​We got into the Clouds are Ghosts while deconstructing their band name. It was clear when we heard their work that the band was good, we compared them to Legendary Pink Dots and the Irrespressibles and that is some of our highest praise. The only problem we ever had with their output was that the whole thing seemed quite unfocused, like fire in zero gravity. It's pretty, but the center just didn't hold.

Still, we held out hopes for the band, and when singer Jason Morris dropped us a line saying that a new EP was on the horizon we perked up. Harbinger takes all our previous complaints about a scattershot approach and throws them out the window. Not the band's sound is as focused as a sniper rifle, and just as deadly.

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Each Wednesday, Rocks Off arbitrarily appoints one lucky local performer or group "Artist of the Week," bestowing upon them all the fame and grandeur such a lofty title implies. Know a band or artist that isn't awful? Email their particulars to introducingliston@gmail.com.

Ira Perez on Facebook

​Recently, we happened across a performance by Ira Perez, last year's winner of the Houston Press Best Female Vocalist award. It's hard to say exactly how fitting that award is until you've heard her live, because she somehow manages to sound better amid the hustle and bustle of a crowded venue than she does within the confines of a recording booth.

Her voice is bright and vibrant and, without being too hyperbolic, probably what it'd sound like if chocolate made noise. And since there's a very stringent Artist of the Week policy re: artists that require off-kilter food metaphors to describe their sounds, we stole a few bits of Ms. Perez's time to talk about tigers, her new album, tigers, Marcus Manchild, tigers and Filipinos.

Aces.

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Mango Punch

Una Casita Blanca

www.mangopunch.com

Mango Punch's Walter Shur is a great front man (as multiple Houston Press Music Awards wins prove), but his real talent lies in songwriting. His band Mango Punch's new CD, Una Casita Blanca (A Little White House), shows Shur's considerable range as a writer with tunes that range stylistically from flamenco to sweet, simple pop and folk-tinged dance numbers, all of them radio-ready.More >>

Tori Amos

Abnormally Attracted to Sin

www.toriamos.com

If, like me, the only song you had heard off Abnormally Attracted To Sin prior to its release was the single "Maybe California," then (like me) the first few seconds of opening track "Give" made you whisper a relieved "Oh, thank God. It's not all going to be like that."

And it isn't. And that is a very, very good thing. Amos' previous album, 2007's American Doll Posse, marked the beginning of her return to her roots as a bad-ass, weird, experimental rock chick, from way back before albums like 2002's Scarlet's Walk and especially 2005's multi-layered but ultimately tepid The Beekeeper began flirting with adult contemporary. Posse brought back the rebellious-outsider attitude that attracted legions to Amos in the first place, an attitude which, on Abnormally, has flowered into a full-on middle finger in the face of what some suspected was shaping up to be a post-childbirth mellowing (Amos gave birth to daughter Natashya in 2000).

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Glasnost

Great Divide EP

www.myspace.com/glasnostmusic

Since the '80s, bands that have dared to cross-breed rock and dance music have been all too happy to let their synthesizers do the songwriting for them - even the most successful ones like the Faint, the Bravery and the Killers. On its debut EP, Great Divide, Houston quintet Glasnost recalls all three without letting its electro impulses get out of hand - save opener "Come Alone," it's the guitars that drive these three songs forward as much as the drum machines, and the ringing riff of the radio-ready title track ought to make Brandon Flowers and company especially nervous.

"Come Alone," meanwhile, is a prime cut of widescreen synth-pop with its feet in the disco, its fingers on a laptop and its heart in the "ruined skyline" of Glasnost's hometown. Three remixes of "Come Alone" round out the EP, the best of which is probably the Kraftwerkian "Culture Prophet" remix, although the glitch-hoppy "Kids at the Bar" take isn't bad either.

With the Watermarks and Motel Aviv, 9 p.m. Friday, June 5, at Rudyard's, 2010 Waugh, 713-521-0521 or www.myspace.com/rudyards

Girl in a Coma

Trio B.C.

www.girlinacoma.com

It's so nice to type the words "Girl in a Coma" for something that has nothing to do with the San Antonio trio's March altercation with some off-duty Houston police officers at Chances, which landed two band members a weekend in jail and a court date later this summer. It's especially nice because GIAC's new album Trio B.C. - the band's second for Joan Jett's Blackheart Records, after 2007's Both Before I'm Gone - is a richly textured document of alternative pop and ear-piercing punk, with slight hints of country, Latin music and shoegaze adding to the fun.

Singer Nina Diaz coos about sucking some lucky boy's toes on the Cat Power-esque "El Monte" - pledging her love, but twisting the knife when she wonders, "Am I just another figure to call upon when you're bored?" and coos like Siouxie Sioux on the bewitching, Spanish-sung closer "Ven Cerca." "Baby Boy," is an eruption of mid-'90s Sonic Youth noise-punk, while the acoustic-powered "HH" and "In the Day" show the Smiths are never very far from the trio's thoughts.

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Green Day

21st Century Breakdown

www.greenday.com

In all actuality, there are two Green Days: The three punk snots who recorded everything from 39/Smooth to 1997's Nimrod and two thinly veiled side projects, the electro The Network and the reverberating Foxboro Hot Tubs. This represents Billie Joe and the boys at their most adventurously unhinged, spewing forth stream-of-consciousness punk rock you really only get from the ages of 14 to 19.

The second is the band that had kids, got married, got divorced and somehow found time to turn on Fox News just in time to see this country implode into a shitstorm of dissent and despair. This is the band that embraced Queen, The Who and the Boss, beginning with 2000's startlingly frank Warning! and in the process transcended an entire punk universe.

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Not to sound like an American conditioned on the stuff of the patriarchy, but thank God St. Vincent is a woman; to say Annie Clark is a saint among female musicians would be way too obvious. It's a shame that critics feel forced to throw in the caveat 'female' when writing about female musicians (especially the good ones), but for her part, St. Vincent is doing her best to wrench that mindset from us all and slap into us the realization that musical excellence transcends gender.

So here's what I'll do: I won't say that St. Vincent is female. There. Done. No longer sexist. St. Vincent is generational; she's My Bloody Valentine sung as a lullaby, and she's making everyone forget that what musicians are supposed to do is copy other musicians. Actor is one of the best albums of the year; 11 songs of gun-toting rock n' roll with a twist of citrus shaped like college-boy cutoffs.

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Paul Wall

Fast Life

www.grillsbypaulwall.com

Did high gas prices kill off Paul Wall? Not really - that's just a coincidence. Rather, the H-Town artist known for his candy cars and diamond grills has suffered from being too closely identified with a regional sound that is no longer fashionable. Just as Chingy stopped selling records after the St. Louis "right hurrrr" movement fell off, Wall has been hurt because the chopped and screwed sound has lost popularity.

It's too bad, because his latest album Fast Life is a lively, excitable work that does its best to update his style. From the soaring synths of "I Need Mo," produced by the suddenly in-vogue hip-hop beatmaker Travis Barker (yes, from Blink-182) to the deep-South bounce of "Fly," Wall is clearly trying to make himself more current.

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Mike Jones

The Voice

www.whomikejones.com

Here's the thing about The Voice, Mike Jones' follow-up to double-platinum debut Who Is Mike Jones?: People automatically want to hate it. Perhaps even more interesting, though, is that Jones knows this. The Voice's most meaningful song is a cathartic track aptly titled "Hate On Me," which even goes so far as to glance at the Ozone Awards debacle, where Jones more or less got his clock cleaned by Trae.

But you know what? Objectively, The Voice is not all bad - in parts, it's even very good. Of course, there are no less than six throwaways on the LP. "Cuddy Buddy," "Swagg Thru Da Roof," and "I Know," for example, all feel like hedge bets, interchangeable melodic rap meant to act as substitutes on the off chance that the "Next To You" doesn't gain any airwave traction. But the surprises save the album.

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