If you get songwriting props from Elvis Costello chances are you know how to write a tune. Ron Sexsmith (a personal EC favorite who’s opened for the bespectacled one on multiple world tours) is a "songwriters/songwriter" a craftsman whose skills are beyond question. The antithesis of a rock star, Sexsmith worked as a mailman in Canada before scoring a songwriting deal with Interscope and finally getting a performing contract at 30 years of age in 1994.

A master of mellifluous adult pop, Sexsmith's latest (and seventh record), Retriever, doesn't disappoint. Re-teaming with producer Martin Terefe (who helmed Sexsmith's keyboard and drum machine heavy Cobblestone Runway in 2002), Sexsmith wisely opts for a more organic approach this time around. Divorced a few years back, he's evidently found love once again judging by the buoyant set of love songs on this set ("Happiness," "How On Earth"). Cloying lines like "she fills my heart with song" are fortunately always counterbalanced by edgier words elsewhere ("I fear sometimes we ain't got a hope in hell / I've half a mind to hang the next fool to wish me well"). Elegant piano tunes form the core of the album, and Sexsmith is equally formidable on Retriever's emotionally battered ballads ("I Know it Well") as its buttery mid-tempo pop rock ("Not About to Lose"). Many of the songs benefit from stately string arrangements by David Davidson (who’s worked with everyone from …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of the Dead to John Mayer) but Sexsmith's warm words and sincerely affecting voice (a smokey and rich Kermit the Frog sound-a-like) ensure that none of it gets too syrupy. Anyone enamored with Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello's Painted from Memory will find similarly stirring sophisti-pop here.

Sea Ray
Stars at Noon
(Self Starter Foundation)

Brooklyn sextet Sea Ray is an odd amalgam of sounds, a faux Brit sounding singer, an angular lead guitarist with some serious chops and a cellist who swathes the whole thing in a beautiful haze. Although this is only the second proper Sea Ray album the group has been in the game a long time (LP No. 1 came out all the way back in 1997) so perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise how polished Stars at Noon is.

Singer/guitarist Jordan Warner has focused lyrical themes (dislocation, emotional numbness) and paints them vividly on each track. The warm tones of keyboardist Jeff Sheinkopf provide the perfect bed of sound for Warner and fellow guitarist Greg Zinman's hypnotic riffs to float over on cuts like "Stray Dog's Got It Made" in which Warner manages to make self-absorbed apathy ("I've got no sympathy for the man who stays when the bullets fly/Not my war, not my scene, I'm gonna go on my own time/One thing I always find the stray dog's got it made") sound oddly appealing.

Lisa Cerbone
Ordinary Days
(Little Scrubby)

Any fans of innocent dreamy folk à la the Innocence Mission or the Sundays should already have shrines to Lisa Cerbone in their cardigan-heavy closets. Ordinary Days, the first record in seven years from one of the East Coast's best songstresses is a spare effort, getting by on little more than a pair of voices and acoustic guitars for much of its running time. One half of the pair, naturally, is Cerbone. The other half is Mark Kozelek, head man of indie mainstays Red House Painters and, more recently, Sun Kil Moon.

Kozelek's presence is felt all over this record, whether it's providing the underpinning vocal harmony to Cerbone's airy Kate Bush-like lead on "Swallowing Stones" or supplying the spacey lead guitar textures that drive the Neil Young-ish rocker "Ruthless Order." Additional accompaniment comes in the form of drummer Tim Mooney (American Music Club) and bassist Geoff Stanfield (Black Lab)—all are accomplished musicians in their own right and have the perfect "less is more" playing aesthetic to suit Cerbone's downcast tunes. Odes to forgotten places ("Araby") are rendered with a spare directness that is immediately haunting ("I stand in the summer wind of the bazaar, I find my hearts grown heavy in the dark / The clock says it's time to go / I'm not ready yet to find that deserted train that leads me back to Araby"). None of Ordinary Days’ tracks are boring strum-alongs either, as both Kozelek and Cerbone pepper their acoustic playing with emphatic picking and mournful minor chords that could make the songs riveting even if they didn't boast an evocative singer to go with them.

The Velvet Crush
Free Expression Expanded Reissue
(Action Musik)

The Velvet Crush were once the “it” band of the moment. Just 10 short years ago, Sony had pinned their hopes on the Rhode Island group's Teenage Symphonies to God as the album that would finally push the instantly accessible sounds of power-pop to the masses. By 1994, power-pop, a silly genre name originally coming into use back in the 1970s to describe the mega-melodic and harmony-heavy rock being overlooked amidst the sea of Led Zeppelin's arena bloat, had long been deemed music's lovable loser by the industry. It's never a good sign when the official poster boys of a genre, in this case early 70s Memphis outfit Big Star, are barely known outside of record geek circles (although lauded by musicians from Elliott Smith to Wilco).

Unfortunately Teenage Symphonies did little to change that, despite providing some truly mindblowing and classic tunes. The band has soldiered on ever since though, with a new album slated for release this June and a recent expanded reissue of their lost classic, 1999's Free Expression. Free Expression is pure, unadulterated VC, all soaring vocals and mesmerizing guitar riffs, made when the band was in between labels and free to make records however they damn well pleased. Recorded with the aid of longtime pal Matthew Sweet at his house in L.A. it's a relaxed and thoroughly Californian rock album. Listen closely to the breezy "Between the Lines" and you can almost feel the warm sand in your toes (no small feat if you're listening station happens to lie in the barren and generally frigid environs of Minnesota). Cheez-wiz keyboards, sassy tambourine fills and garish trumpet solos pop up intermittently to spice things up and are generally effective instrumental devices (albeit goofy); but the secret ingredients that make the album essential are Sweet (his harmony vocals on cuts like "Goin' to My Head" are worth the price of this album alone, and his production skills are impeccable) and pedal steel maestro Greg Leisz who injects a bit of high and lonesome country into the otherwise boogie-heavy setting of cuts like "Heaven Knows."

The second disc of demo recordings (new to this reissue) isn't particularly revelatory, but it hardly matters. Free Expression was already out of print, and any excuse to get extra Velvet Crush on the market should be greeted solely with hurrahs by pop music lovers.