It’s been four years since Nashville, TN’s best kept secret The Features snuck onto our speakers with their critically lauded debut, Exhibit A. The record strengthened their already rabid hometown cult following and won over critics in both the US & UK press while shows with Kings of Leon, the Raconteurs and The Walkmen and sets at Redding & Leeds festivals showed off their brazenly flawless live show. Quite suddenly, The Features disappeared and left us wondering what had happened to the Southern four piece who were bound to become our next favorite band. But now, with trademark pop hooks and stellar songwriting in tow, The Features are returning this spring with an off-kilter masterpiece of a sophomore album, Some Kind of Salvation, due out June 9th.

The Dexateens return to the UK on the heels of its just-unleashed third album, Hardwire Healing -- issued via Rosa Records – an LP that finds the band further honing its drinking-class, barroom-siftin’ rhythm & blues with the help of co-producers David Barbe (Sugar, Mercyland) and Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers). Of course, the Rolling Stones spent a huge chunk of the early and mid-‘70s – and quite a number of brain cells -- trying to tap into and capture the same kind of bluesy, Muscle Shoals sound on its classic run of LPs from Sticky Fingers to Black & Blue. For the Dexateens, it’s a wee bit easier. All the boys from Alabama have to do is turn on the amps and rip into the songs, and everything that the Stones were seeking to reap becomes immediately evident in the Dexateens’ sonic stew. Rock & roll Tide, indeed.

The best pop groups create their own universe, and make up their own ways of playing music and dealing with the big, bad world outside. Those Darlins are a pop group, if they are any one thing, which doesn't mean anybody with ears can't hear the country and rock 'n' roll in their sound and stance. Or maybe this trio of young women (early twenties, although no one's telling exactly), who live a long stone's throw from Nashville, Tennessee in the college town of Murfreesboro, are punks straight out of London or Cleveland, 1977.