It takes a degree of flair to reinvent a fresh pop sound in an industry engulfed in dusty, musty regurgitated reruns. But In the Trees have found a formula to pull it off on this debut album.

Twenty-something composer/guitarist Emily Falco thinks her songs are replacements for nail biting and other nervous habits and she's dead on. Her alt-indie leading vocals—hardy, beguiling, and slinky—are a testament to that. Bassist Timothy Lebreck, drummer Will Olsen, and guitarist Craig Ryan round out the quartet with a Pavement-like passion, delivering mad rhythms, shimmery jams, and medium-flavor guitar rock. The pop track "Best Days," which is currently in promotion to college radio, opens the EP by giving off a partylike atmosphere backed by an off-kilter choral; this erratic vibe rears its head on other occasions. Sometimes grungy, sometimes relaxed, always snappy, these seven tracks are a promising start. Headphones will reveal some curious tidbits if you avoid the Mall-Wart variety. www.inthetreesmusic.com.

Through a cruel quirk of fate, contemporary blues lovers were born a few decades too late to enjoy the legendary performers who created this most American of musical genres. But take heart—local favorites Prof. Louie & the Crowmatix have maintained the tradition, digging back into the blues songbook as a starting point and then mixing it up with some contemporary compositions. They certainly have the chops; members of this five-piece ensemble have previously jammed with the Band, Bob Dylan, Graham Parker, Joe Jackson, and even the blues tribute band who started it all: Jake and Elwood, the Blues Brothers.

For the Crowmatix's fourth CD, Century of the Blues, the band offers a musical roadmap for the uninitiated; the old melds seamlessly with the new on 10 cuts that take blues neophytes from Bessie Smith to Elmore James to Al Green and beyond. The deeply-rooted pain of the original compositions has been purged here, resulting in a hardy party album, so diehards are forewarned. But for newcomers to the hard-plowed fields of blues territory, here's a great starter set to cut your teeth on.

Sir Honey's (aka Jack Ryon) new CD, What Do You Do? mutates the airwaves with its tumultuous melody-writhing and bass'n drum-driving electronica guaranteed to rearrange all your favorite quarks with blazing sonic density, tireless rhythmic inventiveness, and a restless horizon-seeking creativity. It's the aural equivalent of attention deficit disorder (and that's meant as a compliment). These 11 three-to-six-minute tracks of consciousness-raising whirlwind are aimed at the ambidextrous multitasker for whom memorizing Shakespeare and watching The History Channel as she/he copies the Mona Lisa while learning to play the accordion during a family drug intervention at a tornado-ravaged Burning Man festival is all in a Sunday brunch.

Highlights include the midtempo, quasi-Miles Davis "Bitches Brew" vibe, "Faux," set against a driving rock/jazz drum machine that turns nasty with heavily processed saxophone and beep-beep synthesizer soloing over increasingly broken drum patterns; the ballad "Sands," highlighted by a quirky polymetric drum sequence under cloudy Eno-style synthesizer vapors that climaxes with pulsating synth-bass and Bonhamesque/hip-hop drumming; and the multicolored beat-pounding funk-rocker "2710," full of shifting drum figures and multidrum kits knotted up with whirling glissandos of 1970s-sounding analog synthesizers.  www.theycontrol.us.