NPR Music

All month, World Cafe invites listeners to discover the music of Havana, Cuba, with the series Sense of Place.

For 27 years, the members of Neurosis have demonstrated what metal can be and what it can aspire to: transcendent, cathartic, graceful, innovative. Like the best films, Neurosis' albums are thoughtful and sometimes sublime escapes, navigating pain and salvation through Steve Von Till and Scott Kelly's words, as well as a dense atmosphere of distortion and noise. In the past decade, more deliberately paced and folkloric passages have made their way into Neurosis' sound, too.

This will be the last in our summer-long series of polls in search of the albums everyone can love. We've featured a few hundred records since we started back in May, and have found a lot of surprises.

Yeasayer is back with a trippy third album, Fragrant World, which pushes the trio — whose members dipped a bit into the indie-rock "mainstream" with 2010's Odd Blood — back into a more experimental zone.

Chris Keating, Ira Wolf Tuton and Anand Wilder recently visited The Alternate Side's Studio A for a live session and a conversation with Russ Borris. Watch Yeasayer perform "Blue Paper" on this page.

The Quebe Sisters Band makes its first appearance on Mountain Stage, recorded live on the campus of West Virginia University in Morgantown. While the sight of a triple-fiddle band is something to behold in person, the group's talent ensures that its sound translates easily to the radio and beyond.