Nigel Godrich-lead band Ultraísta took the stage at the Echoplex on Friday night to cheers. “We haven’t even played a note yet,” joked Godrich. “We might be terrible. We hope we’re not.”

The Sessions, directed by Ben Lewin, tells the inspiring true story of Mark O’Brien, a 38-year-old male paralyzed since childhood due to complications from Polio. John Hawkes portrays writer and poet O’Brien who, at the request of his publisher, embarks on a serendipitous assignment researching the sexual lives of disabled peoples.

The espionage thriller is an archetypal and sometimes dog-tired genre. Double-crosses, sex, and explosions can only go so far, so modern audiences demand more personal and grounded spies. The Jason Bourne and Daniel Craig-era James Bond movies scratch that itch, but most televised spy dramas are shallow in the character development department. Cinemax’s second original primetime series Hunted aims to buck that trend.

Natasha Khan, on the cover of her third Bat For Lashes album, stands nude save for a necklace, a naked man draped over her shoulders as if he were a feather boa. As far as artists posing nude for album art goes, it’s pretty tasteful—she’s in more decent repose than John and Yoko on the cover of Two Virgins, yet it feels more revealing than Prince’s Lovesexy—with the nude man-boa covering her possibly controversial bits, and vice versa.

For some singers, performing within a certain vocal range can be a case of exploring strengths within their limitations. In Jason Lytle’s case, his breathy, careful delivery is his strength; while occasionally swinging upward to touch a few high notes like taking his hat from a rack, he generally maintains a strangely soothing vocal demeanor.

With her third full studio album Come Home to Mama, the younger of music’s most beige siblings (Wainwright is the younger sister of musician Rufus Wainwright) since Oasis continues to settle nicely into Canada’s throne of easy-listening bland-pop vacated all those years ago now by Shania Twain.

Most records these days come with a steroid-bolstered PR narrative in tow, but the backstory to Efterklang’s fourth studio effort, Piramida, has more traction than those of its peers. Before even setting foot in the studio, the Danish three-piece decamped to abandoned Russian settlement Piramida on Spitsbergen for just over a week, collecting over 1000 sounds from around the ghost town.

Tamaryn may be one of the quietest bands to traipse through the newly ploughed field of indie rock, but that’s only because their unfazed take on shoegaze too often gets passed over. However, if anyone mistook the underrated San Francisco duo (composed of the eponymous singer and instrumentalist/producer Rex John Shelverton) for shy wallflowers, sophomore album Tender New Signs will change that.

A high school masquerading as a hospital-that’s the idea behind Emily Owens, M.D. The title character, played by Mamie Gummer (The Good Wife, and Meryl Streep’s real-life daughter) was a loser in high school, albeit a high achieving one.