(1) Ellyn Maybe: Rodeo for the Sheepish (Hen House Studios). I heard half of the long, quietly mesmerizing “City Streets” on the radio—what was this? A woman with a poem, with music and a sung chorus not behind her but circling her, and the poem neither exactly recited nor sung, but spoken with such a lilt, in a voice so full of miserabilist pride—at forty, a woman is still getting high-school insults tossed at her (“Hey Mars girl,” a man shouts on the street, “get off the Earth”)—that it’s music in and of itself. There is no bottom to Maybe’s inventiveness, to her adoption of Nirvana’s Oh well whatever never mind as an artistic tool, to a confidence that allows her to toss off a bedrock statement on the American character (“There are people / who know the cuckoo is the state bird / of most states of mind”) in a throwaway voice so that its humor hits you not as a joke but as an echo. There is nothing like this album except for the real life it maps.

(2) Train: “Hey, Soul Sister” (Sony). A perfect fan’s letter, with the high, light sound of someone madly in love with the idea of being in love. You can see the singer dancing in circles in his bedroom, waving his arms in the air. Could the soul sister who inspired this record make one half as good?

(3) Lady Gaga: “Bad Romance” (Interscope). When she turns Love into Lahv, lahv, lahv, as if she could care less, the inhuman edge of this semiological construct—the performer, not the song—can open up a hole in your soul. When it feels as if Kiki and Herb are smiling down at her from the heights of their “Total Eclipse of the Heart” she’s Robert Plant, lost in communion with the ancestors, like Medusa or Gene Vincent.

(4) Keri Hilson: “Knock You Down,” featuring Kanye West and Ne-Yo (Interscope). The swirl.

(5) Carolina Chocolate Drops: Genuine Negro Jig (Nonesuch). “Fragments of humble and cryptic work songs appeared,” Constance Rourke wrote of how the voice of the slave made its way into blackface minstrelsy before the Civil War. “Defeat could be heard in the occasional minor key.” In the hands of this string-band trio, taking up “Genuine Negro Jig,” popularized by Dan Emmett in the 1840s, you can hear that sense of defeat stretched so far from the ordinary facts of life that it begins to turn into what was hiding in Rourke’s choice of the word cryptic: into resistance, or, if not that, escape. And when Justin Robinson’s autoharp surfaces a few songs...