Patty Griffin's voice lies somewhere between Emmylou Harris's crystalline Country beauty and Bonnie Raitt's Blues-fried rasp, giving her a perfect instrument to interpret the largely Black and Southern Gospel tracks on her new album, 'Downtown Church.' It was recorded in a Presbyterian church in Nashville that once claimed Andrew Jackson as a congregate, and Griffin sang the songs from the church's pulpit.

Mark Oliver Everett doesn't feel the slightest hesitation about baring his soul, whether in his old persona of A Man Called E or in his better-known sonic disguise as Eels. And Everett's particular genius is in the casually devastating manner that he attaches his well-worn heart to his plainly visible sleeve, making it painfully and beautifully universal.

There are few singer/songwriters who can make melancholy and alienation as gorgeous and powerful and appealing as Freedy Johnston. His gifts were readily apparent on his 1990 debut, 'The Trouble Tree,' and were almost impossibly strengthened on his 1992 sophomore album, the indescribably wonderful 'Can You Fly.' After nine long years, Johnston has finally returned to the studio with brand new songs.

In some circumstances, a solo project from a hot band's lead vocalist might signal a little trouble in paradise, but Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontman Alec Ounsworth merely seems like a restless creative spirit that can't be contained by a single outlet. 'Mo Beauty' was recorded with producer Steve Berlin in New Orleans, and while the bulk of the material was already written, the album bears the unmistakable mark of The Big Easy, from the loping syncopation to the second line backbeat to the general booze-in-church atmosphere.

Richard Lloyd's story on its own is pretty compelling — his membership as guitarist in Rocket from the Tombs and Television, his solo career, his session work with Matthew Sweet — but the tale Lloyd spins on his latest solo album, 'The Jamie Neverts Story,' is worthy of a movie script. In a nutshell, the teenaged Lloyd met a young man named Velvert Turner who had started an unlikely friendship with Jimi Hendrix around the time that Hendrix moved to New York. Turner and Lloyd became best friends, Hendrix began giving guitar lessons to Turner and Turner imparted his newfound knowledge to Lloyd.

Snoop Dogg has made his rep in Hip Hop by delivering his gangsta hype in an almost offhand way, perhaps a natural by-product of his blunt intake. He seems equally at ease turning out deep Dub atmospherics and textures, hardcore Hip Hop beats or smooth R&B; grooves. Snoop's 10th album, 'Malice N Wonderland,' finds him doing what he's always done best: rounding up a talented slate of producers and performers and putting together a conceptual extravaganza.

Although Drivin' N Cryin' never officially went away, its work over the past decade has definitely taken a back seat to Kevin Kinney's solo career, which has yielded four discs since the band's last full album of new material in 1997. 2003's 'Detroit Rock City' EP signaled renewed activity, but only now are DNC unleashing their first full album in a dozen years, 'Whatever Happened to the Great American Bubble Factory?'.

Even a cursory glance at Tom Waits' musical arc over the years (from sensitive Folk/Pop singer-songwriter to jazzy boho troubadour to arthouse Blues experimentalist) will give an accurate reading of his overwhelming creative restlessness. So leave it to Waits to find a new format with which to present his double live document of last year's acclaimed and patently brilliant "Glitter and Doom" tour.

Them Crooked Vultures aims to restore the luster to the supergroup in the new millennium. Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal) and Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) are pretty potent new generation ringers on guitar and drums, but installing Led Zeppelin's iconic John Paul Jones in TCV’s bass-and-everything-else slot is audacious brilliance, resulting in a trio that effectively crosses Rock's modernity with its classicism.

We're slowly inching our way toward the bleakest of release months, and so, if the sheets prove to be as sparsely populated as they seem to be now, I will be perusing the back stock (i.e., the piles of unreviewed material that teeter precariously in the Bunker) to find some things to talk about in the absence of actual new releases in December. In the meantime, let's see what the mailman (or the Internet) brought this week.