Nick Holder From Within (NRK / Fusion III)

Toronto native Nick Holder has come a long way from those barely-there house tracks released on his DNH label. Now an established producer working with famous guys like Ian Pooley and Dimitri from Paris, he runs a second label called NRK from whence comes this marvelously simple and enjoyable album of deep soul and tribal-infused house rhythms. From Within is a delicious journey to the land of laid back house music. 8.5/10 (Krista)

Junior Kimbrough Meet Me in the City (Fat Possum/ Epitaph/ Sonic Unyon)

Kudos to Fat Possum for consistently giving us flawless blues recordings. Thankfully, Mr. Kimbrough fails to break FP tradition with this recording--it's a bit ragged around the edges but this only seems to lend a real sense of urgency and intimacy to these anthems-for-the-downtrodden. Recorded in his house and never intended for release, we see a very "relaxed" Kimbrough in top form as he locks loneliness, despair and loss in the crosshairs and blasts away through a pawn shop guitar. 9/10 (Johnson Cummins)

Hol'fader From the Inside Out(self)

So this is the first of three EPs being released by these local stalwarts over the next few months--exclusively via downloadable soundfile at the MP3.com site. And the global communications route is probably a good one for this perennially underrated group, a gaggle of anglophiles languishing in a local market that's just too small for their niche. If Hol'fader were from Birmingham or Basingstoke and they released these rock-solid groove numbers, they'd be hailed as the new Stone Roses. Or at least the new Jesus Jones. 7.5/10 (Chris Yurkiw)

Bud Osborn Hundred Block Rock (Get to the Point)

A tough listen, but I'm sure that Vancouver social activist Bud Osborn meant it to be so. The Downtown Eastsider deadpans his straight-up street poetry over bass and electric guitar (the latter provided brilliantly by Mecca Normal's David Lester: he's done this kind of thing before), but its litany of real-life murders, ODs, childhood suicide attempts, myriad injustices and multiple condemnations just beats down any appreciation of whatever "art" might be in here. Still, there's a kind of figurative poetry to Osborn himself--a walking cautionary tale for whom advocacy is inseparable from art. 6.5/10 (Chris Yurkiw) At Jailhouse Rock Cafe with Fortner Anderson + Ian Ferrier this Saturday, Nov. 6, 9pm, $5

Yannick Rieu Little Zab (Effendi)

Rieu, the Lac St-Jean area's gift to jazz, is at the top of his game here, his tenor saxophone abetted by a number of fine musicians--guitarist Sylvain Provost, for example, is outstanding. In a program of Brel, five originals and five standards, the ballad playing, especially on "My One and Only Love," is world class. Beauty with an edge. 9/10 (Len Dobbin)

Jared Louche and the Aliens Covergirl (Invisible Records)

Ex-Chemlab frontman Jared Louche slaps together an electic album of covers and rounds up a buncha friends to help him out. Not too far from Chemlab's machine rock--there are plenty of crunchy breaks and familiar loops, add a little distortion and all of a sudden the beats are nicely ruff around the edges. Covering artists as diverse as Iggy Pop and Public Image Ltd. to Leonard Cohen and even Blue Eyes, Jared and company manage to do something a little different, if not totally interesting. It's still machine rock, just applied to songs we already know. 7.5/10 (Lateef Martin)