The vibe of Day Joy's debut album is undoubtedly dreamy. The Florida-based band intends that literally - but not quite in the obvious manner of gentle, mild, peaceful sleep.

Yes, it has cool cello, some warm organ, and spare banjo and guitar in wispy, atmospheric, reverb-heavy arrangements. There are lovely harmonies articulating what Michael Serrin - who founded the band with Peter Michael Perceval III - called "soft-spoken melodies." It usually moves at an aimless pace toward no clear destination.

But the opening track, with the appropriate title "Animal Noise," closes with an aggressive cacophony from nature. The next song is "Bone & Bloody," followed by "Talks of Terror" - which teeters on the edge of a climactic cliff but never leaps off, denying a catharsis that had seemed inevitable. The penultimate song is "Splattered Like Me."

Sweet dreams might dominate, in other words, but they're swirled with nightmares.

Day Joy, on its way to South by Southwest later this month, will perform at Rozz-Tox on March 8, and Serrin said in a phone interview that these contradictions were intentional. The tantalizingly titled Go to Sleep, Mess - released in February on Small Plates Records - was crafted as a concept album. "The idea of it was the mental turmoil that you may have when you can't sleep at night," he said, also comparing it to "that contrast between that beautiful dream and that terrible nightmare you have right after it."

If you're looking for excitement from Tim Schiffer - the Figge Art Museum executive director who started on August 1 - don't talk to him. Instead, just look at the walls.

In our interview on January 25, the soft-spoken Schiffer articulated a modest plan for the Figge, but one that visitors will be able to see for themselves in "clusters" of exhibits that play off each other.

Schiffer's predecessor, Sean O'Harrow - who left after three years at the Figge to head the University of Iowa Museum of Art in November 2010 - believed that the Figge needed to emphasize education above all else (including being an art museum) and that the endowment needed to be built from $5 million to somewhere between $20 million and $50 million.

Because the process of developing a strategic plan for the Figge is just getting underway, the new executive director didn't offer measurable goals in those areas. But Schiffer - who had been executive director of California's Museum of Ventura County since 1999 - has already put his stamp on the museum in a different way.

Based on her vocal confidence and itinerary, it's hard to believe that Nikki Hill is by her own admission a neophyte on the music scene.

She began singing in the church choir in her native North Carolina when she was six or seven, but her tenure as a performing and touring rock-and-roll artist is considerably shorter - basically less than a year. Yet she co-produced and released her self-titled debut EP last year on her own label, she's planning a spring release of some sort, and this spring and summer she'll be playing in Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Spain. On Saturday, she'll be performing at RIBCO, and while you might not have heard of Hill, she's doing her damnedest to change that.

"I'm kind of in that ride-it-'til-the-wheels-fall-off mode," the 28-year-old said in a phone interview last week.

For the seventh year, I've compiled a selection of favorite songs from the past year and sequenced them into an album - something that can fit on an 80-minute CD, with no artists repeated from previous years and a limit of one song per artist.

This year's edition features 20 tracks and is notably heavier and louder than any of the past six. Read nothing more into that than the possibility that my hearing is likely deteriorating now that I'm north of 40. (And don't infer anything from the inclusion of two Swedish bands and another from Denmark, or my apparent weakness for the second songs of albums.)

Beyond the surface aggression, I'm imposing on my 2012 album an air of finality, both aesthetically and thematically. Whether it's the violence promised and delivered by the Hives or the natural calamity of Alexandre Desplat or the seasonal metaphor of Max Richter or the self-loathing regret of Cloud Nothings or the ominous instrumental clouds of Goat, this sounds a bit like the world is ending. I'm pretty sure the planet as we know it will be here on December 22, but here's a soundtrack for December 21 just in case some interpretations of the Mayan calendar prove correct.

The Hives, "My Time Is Coming." There's always been a threatening edge to the punkish garage rock of the Hives, but it's always been obliterated by cheekiness, matching outfits, and a bright bluster that made it impossible to take anything at all seriously. Here, the title and chorus are far from earnest, but both the music and vocals carry something darker - not of getting one's due but of seizing out of desperation and deprivation ("You see I grew up in a hole / Squeezing diamonds out of coal"). The reverb-heavy guitar and the quiet opening before detonation represent minor aesthetic developments for the Swedes, but the biggest change is how they tap into a rage that for once feels authentic.