My Morning Jacket are a five-piece rock group from Louisville, Kentucky-a town that, to judge by It Still Moves, has been somehow prevented from hearing any musical innovation or development that has occurred since about 1974. It Still Moves is constructed exclusively from influences dating from before any of the band were born: the harmonies of Crosby, Stills & Nash, the chugging guitar of Neil Young, the swagger of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the brass of prime Stax soul. Even the production refuses to have anything to do with modern methods, laden with reverb and sounding like it was recorded in a barn (given My Morning Jacket's rural background, this probably is not impossible). For all that, It Still Moves sounds like something more than a faithfully observed period piece. Perhaps because the band are all too young to have heard their favourite records in their original context, they approach them with a naive freshness that makes these ancient sounds feel like living things. Like the Kings of Leon, and to a slightly lesser extent the White Stripes, My Morning Jacket are young people making old music. When it works-the fabulously self-pitying "Dancefloors", which builds to a giddy climax of horns is a particular highlight-that's more than enough. -Andrew Mueller.

Was it homesickness that compelled long time Los Angeles resident KD Lang to fashion her one woman campaign for Canadian nationalism, or just plain good sense? As an organising tool, all Canadian content has long been a mainstay of the Canadian Broadcasting System but few have selected their material with such a fine hand and a high aesthetic. The ex-patriot singer has taken great pains to create a sophisticated homage to her Canadian roots, elegantly reinterpreting 11 songs penned by some of her more illustrious countrymen (and women) such as Jane Siberry, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen. The idiosyncratic chanteuse turns Cohen's "Bird on a Wire" into an aching monochromatic lament, exploring new tributaries of pain that didn't exist in the original, while recasting Neil Young's "Helpless" into haunting anthem of memory and comfort, all the while sounding anything but helpless. Hymns of the 49th Parallel is a gorgeous love letter to her brethren, complete with an intelligent and understated orchestration. -Jaan Uhelszki.

It happens to every hardened party goer-your lifestyle eventually catches up to you. For Steve Earle, this third effort from the then-roué-ish troubadour was a pretty glaring rehab-ahead warning light. The sloppiness was beginning to show: half the disc bogs down in throwaways, cheap echoes of Guitar Town's country-rock acumen. The rest, fortunately, is prime, focused Earle: the Vietnam-vet title track, the Wild West-themed "Snake Oil", the rousing "Johnny Come Lately" which features backing from the Pogues and the oft-covered classic "The Devil's Right Hand", in which the composer achieves that perfect balance of city-slick pop and hillbilly twang. Earle would hit that one-two combo again, but not until he shook that party monkey a few albums later. -Tom Lanham.

Lucinda Williams makes this whole music thing seem so simple: Write in plain language about the people and places that crowd your memory; add subtle flavors of a mandolin here, a Dobro there, perhaps an accordion or slide guitar; above all, sing as honestly and naturally as you can. Of course, it took her six years to achieve this simplicity, an amazing achievement considering the number of knobs that were turned. Her exquisite voice moans and groans and slips and slides-she delivers a polished tone in a coarse manner. On the superb "Concrete and Barbed Wire", soft acoustic guitars are punctuated by electric slide, accordion, mandolin, and Steve Earle's harmony. Williams's deeply personal stories are matched with bluesy rumbles, raunchy grooves, and plaintive whispers. The entire Deep South is reduced to a sleepy small town filled with ex-lovers, dive bars, and endless gravel roads. -Marc Greilsamer.

Less than two years after her mentor Gram Parson's death, Emmylou Harris recorded her first album for Reprise. Pieces of the Sky inaugurated a suite of four mid-'70s albums and a surprising number of hits: her sound was clearly traditional, but also tastefully up-to-date with folk-rock and singer/songwriter styles, and her crystalline, febrile vocals took standards such as "Love Hurts" and "If I Could Only Win Your Love" back up the charts. Heartaches and Highways - The Very Best of Emmylou Harris brings together her biggest hits, and shows why Harris is important and why she continues to make adventurous country music. Through unfailingly tasteful song selection, brilliant occasional songwriting, and her cool, velvety soprano, Harris extended Gram Parsons's vision of "cosmic American music" and made it her own. -Roy Kasten.

Heavier Things should surprise more than a few critics. John Mayer's big-label debut was a multi-platinum breakthrough success whose sensual anthem "Your Body is a Wonderland" scored him an unlikely Grammy for Best Pop Vocal. That out-of-the-box success-and more than a few critics grousing that Mayer's muse was cloned from Dave Matthews-primed him for the typical sophomore slump. Instead, Mayer delivers an album whose tone and title suggests a gentle, tongue-in-cheek rebuke to his naysayers. Propelled by the subtle ambitions of an expanded pop-jazz framework (largely courtesy of Sheryl Crow/No Doubt producer Jack Joseph Puig), Mayer's breathy vocal tack now suggests a detached, conflicted and significantly less precious incarnation of Michael Franks. But the way he weds fluid pop hooks to lyrical concerns, whose self-obsessions are undercut by telling dollops of self-deprecation, should clearly draw listeners in, from the my-spirit's-too-smart-for-my-body laments of "Clarity", upbeat single "Bigger than My Body" and bluesy plea "Come Back to Bed" to the cautionary, melodically rich "Daughters" and even the anti-materialist agitpop of "Something's Missing". -Jerry McCulley.

Emmylou Harris has always had a way with woe. On All I Intended To Be, she seems more maudlin than ever as she sings her way through songs about loss, heartbreak, even the odd funeral. Of course, this is the kind of material Harris has always been comfortable with, but as her career and years advance gracefully, so her gliding soprano seems to breathe ever more refinement and soul into her material. All I Intended To Be has been produced by Brian Ahern, her former husband and the man behind her first 11 albums-another reason the album sounds so comfortable and accomplished. Joined by a virtuoso set of players including keyboardist Glen Hardin and multi-instrumentalist Stuart Duncan, plus vocalists Vince Gill, Buddy Miller, and Dolly Parton, Harris blends a handpicked selection of cover versions with her own material. Tracy Chapman's "All That You Have Is Your Soul" gets a honeyed reworking, as does Merle Haggard's "Kern River" and Mark Germino's "Broken Man's Lament". Billy Joe Shaver's "Old Five" and "Dimers Like Me" both get respectfully and sublimely covered too. But her own songs - in particular "Sailing Round the Room" and "Gold" - stand up well to these evergreens. An eclectic and profound set, All I Intended To Be is also one of Harris' best in recent years. -Danny McKenna.

Let's not mess about: My Morning Jacket's At Dawn is a classic American rock record. There is nothing exactly revolutionary about the second album from the quintet from Louisville, Kentucky. Guitars strum and occasionally squall, vocals are of the high and lonesome variety, songs stretch out from poignant sketches into rambunctious shows of strength. Educated guesses suggest a few Neil Young albums might have found their way into the life of singer, guitarist and songwriter Jim James. Elsewhere, someone could be reinventing music. It's doubtful, though, that they could make anything out of it quite as fragile, powerful and involving as At Dawn. Habitually linked with Wayne Coyne (Flaming Lips) and Jonathan Donahue (Flaming Lips / Mercury Rev), James's plaintive, massively-reverbed vocals actually have as much in common with Roy Orbison and Gene Pitney-noble, heartbroken balladeers on the fringes of rock. Better still, his songs are the kind of marvels that Americana's pin-ups frequently promise yet so rarely deliver. Highlighting individual tracks seems crude in the context of so many riches. Indeed, by the time "Phone Went West" has spent seven minutes resurrecting that most benighted of genres, white reggae, you'll be convinced My Morning Jacket are not just masters of the ancient arts, but the best band to saunter onto the world stage since the White Stripes. [+]