Jeffrey Konrad's Shadow Boxing, his second "official" release under the name Konrad, is all over a pop map written mostly in crayon, with keyboard cheese and drum machines aplenty. If the album weren't so layered and carefully constructed, it would be an easy mistake to dismiss many songs as amateurish outsider art produced largely on a synthesizer.

The wrongheadedness of that should be evident solely from "Hang-Ups," which foregoes electronics entirely for a poignant, country-tinged ballad that recalls Neil Young in its instrumentation and sleepy vibe. The two-line chorus is plainspoken but clear, with understated vocals that capture a character both self-aware and lost: "Getting over you has been difficult / 'Cause I'm faking it through my future." The verses are loaded with phrases both cryptic and evocative - "Open season on the polygraph," "Shadow-boxing with the angel of death."

The Detroit trio Koffin Kats - headlining an all-ages show at the River Music Experience on May 5 - performs in the musical subgenre known as psychobilly, and the fusion of punk and rockabilly isn't particularly well-known or popular in the States.

So it's a bit strange that bassist and singer Vic Victor, in a phone interview last week, called psychobilly a "music genre for everybody." The style's biggest name is probably the Reverend Horton Heat, whose top-selling albums have managed to reach only the lower quarter of Billboard's top 200.

Yet Victor said that when the uninitiated but curious - those who don't realize that the upright bass has a place in rock music - show up to a Koffin Kats gig, they're usually converted. "Everyone's invited," he said. "That's kind of the idea with this new record. We didn't write it for the psychobilly crowd. We wrote it for anybody who likes rock and roll and driving music."

That album is Our Way & the Highway, and while Victor probably overstates its appeal as universal, there's no denying that the Kats' brand of psychobilly deserves a wider audience; the band's music is relentless but also loaded with hooks, strong melodies, and alluring harmonies on top of the aggressive rockabilly groove. If Green Day deserves some of its superstar status, then the Koffin Kats are worthy of at least a piece of that pie.

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.

One minute, St. Ambrose art professor Leslie Bell is talking about his paintings - mostly allegorical scenes featuring women and girls. The next minute he's talking about his students - especially the female ones - without having shifted gears.

"On a really basic level, I'm trying to kindle a spark of quirky individuality in each person I paint," he said in an interview last week. "I don't want them to come across as generic. And ... through body language, environment, to a lesser extent facial expression - because my characters tend to be a little bit on the deadpan side - even fashion or dress ... I want to communicate a kind of self-made-ness."

He then says he doesn't want to be cheesy - the simplistic idea that girls can be carpenters or play chess: "I want it to be more what we deal with everyday in the studio, which is following what you're interested in, sort out the 'should' voice in you ... , acknowledge that there is peer pressure and that there are societal pressures and that there are laws, but then make as much use of the freedoms that you have to cultivate your interests, develop your interests, don't be ashamed to be an intellectual, fight me as a professor ... ."

One can see that shift happening even more quickly here, in a single sentence: "I want my work to be really affirmative of women's and girls' abilities to create themselves, to stick to their own ideals, to find ways of proving to whoever might be skeptical of what it is to be a woman artist or just a woman that there are as many paths to maturity as there are people attempting to mature."

This conflation is illuminating, as Bell's artistic interest in female experience and identity seems inseparable from his teaching responsibility to help young artists develop their own voices. He notes that well over half of the students in the St. Ambrose art department are women, and it's easy to infer that his painting is akin to homework, a way to develop empathy and connections with his female students. They're also a way of leading by example, of showing through art a path to authenticity.