(Note: This show was canceled on October 14 and will be rescheduled.)

When Rock Island native Lissie Maurus performed in the Quad Cities in November, she had just released the EP Why You Runnin', and it seemed to promise that more aching folk would follow.

Three of the EP's five songs ("Little Lovin'," "Everywhere I Go," and "Oh Mississippi") made the cut on the full-length Catching a Tiger, but only the first of those - with its escalating, building soul - foreshadowed her album's stunning pop path.

There's no doubt that Lissie is a strong singer, with a throaty voice full of color and conviction and frayed around the edges. But good folk music requires sterling wordplay, and I worried that Maurus might not yet have the songwriting chops to carry a record of lightly adorned songs, even with her considerable pipes.

So Catching a Tiger - released in August - is a major and welcome surprise. A handful of producers and co-writers developed tracks around Maurus' voice, and she takes flight within the dynamic tunes. I heard Cat Power and Neko Case in the spare arrangement of her EP, but Catching a Tiger finds her in the smartly fleshed-out company of Tori Amos and Fiona Apple; the aural richness augments and supports fundamentally strong material.

In a genre that stresses heaviness, riffs, chops, and menace above all else, Georgia-based Kylesa is something of a rarity.

The five-piece psychedelic-metal band is most notable for its strong sense of melody and dynamics within undeniable heaviness, and that's partly a function of having three vocalists (including a woman!) and two drummers. But Kylesa is greater than the sum of those parts, commanding a wider range of feelings and textures than most metal bands even attempt, let alone pull off. They caress listeners while still bludgeoning them, often at the same time and rarely straining.

Playing RIBCO on October 8 as part of the Sanctioned Annihilation Tour with High on Fire and Torche, Kylesa is poised to release the majestic, thunderous Spiral Shadow on October 26, and it might be my favorite metal album in years.

The blurb that accompanies any write-up of the New Orleans-based rock band Cowboy Mouth comes from Cake magazine: "On a bad night they'll tear the roof off the joint, and on a good night, they'll save your soul."

For drummer, singer, and primary songwriter Fred LeBlanc, a great live show -- which will be on display at RIBCO on Friday -- is both natural and a necessity.

The band has been around for two decades now, with the constant core of LeBlanc and guitarist, singer, and songwriter John Thomas Griffith. By LeBlanc's count, Cowboy Mouth has had 427 bassists and 1,628 guitar players.

"The crux of the band has always been me and John," LeBlanc said in a recent interview. "John and I always had a chemistry, and we always built a band around that. We had all done stints in major labels before the band, and so it was: What do we have that they cannot steal from us? They can steal songs from us; they have. They can steal recordings from us; they have. But they can't steal playing live. ... That's how we built our reputation."

Images by photographer Chris Jones from Thursday's Toby Keith concert at the i wireless Center, with opener Trace Adkins. Click on any photo for a larger version.

Toby Keith: