King Decemberist Colin Meloy’s love for the heydays of British folk-rock has always served as the foundation on which he builds his crafty, idiosyncratic chamber pop, but on The Hazards of Love he’s taken that bedrock and built his own version of Stonehenge. A 17-song suite (think one continuous song with track ID’s peppered throughout for sanity’s sake) about a girl named Margaret, shapeshifters, forest queens, and fairytale treachery, The Hazards of Love is ambitious, pretentious, obtuse, often impenetrable, and altogether pretty great. Harking back to the late-60s/early-70s offerings from bands like Pentangle, Horslips, ELP, Steeleye Span, and the Incredible String Band, it makes no apologies for its nerdy, prog rock musicality, and convoluted narrative. Meloy, who often cites Shirley Collins, Nic Jones, and Anne Briggs as influences — Hazards is named after a Briggs EP which featured no such song — must have had a vast hard rock/power metal collection to draw from as well, as one can glean melodic cues and structures from Iron Maiden and Rush as easily as they can Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull.

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M. Ward’s fifth proper album begins appropriately with the lyric “When you’re absolute beginners, it’s a panoramic view,” a notion that the dusty Portland, OR-based singer/songwriter must be nostalgic for as his profile increases with each and every project. His 2008 collaboration with actress/singer/songwriter Zooey Deschanel as the producer, player, and arranger of She & Him helped to let the rest of the world in on what the low-key folk underground has been savoring since 2001’s End of Amnesia. His penchant for sun-drenched West Coast vistas and timeless narratives that revel in Tom Waits-inspired Americana and non-dogmatic spirituality come full circle on Hold Time, a typical Matt Ward collection of laconic summer songs that could have safely appeared in any decade without suspicion of origin.

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While they may have retired the helmets, stuffed (taxidermy-style) animals and regional foliage that had become a staple of their (new recruit orientations) live shows, the band has lost none of its postwar glory as evidenced by their new single “Waving Flags,” which is climbing steadily (number 26) up the greased pole that is the U.K. singles chart. Rally around the Big Country-inspired guitar lead, marvel at the forward-thinking, pro-immigration drinking theme, and haul those canned vegetables and fruits into the fallout shelter and let us witness the glorious return of British Sea Power.

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Exhibiting the same kind of yuletide herd mentality that damned a million Cabbage Patch Kids, Tickle Me Elmos, and Atari 5600s to a lifetime of basement closet servitude (or in the latter’s case, ten-to-15 years spent in water-logged boxes outside of the local (pre-eBay) Salvation Army or St. Vincent de Paul before earning its “cool” back through the dark forces of nostalgia and irony), parents all over the world (and seemingly all at once) committed the ultimate holiday sin by replacing their tried and true seasonal favorites with Mannheim Steamroller’s impossibly lame Christmas 1984 album.

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New York’s Brian Dewan is a true American original, dabbling in everything from the construction of giant birdhouses to the creation of instruments called the Swarmatron and the Courtesy Modulator (as well as his very own custom Electric Zither that serves as his compositional assistant of choice) to paintings, set design, and musical contributions for everyone from David Byrne and Neutral Milk Hotel to the Blue Man Group and Sesame Street. Words of Wisdom, the first chapter in his ambitious Humanitarium series, collects old, mostly anonymous folk songs from the attics, school desks, and bone-lined time capsules of yesteryear and paints them with his own distinctive shade of autoharp, organ, and accordion-fueled macabre. Think Prairie Home Companion without a shred of hope.

The Kettle Valley Line
The Mirimachi Fire

In the long list of exclusions from Rhino’s Brit Box, few are as poetic as the Auteurs. One would be hard pressed to find a more notoriously insolent voice than that of fringe-dwelling mastermind Luke Haines, a sly modern-day Dickens anti-hero who filtered the Britpop scene through the same cheesecloth of suspicion that fueled Ray Davies to pen the classic industry basher Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, Pt. 1, but where Davies was prone to the occasional bout of nostalgia, Haines could barely conceal his contempt, and his signature sneer remains one of the most effective weapons of derision to this day. The band never found the audience that so eagerly embraced similarly-themed acts like Radiohead and Blur (perhaps it’s the other way around), and Haines eventually re-invented himself with Baader Meinhof, Black Box Recorder, and ultimately an eponymous solo career, but the four slabs of wax that bear the group’s surprisingly apt moniker sound as freshly foul and gorgeously snide today as they did in the century prior.

• How Could I Be Wrong
• Lenny Valentino
• Unsolved Child Murder
• 1967

Sure, you’ve seen the footage of a seam-bursting Elvis Aaron Presley draped in a lei-covered American flag onstage in Honolulu, but this tale of gut-wrenching patriotism was originally compiled by the late-great country maverick Mickey Newbury from folksongs and spirituals that originated during the Civil War. With “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as its bedrock, Newbury’s “American Trilogy,” which appeared on 1971’s Frisco Mabel Joy, trades the King’s grandstanding for pure heartache, utilizing the rain on the roof of producer Dennis Linde’s converted garage and Beegie Adair’s humongous-yet-tasteful synth strings to produce one of the genre’s most goosebump-inducing moments. If it weren’t such a gloriously essential recording, I would heartily recommend in its place the surprisingly reverent Manowar (Spinal Tap sans irony) rendition that appears on their 2002 Warriors of the World album, if only for the cover art alone. This beautiful live version with Newbury and violin player Marie Rhines is taken from the DVD Live at the Hermitage.

The War of 1812 had been over for almost two weeks when the United States drove the British from Louisiana’s Chalmette Plantation under the leadership of Colonel Andrew Jackson — the Southern front had not been alerted yet of this rather important development. The version of “The Battle of New Orleans” that listeners are most familiar with, aside from the hokey live rendition that appears on almost all of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s greatest hits compilations, was penned by former high school principal Jimmy Driftwood, who wrote the lyrics against the melody from an old Irish tune called “The Eighth of January” back in 1958. Using a guitar and a mouthbow, Driftwood gave the tune an earthy, singalong “Ballad of Davy Crockett” aura, landing it feet-first into the canon of American song. Many up-and-coming country artists in the ’60s, including the NGDB, worked the track into their live sets, some even putting it to tape. This version, from the Dirt Band’s wildly hallucinogenic 1975 song cycle Symhonion Dream, takes Driftwood’s original, puts a bit in its mouth, and treats it to just under four minutes of electro-shock therapy, laying down a thick layer of flange, sampled bagpipes, and enough affected hillbilly vernacular to render the banjo-picking Mongoloid from the film Deliverance an icon of the North.

“The Battle of New Orleans” (sample)