in comparison. "Boy Blue" from Hercules and Love Affair's problematic sophomore effort is such a song. The musical project spearheaded by New York's Andy Butler first turned heads in 2008 with its melancholy disco debut, memorably centered on vocals from the saddest swan of the dance floor, Antony Hegarty. On Hercules' latest, "Blue Songs," Butler and crew try to find the meditative pulse in the otherwise frenetic beat of deep house music ripped straight from the Frankie Knuckles era, with mixed results.

One of the most acclaimed new bands of the year has no drums, no big amplifiers. Just an acoustic guitar, an electric bass, a cello and a violin and, sitting at the piano, a bohemian Buddha with an otherworldly voice and a dead aim at the hearts of his listeners.

"People used to say nobody can sing my songs but me — they're too personal," Joni Mitchell explained last week during a rare interview. Apparently, nobody told John Kelly not to try adapting her songs. The renowned Obie Award-winning actor and performance artist has been belting out Mitchell's songs for more than 20 years. This weekend, the New York-based Kelly concludes the L.A. run of his acclaimed solo tribute to the iconic, iconoclastic singer-songwriter, "Paved Paradise: The Art of Joni Mitchell," at Renberg Theatre.

Britain's prestigious Mercury Music Prize was established to honor the best British album of each year, so eyebrows have been raised after an album by the New York-based band Antony & the Johnsons won the award over such high-profile and indisputably British acts as Coldplay and the Kaiser Chiefs this week.

In the middle of the sweaty, happy crowd dancing Wednesday at the Echo, a man in a straw boater and fancy silk cravat held aloft a majestic yellow fan. Imaginative onlookers might have thought it was the Spirit of Disco, come down to bless Hercules and Love Affair, the Brooklyn-based ensemble onstage. Embossed, colorful fans were an emblem of early disco, when the subculture still thrived in multiracial, gay-dominated clubs, before it became suburbanized.

The FIRST vocal lines of young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, "Mothertongue," consist of a seemingly arbitrary list of numbers and addresses. Sung by mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there's poetry in all that data. "If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it's going to be pretty interesting," the Manhattanite said.

Animal Collective "Merriweather Post Pavilion" Domino * * * 1/2 With its eighth studio release, urban tribalist Animal Collective has distilled an album of its purest songs yet. "Merriweather Post Pavilion" shines a light into Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist's subterranean world of labyrinthine freakadelia, banishing some of the ghosts that have haunted it before.

Summer listening, like summer reading, entails a commitment to leisure and comfort, especially considering the volume of pop music genres producing so many fresh sounds at such a huge volume. But despite the reflex to check out with a beach-burning romance novel, or a breathtaking thriller, choosing a vacation diversion certainly doesn't mean abandoning reason completely and indulging in the collected works of, say, LMFAO. There needs to be enough heft to keep the brain's internal jukebox engaged, but not to Zappa-esque proportions.

Eminem "Recovery" Interscope/Aftermath Two and a half stars Ever since Kanye West looped Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," the hip-hop zeitgeist has tilted toward techno. Skinny-jeaned stars Wiz Khalifa and Kid Cudi have rapped over Alice Deejay and Robert Miles, while Power 106 keeps house DJ David Guetta in heavy rotation. Admirably, Eminem has always ignored evanescent trends. Despite an over-reliance on gross-out gags and tired pop culture riffs, his last album, "Relapse," further plumbed the weird depths of his psyche, stringing together Hannibal Lecter fantasies and byzantine rhyme schemes to create something singular but scattershot.