The Quad Cities-based hard-rock band 3 Years Hollow can trace its current enviable position to a series of fortunate events.

The quintet is poised to release its album The Cracks on the national Imagen Records indie label on February 11 - with a local release show February 8 at Rascals Live in Moline - and has tour dates scheduled with Saving Abel through mid-March.

None of that would have been possible, vocalist/songwriter Jose Urquiza said in a phone interview on January 29, without a trade of equipment for time.

Roughly seven years ago, Urquiza said, the band was looking to cut its first album, and he approached Real Trax Recording Studios' Rob Cimmarusti about learning the ropes of the business. Cimmarusti made a proposal, Urquiza said: "We had this really expensive microphone, and he basically said, 'I'll trade you. You can give me the microphone, and you guys can have all the studio time that you want.' We wanted to record our record, so we did it. We would not be here without Rob."

The products of that swap were 2008's Ascension and a continuing relationship with Real Trax. Urquiza is now the studio manager, and he and guitarist Tony Reeves, guitarist Neil Kuhlman, bassist Dex Digga, and drummer Chris Cushman recorded the bulk of their new album there, too.

The story of The Cracks, 3 Years Hollow's second full-length, is a bit more complicated but no less serendipitous. It starts with the band's 2012 EP Remember, which was meant both for fans and record labels. Its title track topped Sirius XM Octane's charts, which "really ... legitimized us [as] a national band," Urquiza said.

The Des Moines band Foxholes formed in late August 2012, and its first album is set to be released March 1. Can't Help Myself is a surprisingly mature work, in the sense that a band this new has a clear sonic identity - rooted in late-'80s/early-'90s alternative rock - yet it doesn't use its touchstones as crutches; the songs in no way suggest a group trying to find its feet over its first year-plus, or an ensemble beholden to its influences.

But the quartet - which will be performing its first show outside of the Des Moines and Ames areas at Rozz-Tox on February 1 - has indeed been a work in progress. And with a second full-length album planned for later this year, it's evident that Foxholes moves quickly.

In reviewing The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die's Whenever, If Ever, Pitchfork.com said it's "a rare debut that's powered by an almost frightening will to live, a desperation that strongly suggests the people involved have no other option to deal with what's inside of them."

That's a somewhat ironic assessment, given that the band almost didn't complete the album. "We weren't sure if everybody was going to break up or if we were going to finish the thing ... ," guitarist Greg Horbal said in a phone interview last week. "I think for a while, even I was kind of like, 'If we get this record done, it'll be a miracle.'"

Through the thick melodic honey of Russian Romanticism and the ever-changing musical illusions of a contemporary American composition, the Quad City Symphony on December 7 fashioned a successful concert from two divergent approaches to lyricism. Although the symphony occasionally blurred the differences between melodies and their accompaniments, they achieved resplendent moments of uplifting splendor in both pieces.

The program paired Jennifer Higdon's imaginative, three-movement Violin Concerto - which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize - with Sergei Rachmaninoff's profusely tuneful Symphony No. 2. Separated by a century of musical development, these works feature vast differences in compositional technique and tonality: Rachmaninoff worked in the customary symphonic form while Higdon writes improvisationally, and Rachmaninoff used traditional harmonic structure while Higdon employs a variety of tonal systems developed during the 20th Century.

But they are similar in using lyricism or songfulness as the primary means of self-expression. Consequently, in both cases, the artistic challenge for the Quad City Symphony was the same: to emphasize, with dynamics and stylistic nuances, melodic and motivic fragments and differentiate them from background sounds and accompaniment - a task the orchestra and its guest conductor struggled with in the first movement of Rachmaninoff and throughout Higdon.