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.'"

Har-di-Har. Photo by Taylor Creery Photograpy.

There are many unusual things about the married-couple musical duo Har-di-Har, including the way songs swerve, shift, collapse, explode, die, and rise again with little warning. But it's unlikely that you'll get to hear their strangest songs when they perform at Rozz-Tox on Saturday.

Some odd bits first:

• The name Har-di-Har is drawn obliquely from the theme music of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and that information is as helpful as any of the other explanations given by the band.

• The pair shares a drum kit, with Julie Thoreen playing the "hands" and Andrew Thoreen the "feet."

• People who purchase a USB drive with the band's two EPs will get all future Har-di-Har releases uploaded to it for free at a live show.

• The Thoreens decided to pursue music before they'd played a single show as a band.

• Har-di-Har's Facebook page calls its music "psychedelic dream pop intricately composed and played the way three-legged contests are won."

"We cannot do anything the way other people do it," Julie Thoreen said in a phone interview last week.

The Sumner Brothers

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.

John Fullbright. Photo by Vicki Farmer.

When John Fullbright plays at Rozz-Tox on May 30, expect a certain amount of ambivalence from the songwriter and musician.

I asked him in a recent phone interview whether he considers himself a good performer. "I think sometimes I am," he said plainly.

It's not that the 25-year-old Oklahoma native and resident doubts his chops, which earned him a Grammy nomination for his debut album, From the Ground Up. Rather, he's not particularly comfortable in front of an audience.

"I don't like getting on stage and saying the same jokes and doing the same thing and having a show," he explained. "But at the same time ... that's what people are paying for."

Brett Newski & the Corruption. Photo by Sweet Chucky B.

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."

The Lonely Wild

On the Web site of the California band The Lonely Wild is a country-rock-stomp version of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," notable for its clarity, the way it bends the song to the band's style while remaining true to the original, and some Michael Stipe-like vocals. But what will strike most people forcefully and immediately is the jarring segue into the guitar solo from Pink Floyd's "Money," with motifs from both songs intertwined for the remainder.

It's a small, natural leap between the central riffs, but it's an inspired pairing. And on its debut album, The Sun as It Comes (released April 2), the quintet shows a similar skill at combining disparate elements into a natural but distinctive whole - explosive desert gothic, with Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western soundtracks blended with modern indie rock.

The band will be performing at Rozz-Tox on May 4, and singer/songwriter Andrew Carroll said the band grew out of a solo project. His previous band had been a collaborative songwriting outfit, he said, and writing alone was "kind of liberating, not having to ask for other people's opinions, or having to work with four different people ... . It gets difficult to produce material that way."

Day Joy

The vibe of Day Joy's debut album is undoubtedly dreamy. The Florida-based band intends that literally - but not quite in the obvious manner of gentle, mild, peaceful sleep.

Yes, it has cool cello, some warm organ, and spare banjo and guitar in wispy, atmospheric, reverb-heavy arrangements. There are lovely harmonies articulating what Michael Serrin - who founded the band with Peter Michael Perceval III - called "soft-spoken melodies." It usually moves at an aimless pace toward no clear destination.

But the opening track, with the appropriate title "Animal Noise," closes with an aggressive cacophony from nature. The next song is "Bone & Bloody," followed by "Talks of Terror" - which teeters on the edge of a climactic cliff but never leaps off, denying a catharsis that had seemed inevitable. The penultimate song is "Splattered Like Me."

Sweet dreams might dominate, in other words, but they're swirled with nightmares.

Day Joy, on its way to South by Southwest later this month, will perform at Rozz-Tox on March 8, and Serrin said in a phone interview that these contradictions were intentional. The tantalizingly titled Go to Sleep, Mess - released in February on Small Plates Records - was crafted as a concept album. "The idea of it was the mental turmoil that you may have when you can't sleep at night," he said, also comparing it to "that contrast between that beautiful dream and that terrible nightmare you have right after it."

Dan Hubbard & the Humadors

The Web-site bio of Dan Hubbard & the Humadors says the band builds its music on "the classic sounds of Tom Petty, Van Morrison, Neil Young, and Jackson Browne." That's a pretty common set of influences, and one that has produced plenty of earnest but dull music in the hands of less-skilled singers/songwriters.

But with Hubbard and his band - playing their first headlining gig in the Quad Cities on February 8 at Rozz-Tox - those forebears mostly hint at an unpretentious, straightforward, gimmick-free, and song-based style. And when the hooks are plentiful and the arrangements are thoughtful and performed with vigor - as they usually are - the guys pull it off.

Anna Ash

The first impression of Anna Ash's These Holy Days album is her distinctive, boldly quirky singing - soulful, pliable, and off-center, comfortable in breathy coos and pointed, high-pitched peaks. The title track features a piercing vibrato that's ethereally visceral, both heavenly and a bit frightening. That's the kind of voice that sounds like a natural extension of personality honed over a lifetime, an idiosyncratic instrument that nobody ever had the heart to constrain or correct.

But in a phone interview this week, Ash - who will be performing at Rozz-Tox on December 16 and recording a Daytrotter.com session the next day- revealed that she only discovered this marvel over the past five years, and she's still exploring it.

"I didn't really even know what my voice sounded like until I was like 19 or 20 years old," she said. " I was very shy about singing as a kid. I was never very good because I was so scared and so nervous."

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