Though impeded by my lack of connectivity, I manage to find new music to listen to:

• Tift Merritt - Traveling Alone. Is this alt-country? It's country alright, but it's nothing at all like what you'd hear on commercial country radio; and it's not paleo- stuff like Gillian Welch or bluegrass; and it's not old-style redneck stuff like Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard. It's that Graham Parsons / Emmylou / later-Krauss strain: a little bit of rock, heavy on the balladry, a lot of twang, but none of that shit-kickin, whoop-it-up, faux-downhome stuff that popular country music relies on. I like it. Good songs. Nice vibe. Andrew Bird makes an appearance on backup vocals, doing a very convincing Roy Orbison impression. She's pretty good live, too.
• Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison. I'd heard some songs from it, but never the whole thing, with all the talking and his jokes and the little novelty songs. It's pretty wild. The sound is raw and live. The wardens make announcements. The crowd laughs at the little innuendos in the lyrics, then he cracks up and forgets the words. The crowd is loving it, in a much different way than the James Brown Apollo crowd is loving it: convicts, not teenage girls. His voice is great, and his personality dominates. The music is, while not always amazing, at least fun.
• Janelle Monae - Archandroid. So it seems I have a thing for quirky female R&B singers: Santigold, Erykah Badu, etc.. And Monae is super-quirky. Or, at least that's the impression the album wants to convey. The record leaps all over the place: 80's pop, big-band, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, classical, rock, etc.. It wants to be a wild ride - a concept album inspired by Metropolis, she says. And some of it is fun, and some of it is interesting. But the rest isn't strong enough to carry me along. She's got talent. But I think I'd like to see it focused on maybe two or three genres at a time, instead of six or seven.

You got anything new?