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Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' "100 Days, 100 Nights" is about love, not some supersized flood; according to the singer, that's how long it takes for a man's heart to unfold. Meanwhile, her dynamite backup band chips in the brassy punctuation marks.

At the top of the West, hip-hop is thriving. From the righteous rhyme of Blue Scholars and Ohmega Watts to the infectious party-rap of The Saturday Knights, here's a taste of the region's best hip-hop.

Britney Spears has had a busy year: A child-custody fight, a much-derided MTV Video Music Awards performance, a public tonsorial meltdown. But she has a new album — Blackout, her first studio disc since 2003 — and the music is what matters, right? Rock critic Ken Tucker has a review.

Ramiro Musotto is an acclaimed artist known for his exceptional and innovative work on a one string percussion instrument that is often used in Brazilian capoeira. His music fuses together Latin American folk, carnival samba and Brazilian pop.

The Cleveland Orchestra is matched against Claude Debussy's tennis-inspired ballet Jeux, which conductor Franz Welser-Möst calls one of the most difficult symphonic pieces to perform.

Once an electronic duo, Goldfrapp now embraces dance, glam-rock, and folk on Seventh Tree. British super-diva Allison Goldfrapp and her collaborator, Will Gregory, perform music from the new album with the legendary Steve Lillywhite at the production board.

Harnessing a passion for old-time American folk music and ancient Chinese culture, Abigail Washburn and The Sparrow Quartet achieve an unlikely sound that absolutely works. The band plays material from its self-titled debut on World Cafe.

More than anything Malkmus has done, Real Emotional Trash engages in the sort of shape-shifting that marked Bob Dylan's career. He wears a different mask on virtually every song, and it certainly helps that the band is his strongest post-Pavement outfit yet.

While it may have replaced its trademark organ with a piano, Mates of State's members still crank out some of the finest indie-pop music around. In a session from KUT, the duo explains the need to progress as a band and plays songs from its fifth CD, Re-Arrange Us.

For the Perry siblings of Tupelo, Miss. — ages 9, 14 and 16 — making music involves making unique instruments from car parts. The young family band with astonishingly mature blues chops demonstrates its craft in NPR's Studio 4A.