Acoustic Dreams

Whimsy, fantasy, melancholy melody, the sweet balm of harmony . . . you'll find all of this, and more, among our Acoustic Dreams selection, where music and beauty are often one and the same. The Leisure Society, a folkish project led by Nick Hemming (known for his collaborations with film director Shane Meadows), gets us underway with the gently ambling gait of "A Short Weekend Begins With Longing," followed in no particular hurry by the likes of Paolo Nutini (was there ever a tune so swoonful as "Candy"), Richard Hawley (with his sad meditation on devotion, "For Your Lover Give Some Time"), and Justin Rutledge (wrapping nostalgia and heartbreak in a cloud of pedal-steel on "Everyone's In Love"). You'll discover strange Jam in the acoustic dream world of our Next Steps.

The Bad Shepherds — a group of retro-new-wave folkies featuring comedian Adrian Edmondson — add an unexpectedly fanciful dimension to the Jam's "Down In the Tube Station at Midnight," and by slowing the original down, they shine new light on Paul Weller's brilliant poetry of urban malaise. The Shins deliver the unsettling imagery of "New Slang" (with its talk of bakers cutting their thumbs and bleeding into their buns) in such a lovely package that the darkness is barely visible, while Taken by Trees — a solo project from the former Concretes singer, Victoria Bergsman — finds extra ethereality by recruiting Sufi musician Sain Muhammad Ali on "To Lose Someone." Mariee Sioux is one of several enchantresses hiding out among our chimerical Deep Cuts.

Here in Deep Cuts, you'll find a selection of voices so dreamy that your soul could melt before you reach the intended destination: acoustic nirvana. Mariee Sioux — raised in the creative community of Nevada City, California — deftly weaves the fantastical narrative of "Wizard Flurry Home" through hanging branches of guitar and mists of Native American flute (played by Lisa Carpenter, a.k.a. Gentle Thunder); Simone White trips lightly along the verges of whisper on "A Girl You Never Met"; and Amber Webber (one half of the Vancouver-based duo, Lightning Dust, alongside Joshua Wells) gives the sparse landscape of "Waiting On the Sun to Rise" an un-earthly shimmer.

Great songwriting, at one level, has always been about unlocking the imagination . . . and, when it's delivered with the gentler pacing and inherent delicacy of instruments that aren't plugged in, great songs have a dream-like power to take us to places we never knew existed. All of these tracks let us look again at life through several layers of refraction so that everything seems fresh, and sometimes a little spooky, whether it's Bat for Lashes following the spectral pathways of "Moon and Moon," or the gents from Air taking us on a promenade through the boudoirs of their mind on "Au fond du rêve doré." So start counting sheep, dreamers, and prepare to enter the realm of Bowerbirds, the Loose Kites, Horse Feathers, Great Lake Swimmers and the Rosewood Thieves.