The finale of the Quad City Symphony’s Masterworks season was a difficult juggling act requiring the preparation of contemporary, impressionistic, Classical, and Romantic musical languages while collaborating with and attending to the artistic needs of a composer, a piano soloist, and three sopranos.

The orchestra fundamentally pulled it off, although it sounded like one more rehearsal for the large, complicated program would have helped the symphony master the nuances of each piece.

It’s rare when critics and artists see eye-to-eye, as an external perspective often misses intent and the nuances of creation, and the view from inside is often too close to see the bigger picture. But with Lucero’s Women & Work, the Memphis-based band and its reviewers are seeing the same things from their respective vantage points.

In a phone interview earlier this month promoting his band’s April 3 performance at RIBCO, bassist and founding member John C. Stubblefield said that the new album – released March 13 – is distinct from Lucero’s previous studio records: “Every album before [2009’s] 1372 [Overton Park], we’ve always kind of gone in and reinvented to a certain degree. ... Rather than reinvention on this one, I think it was more realization ... .”

That was echoed by AllMusic.com’s Thom Jurek, who wrote: “It’s as if this sound was always there just waiting for them to mature enough to let it breathe. ... Women & Work is the sound of a ... confident band, fully embracing their hometown’s musical legacy, and wrapping it inside their own sound, making each both larger and deeper.”

Stubblefield said that the album has added a “strong sense of regionalism” to Lucero’s punkish alt-country barroom brawn, most obviously with the soulful horn section that debuted on 1372. That album, he said, was “kind of Lucero with horns on top of it, where it was hinting at this certain thing. On this entire record, now that the horns have been playing with us for a couple years, it’s more integrated and more organic ... .”

And Women & Work also touches on the blues and spiritual traditions of north Mississippi. “It was cool to realize all the different musical styles of the region and pull it off on one record,” Stubblefield said.

(Some have found fault with the album’s love-letter-to-Memphis approach. The A.V. Club thought the band took the homage too far: “It all sounds familiar, and that’s the problem ... : Lucero has never sounded so assured or less distinct.”)

Led by singer/songwriter/guitarist Ben Nichols, Lucero since its 2001 self-titled debut has established twin reputations as hard-working road dogs and sterling songsmiths. You can hear both in Nichols’ authoritatively weathered and abused voice, as he infuses the album’s titular themes with both art and experience. (There’s probably something in his genes, too, as he’s the brother of writer/director Jeff Nichols, whose two feature films thus far are grimly rich, daring, and humane. Lucero scored his Shotgun Stories.)

After a brief introduction, “On My Way Downtown” kicks off Women & Work with a bright boogie, and the title track continues the party vibe.

The tempo slows and the mood darkens on “It May Be Too Late” – “Now I could get better / Or I could get drunk / Two doubles for the road / Reckon I’m done” –but Nichols infuses the words with an undeniable rhythm that buoys it.

On “I Can’t Stand to Leave You,” he sings with a downbeat resignation that’s leavened by a certain hopeful sureness, and the latter is matched by every instrument – the rhythm section, the female backing vocals, the keys, and the horns. The band expertly draws from opposing feelings and somehow makes that feel natural rather than ambivalent.

The album, Stubblefield said, was developed over two months, and he said the process involved “exploring every idea and every riff. ... A couple of songs, the bridges became whole other songs. Kind of our most collaborative effort.”

The productive labor is evident on Women & Work, which often creates resolution where there should be loose ends and tension. As Paste wrote, it’s ultimately “a mixture of a retrospective eye and [the] solace of the future.”

Lucero will perform on Tuesday, April 3, at RIBCO (1815 Second Avenue in Rock Island). The 8 p.m. all-ages show also features William Elliott Whitmore. Tickets (RIBCO.com) are $16 in advance and $20 the day of the show.

For more information on Lucero, visit LuceroMusic.com.

While a brief, unpretentious piece, Coyote Dances – by local composer William Campbell – is long on musical adventure, drama, and humor fashioned from a Native American moral yarn reminding us not to get too big for our britches.

In personal and e-mail interviews, Campbell – chair of the St. Ambrose University music department and an associate professor there – explained how he portrayed a story of the folkloric trickster hero Coyote in music and the March 31 and April 1 premiere of the composition with the Quad City Symphony Orchestra.

“I wanted to write fun music with exuberant, joyful moments,” the composer said. And the score indicates that Coyote Dances is full of them.

My first listens to And Other Anagrams, the full-length debut of the Quad Cities trio Ragaman, brought to mind something Andrew Bird said to me in a 2007 interview: “I don’t know what a bass line is supposed to do.” The context was finding collaborators who didn’t play “stock footage,” who fight pop formulas in the creation of pop music.

Bird and Ragaman share an endearing softness and a natural aversion to subjugating intelligence, and both seem constitutionally incapable of conventional approaches, from instrumentation to style to structure. Ragaman employs the sitar as the lead on “Everyone You Know,” for example, and it’s the perfect essential detail: Taking the traditional rock role of the electric guitar, the instrument is comfortable yet foreign, and its chattiness anchors the song. The break of “Ankle Bells” features what sound like kazoos and trumpets – although I suspect some of that is mouth-mimicry.

Singer/songwriter/guitarist Lars Rehnberg, bassist/engineer Gordon Pickering, and percussionist Leif Rehnberg make up Ragaman – an anagram of “anagram,” a joke referenced in the album’s title. Their style is a pop stew with distinct flavors – jazz, funk, and world music intermingle and take turns dominating. But it’s unified enough by its ambition, its breezy texture, and the vocals and playing of Lars Rehnberg – a former co-worker at the River Cities’ Reader.

It was more than a concert. It was an artistic assault against war.

Performing Benjamin Britten’s choral masterpiece War Requiem – with its contemporary music, Latin requiem, and harrowing poetry of World War I soldier/poet Wilfred Owen – the Quad City Symphony Orchestra and its performing partners from Minnesota, Germany, and our own community on March 3 exposed the crippling sadness, human devastation, and insanity of war and found in its darkness a timeless argument for peace.

It was a gutsy decision for the symphony to program a single, 90-minute composition with unfamiliar words and music exploring the grotesque realities of war. But Quad City Symphony Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith accompanied that choice with education, altering the usual concert format by using the first 40 minutes to explain Britten’s literary restructuring of the requiem, demonstrate its fresh sound, and show key guideposts in the dramatic flow of the piece.

And the coherent, compelling performance of Britten’s epic work decisively outweighed any disruption of concert rituals.