The band Decker calls its sound "psychedelic desert folk," and each of those words carries roughly equal weight.

The folk influence is a carry-over from earlier incarnations of the band. Before its fourth album - last year's Slider - leader Brandon Decker wrote the songs and brought people in to round them out. "I didn't feel they were really musical," he said in a phone interview last week. Rather, they were vehicles to say something.

But when the band performs at Rozz-Tox on April 20, Decker will be emphasizing the other two words. In its current form as a four-piece, the folk leanings are somewhat obscured by the wide-open space reflecting its home base of Sedona, Arizona, and the spaciness of psychedelic rock. (The band stylizes its name as "decker.", but for readability I'm ignoring that.)

On Slider and the epic "Cellars" (from the upcoming Patsy EP), there's a comfortable balance between direct simplicity and airy, patient exploration. Instead of being dense in any given moment, the songs wander purposefully, collecting detail to achieve their fullness.

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.'"

Several reviews of the Sumner Brothers' second studio album, I'll Be There Tomorrow, start similarly. No Depression's begins: "There's no reasonable explanation why I have not heard the Sumner Brothers before ... ."

Actually, there is a reasonable explanation. The Vancouver duo - playing Rozz-Tox on June 11 and recording a Daytrotter.com session while in the Quad Cities - has built a following in western Canada and the U.S. west coast over the past seven years; but it has never played "out east," in Brian Sumner's words. I didn't ask, but I think "out east" likely includes the Midwest.

"We're the turtle in the race, where we just kind of slowly grow every year," he said in a phone interview last week.

But I'll Be There Tomorrow is bringing a lot of new ears to the group following a self-titled studio album and two collections of home recordings. "It's just careful planning on our part," Brian said of the positive attention the 2012 release has received. The brothers have conscientiously cultivated media relationships, he said, which paid off when the record came out in September.

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."