Ben Schneider is a visual artist who studied painting, and his music - as Lord Huron - reflects that. It's not merely the covers for his two EPs - warmly evocative, slightly foggy images that showcase the natural beauty of figures, water, landscape, and light together. The ethereal, tropical songs themselves have their origins in the visual.

Schneider and his four-piece backing band will be coming to RIBCO on May 4, and in a phone interview this week, he described the translation from the visual to the aural.

"When I'm writing songs, I usually try to tell a story ... ," he said. "A lot of times, the way I'll start is by getting an image in mind and then try to translate that image ... sonically. ... I just kind of try to make a soundtrack for that image. It's almost like making a little film in your head, and then making music that will go with it."

Wagonwheel Blues, The War on Drugs' 2008 full-length, starts with two seconds of something before launching into the harmonica-fueled "Arms Like Boulders," on which band mastermind Adam Granduciel sounds shockingly like Bob Dylan.

Those two seconds - perhaps filtered guitar noise, a light layer of percussion, and a single hit on a glockenspiel - aren't essential to the song, but they are essential to The War on Drugs, which will perform on Thursday at The Rozz Tox in Rock Island. It's a tease for the band's atmospheric side that's combined with straightforward Americana to create something unusual but right - Dylan and Springsteen fused with the experimentation of the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, and Sonic Youth. Listening to Wagonwheel Blues and the band's 2010 EP, Future Weather, it seems amazing that this alchemic formula hasn't been tried more often.

In a phone interview this week, Granduciel said the aesthetic emphasizes "two worlds": "normal song structure and sounds." As Pitchfork.com said in its review of Wagonwheel Blues, the band "emphasize[s] sound and song equally, showing a wide musical range despite the limited elements. ... [T]he War on Drugs' approach comes across as not only natural, but imminently worthwhile, as if these revered sources needed to be roughed up a bit to sound new."

Jordan Danielsen has made his living exclusively from music for seven years now, so it might seem a little strange that he's in his fourth semester studying music performance at Black Hawk College.

Part of the impetus, he said in an interview last month, was expanding his performance repertoire from his natural instruments of guitar and harmonica to piano and drums. And some of it was self-improvement, a desire to learn to read music and to better hear harmonies.

But he also had an eye to his career, hoping to meet horn players and wanting to learn to write charts so other musicians could play them. The ultimate goal appears to be flexibility - the ability to hire the musicians he needs at any time to get what he wants for a project, without being reliant on a fixed band.

The 31-year-old Danielsen recently released his debut CD, the 14-track Night Alone in the City, and it's largely the product of years hosting open-mic nights at venues such as Davenport's Bier Stube. The songs are straightforward and seem designed to connect instantly to an audience; one can almost hear where Danielsen expects a cheer or a laugh from his listeners. In that sense, the album works, even though the songs outside of a live context feel somewhat thin. ("Open Mic" probably works as a tone-setting invitation in front of bar patrons, but it feels out-of-place on a CD.)

(Editor's note: This article was originally published in advance of Canasta's February 3 River Music Experience show, which was canceled. It has been re-scheduled for Friday, March 25. Show information has been updated in the article.)

The six-piece Chicago orchestral-pop band Canasta began writing songs for its second album shortly after the release of its first - We Were Set Up - in 2005.

It took five years for The Fakeout, the Tease, & the Breather to get finished and released. That's a lifetime in the music business, and probably two or three lifetimes for a band that's still trying to break through - with all the members holding down "real" jobs in addition to their band duties.

Canasta will be performing an all-ages show March 25 in the River Music Experience's performance hall, and it should be evident that the labor that went into The Fakeout, the Tease, & the Breather was fruitful. Both the Huffington Post and Metromix named it one of the best Chicago albums of 2010. The Chicago Reader called it "so perfect - every note falling into place with deeply satisfying craftsmanship - that you'll swear you've heard it before." And The Onion's AV Club said: "You can almost feel storm clouds parting for the 11 sunny, rollicking songs that lay ahead. For nearly a decade, the local chamber-pop group has managed to retain its ambition and melodic optimism, without ever coming across as winking."

But in truth, the half-a-decade story of the album is less about nailing the nuances over time than an unusually liquid lineup.