Manufacturer: 14th Floor

Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and bluegrass crooner Alison Krauss may not be the likeliest of musical combinations. But on this welcome collaboration album, they work beautifully together, wringing a kind of magic from other people's songs. The key to the album is its versatility. Between them, Krauss and Plant can handle a vast repertoire on their own, and here they take on the lot, from ...

Manufacturer: Decca

Manufacturer: Modena Records Ltd.

Manufacturer: Virgin TV

Over the years this Irish folk band has recorded with James Galway, Roger Daltrey, Nanci Griffith, Elvis Costello, Willie Nelson, and many more. For The Long Black Veil, they made their biggest haul yet: the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Marianne Faithfull, Mark Knopfler, Sinead O'Connor, Tom Jones, Sting, and Ry Cooder. Knopfler, Faithfull, and O'Connor wander off-key in their vocals. ...

Manufacturer: RCA Victor

Reading-based songstress Laura Marling has been likened to veteran folksters Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. Despite such hyperbolic accolades, her entry into the crowded world of young female singer-songwriters has been remarkably hushed and wonderfully organic. Having started writing songs at the age of 15, Marling's success has been achieved not by shouting, but by whispering her way through the ...

Manufacturer: EMI

Manufacturer: Fledg'ling

Various Positions was Leonard Cohen's first album of the 1980s, yet was in keeping with the rest of his albums in two important respects: one, it sounded absolutely nothing like anything else anyone else was doing; two, it was a compelling reason for anyone else dealing in songs of love and its loss to wonder why they were bothering. As a lyricist, Cohen has few, if any, peers--he has never ...

Manufacturer: Sony

Martha is the youngest of the Wainwright clan (with brother Rufus two years her senior), and she's also still the one with the most to prove, even after her eponymous 2005 debut captured hearts aplenty via a delightful bundle of timeless folk ruminations with intriguingly fraught seams--and one infamously foul-mouthed diatribe against her father (folk singer Loudon Wainwright III). It's hard to ...

Manufacturer: Drowned in Sound

Even the production, laden with synthesized strings and cooing female choruses, is wry on I'm Your Man, a definitive Leonard Cohen album. Though still touched with the tragic ("Take This Waltz," based on a Garcia Lorca poem), the album often achieves its high points by combining Cohen's world-weariness with black-humoured evocations of social and romantic ills and artistic quandaries. "I ...

Manufacturer: Columbia