These men with the rolled-up sleeves on their white blazers demand and earn your respect.

Sincere but not without flashes of playful humor.

[xrr rating=3.5/5]Vancouver’s Dan Mangan moves on from his folk festival singer-songwriter roots on Club Meds, his latest album for Arts and Crafts. The last seven years of his career culminated in the critical acclaim of 2011’s Oh Fortune, but this time he puts down the acoustic guitar and folk-rock for something more intense and complicated. Blacksmith primarily consists of musicians …

[xrr rating=4.0/5]Taylor Kirk’s voice can deftly sway between ephemeral beauty and impending doom; and as their frontman’s vocals go, so goes gothic-tinged Canadian folk-bluesmen Timber Timbre. Ever since the band’s 2009’s self-titled breakthrough—which followed two self-released records that hadn’t yet settled into a distinctive style—Timber Timbre has quietly cornered the market on creepy-cool, their foreboding sound conjuring swampy, macabre imagery …

[xrr rating=3.0/5]As co-leader of Broken Social Scene, Kevin Drew specialized in being the eye of a musical hurricane. Every BSS song seems haphazardly written on the fly, only anchored together by Drew’s vision and his sheer commitment to making that project work. It’s not surprising, then, that the group disbanded after Forgiveness Rock Record, where not even Drew’s willpower was …

[xrr rating=4.0/5]Sometimes a loss turns out to be a gain. Such is the case for Toronto’s darkwave outfit Trust—once a duo until shortly after their 2012 debut, when the act was reduced to a one-man show. The superlative Joyland arrives as the fruit of Robert Alfons’s labors alone, as former cohort Maya Postepski split to focus her considerable production prowess …