Less than a minute into In Tall Buildings' 2010 self-titled debut is a moment that hints at Erik Hall's cut-and-paste method. New vocal lines burst abruptly from beneath the previous ones, as if overeagerly jumping their cue. But the music is so carefully constructed that it's obvious this was a choice rather than a mistake, and the effect in an otherwise patient and gentle song is the understanding of a clear vision behind the music.

The album was crafted over four years, Hall said in a phone interview this week promoting his February 15 performance at Rozz-Tox. "I didn't push it at all," he said. "I didn't work on it unless something came to me, unless I had an idea that I knew I wanted to apply to the music that I was already working on. So it was very gradual."

While the album's gestation period was long by music-industry standards, Hall's composing and recording approaches were particularly unusual. He started out with a backbone - a chord progression or rhythmic pattern - and recorded it for the final product. "That's it," he said. "It's not like a demo. ... Sometimes I have to sit and live with that for a good while before I figure out where the vocals are going to come from, what the song is going to be about, and what else sonically it needs." He added with a laugh: "That can take anywhere from a week to a year."

When the quartet Deleted Scenes recorded its second album, Young People's Church of the Air, the atmosphere was "intense and pressurized," resulting in a "doomed energy," singer/guitarist/co-songwriter Dan Scheuerman has said.

In an interview this week promoting his band's February 3 performance at Rozz-Tox, Scheuerman elaborated on those intriguing phrases. To start, the recording period was more compressed than for the band's debut, he said: "We wanted the record to have a moment. Instead of being recorded over a year, it was recorded over more like three months. In that sense, it's more identifiable as one piece of work."

But the time frame was just one factor. "There was a weird vibe going on in the studio," Scheuerman said. Producer L. Skell "is hard to read. So there was a lot of silence and glowering ... . And so we'd go in a direction and not be sure what was going on. And then when things seemed dark and we weren't getting anywhere, everything would sort of snap together and ... [Skell] would come up with one or two really amazing suggestions to focus everything. There was a sense of ominousness to the proceedings, and that I think created a sense of doom. And there's also a bit of doom in the songwriting as well. ... There was a high degree of tension."

Metal often skates by on aggression and technical chops, and it rarely creates drama. The Quad Cities quartet Helmsplitter, on its debut Storms of Genocide - for which the band will perform a CD-release show Friday at RIBCO - nails the requisite fury and dark majesty while also capturing that elusive elevating quality.

Twenty favorite songs from 2011 clocking in at just under 76 minutes, roughly sequenced. No apologies for the narrowness of my tastes.

Paris Suit Yourself, "Sometimes." From the flat, stuttering riff to the woodblock accents to the falsetto vocals, this one plays a bit like a parody of Queens of the Stone Age, which itself has occasionally seemed like a parody. But as I've long said about the songs of Spinal Tap: There are a lot of bands that would be proud to have made "Big Bottom" and "Stonehenge." It's such a fine line between stupid and clever, and even when you're on the wrong side, sometimes it works.

Hella, "Self Checkout." Back in 2005, I described the guitar-and-drums duo Hella as a "spastic, manic, lightning-speed instrumental racket, equal parts math rock and free jazz, calculation and improvisation ... . It's strange and arresting, and - shockingly - instantly accessible if you keep your mind and ears open." Thankfully, not much has changed. The secret of Hella generally and "Self Checkout" in particular is its violent lyricism - the feelings and wordless narrative crafted in the context of the din. As you might expect, there's anger and frustration, but joy sneaks through; you can almost feel the exuberance of creation and the rush of nailing it.