As pop becomes more of an assembly-line affair involving multiple producers, engineers, and guest stars – you could call it craftsmanship by committee, or maybe a music-making gang bang – it doesn't take a bird brain to notice the flock of solitary singer-songwriters flying to the fore these days.

The latest in that sometimes endangered species, Burd Early, a.k.a. James Angelos, isn't the ranch-loving nature boy the late Townes Van Zandt once was, though the comparison is inevitable considering the titles of B.E.'s Mind and Mother and the Texas crooner's Our Mother the Mountain. Angelos's habitat resembles the wrenching, terse terrain of Cat Power and Will Oldham more than it does the sweeter plains of the Flatlanders and Willie Nelson. Nonetheless Angelos and Van Zandt turn out to be singular folk of a feather, comfortably couched in craft, familiar yet enticingly out of tune with the rest of the crowd.

Angelos obviously has different issues. For one, he thinks too much. Check out his mind, separate but equal to the eternal maternal and the self-flagellating focus of the title tune: "Mind and mother, unrealized flower / How cruel I have been to you / No more lashing out, tearing petal from flower." Resisting the urge to bury his listeners in empty rhymes or retreat into the nostalgic, old-time religion of American folk, Angelos finds more than a few eloquent ways to convey his alienation. On "Blackdot," connection is just an AIM message passing in the night, blinking like a new-media come-on, or a carrot dangling the promise of community. "I'm sitting at a terminal / Reading other people's lives / Hoping through this, to find mine," he sings, convinced he'll never find an answer to that eternal question "Are you my mother?"

He finds some uneasy harmony in a duet with Rosario Garcia-Montero ("Undoing the Day"), but just as quickly he's back to his beautifully depleted self, reveling in minor-chord melancholy, trudging tempos, and spooky, twanging asides. Long may he groan, if it leads to this kind of poetry. Burd Early plays May 4, Cafe du Nord, S.F. (415) 861-5016. (Kimberly Chun)

Butchies
Make Yr Life (Yep Roc)

Inquiring minds want to know about Kaia Wilson's well-known breakup with Mr. Lady Records cofounder Tammy Rae Carland and the Butchies' subsequent split from the label, but on the Butchies' fourth album, she keeps mum on the subject. So, please, somebody tell the Internet gossips to stop reading the singer-guitarist's real-life drama into Make Yr Life. After all, aside from the kiss-off epic "Second Guess," the Durham, N.C., trio stick almost exclusively to the far more joyous subject of getting hot 'n' heavy with the lady in yr life. The result is the homosexiest CD you'll likely hear this year: "I'm gonna jump on you on the bed!" Wilson giddily warns on "Send Me You" before panting on "Everything + Everywhere" that "you can grab me by my jeans / Pull and take what you want."

Of course, the Butchies – Wilson, bassist Alison Martlew, and drummer Melissa York – have long given props to the pleasure principle with songs like "Sex (I'm a Lesbian)," but they've rarely sounded as in lust as they do here. A striking departure from the classic rock revisionism of 2001's 3, the dirtier, flirtier Make Yr Life makes its mark with careening, power-pop choruses practically culled from Cheap Trick's hook book. On standouts "Trouble," "17," and the title track, the trio abandon their previous rock fury for more playfully melodic da doo doo doots that are as intoxicating as anything they've ever done. And if that's not enough enticement to bust out the lube, then the closing cover of the Outfield's "Your Love" should at least get you and yr own Mr. Lady spooning. (Jimmy Draper)

Various artists
Contamination Festival 2003 DVD (Relapse)

Mastodon, a quartet from Atlanta, were trudging deliberately into an original number called "March of the Fire Ants," their bodies swathed in red, then blue, then emerald light. Despite the din (I had the sound up high in an effort to keep things real), and quite unexpectedly, all I could think was "This is an amazing band." Their music was, above all else, loud, bombastic, and demanding of both band and audience – full of intricate stops and starts, each part played with a precision that may be effortless but appeared as labored as the travails of Sisyphus. Mastodon locked into what was almost a groove, except it's better described as a grind; nevertheless, it gave the music a kind of forward motion that was as inexorable as death. A haphazard mosh pit formed and then dissolved, and the room full of young men stilled slightly, as if together they were giving themselves up to fate. One by one, they began dropping their heads four times a measure, and bassist Troy Sanders moved center stage, facing the crowd with his legs spread far apart in an upside down V. I found myself wondering how far the hall was from Amish country – the show was part of Relapse Records' 2003 Contamination Festival, which took place in Philadelphia – as blond and bearded Sanders ambled toward the microphone, and I was momentarily transported to the murder mystery film Witness, set in Pennsylvania's Amish country.

The cinematic moment was obliterated when Sanders opened his mouth and began to makes noises that sounded like the roar of a thousand automobiles on a crowded freeway responding to the thunderous rumble of a 747 coming in low for a landing. I think he was singing, and if the Web is any indication, the first verse and chorus of "March" go like this: "As passion encircles the daily storm / The heart bleeds and droughts do not / One grave / Bone engraved / Stone grave / Stone engraved." Nothing that came from his mouth resembled those words, as near as I could tell, but it didn't matter to a crowd that was locked in on the band like the radar on a modern weapons system.

After a four-song set capped by a volcanic dirge called "Mother Puncher," Mastodon called it a night and turned the stage over to Bay Area metal legends Neurosis. They delivered four songs at an excruciatingly deliberate pace, yet with a wallop that could best be described as pulverizing. I mean that in the best possible way. The band play with a light show, and DVD helps you appreciate an experience that can only be described as a kind of ritual. The same should be said for the grunting, howling, leaping display of collective release called "Observer to the Obliteration of Planet Earth," by Cephalic Carnage (who would have understood that the singer from Soylent Green was onstage for the song – it just sounded like another hog rooting in the barn?).