When John Fullbright plays at Rozz-Tox on May 30, expect a certain amount of ambivalence from the songwriter and musician.

I asked him in a recent phone interview whether he considers himself a good performer. "I think sometimes I am," he said plainly.

It's not that the 25-year-old Oklahoma native and resident doubts his chops, which earned him a Grammy nomination for his debut album, From the Ground Up. Rather, he's not particularly comfortable in front of an audience.

"I don't like getting on stage and saying the same jokes and doing the same thing and having a show," he explained. "But at the same time ... that's what people are paying for."

Brett Newski & the Corruption bills itself as "a band from Saigon, Vietnam," but before you imagine some sort of Eastern-Western mash-up, know that Newski comes from the exotic environs of ... Milwaukee.

It's true that the band lived and recorded its album Tiny Victories in Saigon, and that Newski and his collaborators are an international cast - albeit entirely from North America and Europe. But when the band plays Rozz-Tox on May 28, don't expect any divergence from poppy Western guitar rock. Outside of lyrics based on travels and life abroad, the influence of southeast Asia, Newski said in a phone interview last week, is limited to the invigorating hullabaloo of the city.

"It's indie rock," Newski said. "We're not rocking any sitars or anything. But the energy that the city brings that we're constantly surrounded with I thought translated well into the energy of the album."

When I last wrote about Unknown Component, the one-man DIY project of the prolific Keith Lynch, I focused on one song and compared his voice favorably to Kurt Cobain's.

Five years - and at least five recordings - later, I'm faced with his 2012 album Blood V. Electricity, and his growth is impressive and, frankly, startling. The Iowa-based singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer will be performing at Circle Tap on May 11, and the talent I saw before is now mature, the potential is realized, and the flashes of brilliance have been transformed into a consistently alluring and engaging whole. (And while his singing still has a whine, the edge has been sanded off, banishing all thoughts of Cobain.)

The album is on the one hand atmospheric and spacious and on the other concrete and tangible, finding a happy balance between misty textures and solid frames, and forging a successful, alchemical marriage of synthetic and organic instrumental sounds.

On the Web site of the California band The Lonely Wild is a country-rock-stomp version of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," notable for its clarity, the way it bends the song to the band's style while remaining true to the original, and some Michael Stipe-like vocals. But what will strike most people forcefully and immediately is the jarring segue into the guitar solo from Pink Floyd's "Money," with motifs from both songs intertwined for the remainder.

It's a small, natural leap between the central riffs, but it's an inspired pairing. And on its debut album, The Sun as It Comes (released April 2), the quintet shows a similar skill at combining disparate elements into a natural but distinctive whole - explosive desert gothic, with Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western soundtracks blended with modern indie rock.

The band will be performing at Rozz-Tox on May 4, and singer/songwriter Andrew Carroll said the band grew out of a solo project. His previous band had been a collaborative songwriting outfit, he said, and writing alone was "kind of liberating, not having to ask for other people's opinions, or having to work with four different people ... . It gets difficult to produce material that way."