These discs will be among year’s best

Don’t wait for all those year-end best-of lists in nine months. Get hip to two nouveau Americana records that are sure to rank among the finest Vegas releases of 2013 right now:

■ COASTWEST UNREST, “High Times on Lowly Streets” (facebook.com/coastwestunrest): The album begins with a rush of violin played so frantically, you can practically here the strings fray from the pressure, as if they were being stroked with a machete instead of a bow. It sounds like one of those climactic scenes in a horror flick, right before the knife goes in and the blood spurts out.

And then, the band exhales, and the song, “Remembrance of Things Past,” drifts by like it was floating down some lazy stream. It’s a microcosm of the album that follows, where moments of carefully crafted tension are followed by grand, rejuvenating release.

“We’re burning down the house!” frontman Noah Dickie howls on “Still Frightened,” stoking said flames with obvious relish via some feverish harmonica playing.

Then comes “A Parting Gift,” a dusky waltz where Dickie sings of love’s tumult plaintively, followed by the decidedly more raucous “Henry Miller Library Incident,” a foot-stomping hoedown. Cellist Zoe Kohen Key and violinist Alex Barnes alternately race circles around each other and add texture to these sunset-gorgeous tunes, while percussionist Josh Dickie plays hard enough at times to suggest that he just might be a closet metalhead. Together, these four have crafted an album where the “High Times” aren’t confined to the title.

■ THE CLYDESDALE, “Trail of the Painted Pony” EP (facebook.com/TheClydesdaleMusic): Four songs in, Paige Overton bids adieu to her heart once and for all.

“I’ll just rely on my brain,” she sings on “Weepy Horn,” her voice equal parts longing and resolve. “The only thing it knows of love is pain.”

Two tracks earlier, on the lapsteel-abetted “Orange,” she compares her heart’s tattered state to that of Old Glory’s.

Is there such a thing as heartache by osmosis?

If so, stock up on the Kleenex now.

Fellow Clydesdale singer and guitarist Andrew Karasa ameliorates all these emotional wounds rubbed raw by Overton on a pair of high-steeping tunes that ride the range hard and fast.

With its galloping bass lines and sidewinding, reverbed guitar, “Miracle” is a sweet-voiced analeptic while the title track is all rollicking reassurance.

“Sometimes hope springs forth from dry riverbeds,” Karasa sings knowingly on the latter song, directing his words to the lady on the mic, perhaps?

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com
or 702-383-0476.