Regardless of your views on love, marriage—or Michael Cera’s status as an indie heartthrob—writing off the Paper Heart soundtrack in its entirety would be like pulling a football away from Charlie Brown as he goes to kick it—heartless, cold… and all too tempting.

It’s a little insulting to describe a Scarlett Johansson record in movie terms, since by all accounts, she takes the whole thing very seriously. However, Break Up, her second record, feels as pat as a bad romantic comedy, with Yorn miscast as one of the leads.

Though Alberta Cross originally hail from London, their Neil Young-inspired vocals, watery guitars, and psychedelic production sound like they could have come tumbling out of Alabama or the hills of L.A.‘s Laurel Canyon, efficiently appropriating the darker Southern Rock sound with an added tendency for narrative, dynamic arcs.

After the departure of their drummer Colin Anderson and frontman Nicholas Delffs’ “soul-searching” trip to India, Portland’s The Shaky Hands are back where we left them on their third release: making rootsy post-punk.

In their seemingly endless run of touring, most notably in support of Eddie Vedder on the Pearl Jam frontman’s solo treks of the last couple years, Liam Finn and Eliza-Jane Barnes established themselves as perhaps the most electrifying live duo since The White Stripes. This EP follow up to Finn’s 2007 debut, I’ll Be Lightning, features Finn and Barnes trying to establish on record the identity they have so successfully forged on stage.

A supergroup made up of drummers brings to mind all the wrong images: primarily that of multiple rotating drum kits with an absurd amount of toms, banging out hour-long solos that were only originally created as a way for everyone else in the band to go backstage and do blow. Luckily Drummer is not that band.

Nothing silly or south-of-the-belt happening on Grand Archives’ second album, Keep In Mind Frankenstein; this one floats high above the clouds, the work of bearded angels on the Sub Pop label. Grand Archives does ethereal, without the mumbling and shuffling of their ancestral band Carissa’s Wierd (yes, always wierdly misspelled) and without the widescreen Big Rock of their brethren Band of Horses.

Every decade following Woodstock there’s a flurry of retrospectives, and the 40-year anniversary is no exception. This one comes hot on the heels of an AARP membership for most attendees, but that doesn’t mean a new crop of music fans can’t be browbeat with the event’s mythology. See, kids, there was a time when neither Mountain Dew nor Clear Channel played a prominent role in music festivals, when pull-tabs were hauled past lax security, when the money-making aspect had yet to make things unbearable. Woodstock made things unbearable the old-fashioned way: half a million naked hippies rolling around in the mud.

For those of us that fell in love with They Might Be Giants as children (circa 1990’s Flood), the duo served as our first introduction to alternative music. Sure, Pearl Jam and others got tagged as alternative, but those of us who spent hours laying in bed poring over those bizarre lyrics and listening to the tapes over and over—if you’re one of us, you know who you are—had our own little secret about what alternative music really was.