Live, Niemann’s full-throated voice and the swinging five-piece band behind it act as a siren call. Spry golden-agers, hot rockabilly chicks, grizzled tugboat captains, Cajun-zydeco two-steppers, giddy middle-aged tourists and young lindy hoppers pour onto the dance floor for a crash course in honky tonk history from 1930 to 1972. “This one was written in 1941 by a 12-year-old girl,” Neimann announces, launching the dancers into overdrive with “Boogie Woogie Blues.” By now, the room’s filled to overflowing with curious passersby, new converts and the growing ranks of regulars who religiously follow the band.

Gal Holiday’s new CD—the long-awaited follow-up to their 2007 debut—is a gift to those fans. “We’re making it as a tribute to the people who come week after week and dance and buy drinks and drop money in the tip bucket,” says Niemann during a break from recording sessions at Axis Studios in Metairie. Untitled as of press time, the self-released CD is packed with crowd favorites from Bob Wills (“Brainy Cloud Blues”) to Bob Dylan (“Don’t Think Twice”).

Fest-goers will get a preview of the album with a band that now includes guitarist Cranston Clements in addition to Dave James (guitar), Dave Brouillette (upright bass), Steve Spitz (pedal steel) and James Clark (drums). The word from the Gal? Get ready to dance. “We definitely swing these country songs out.”

“The hangover-weary brave enough to show up at that hour will definitely get that headache pummeled,” promises lead guitarist Rob Cambre. “And what’s more Catholic than a bingo tent?”

Formed during the tail end of the 40s’ demise last spring, Rough 7 draws equal inspiration from the Holy Trinity and the Detroit Big Three (Funkadelic, Stooges, MC5), throwing down covers of both “Kick Out the Jams” and the Rev. Charlie Jackson’s “God’s Got It” amid their own growing canon of songs.

“When it first started out, I had a psychedelic thing in mind, with swirling guitars,” says Scully. Enter improvised-music shredder Cambre. Recommended for the job by original guitarist Michael Aaron, who was moving out of town, Cambre sealed the deal at a Rough 7 Saturn Bar gig. “‘Meltdown’ was the first tune they played, which I totally loved,” recalls Cambre, who joined bassist C.J. Floyd and 40s’ drummer Mike Andrepont on the Rough 7 team. “I felt like I could live in this house.”

Soon that house started to grow. Inspired by an old Rev. Charlie Jackson gospel record Cambre brought in to “church up” the band, Scully put out a call for singers. “All my life I’ve wanted soulful women backup singers,” he admits. “And the ones I got are great.”

The Rough 7 had three singers on board when the band debuted at Café Negril during French Quarter Fest. Only two remain: Meschiya Lake and Altercation, whose calland- response harmonies add a rich R&B texture. But the Rough 7 is still a septet. To amp up the noisy psychedelic element, Scully recruited keyboardist Ratty Scurvics, the Ninth Ward force of nature, to put his spell on the band. “

As the foundation gets really solid, the colors get wilder,” says Cambre. And by Voodoo, it should be rock-hard. In late October, the band started laying down tracks for a debut album produced by Dr. Fred for his new label, Rookery Records, on Independence Avenue in Bywater. They’ll also be fresh off a Friday Hi Ho gig, where they’ll back the Ratty Scurvics Big Band the night before Scully joins his fellow 40s at Voodoo. So what can fans expect when they stagger into the Bingo! Parlour at high noon on Day of the Dead?

“A lot of sin-sick soul, baby,” says Scully. “Good Sunday morning stuff.”

Morning 40 Federation plays Saturday, October 31 at 9:45 p.m. in the Bingo! Parlour. R. Scully & the Rough 7 play Sunday, November 1, at 12 p.m. in the Bingo! Parlour.

Like “Mudbugs,” Hold Me Up was written and recorded in New Orleans, then remixed in Sausalito, California, near where Caffall lives when he’s not touring with Maria Muldaur. There’s no mistaking the Big Easy influence, especially on R&B slow-burners such as “Try.” But Caffall busts Southern boogie blues and big rig rock just as hard, making this a great party album.

Tweedy, who rarely pens character studies, goes for broke in “Bull Black Nova,” which slams us right inside the head of a murderer fresh from the kill: “It’s in my hair. / There’s blood in the sink. / I can’t calm down. / I can’t think.” Menacing chords presage the meltdown, turn suddenly sickeningly sweet, then pour salt on the victim’s wounds with a full-court Wilco press. The U-turn from ugly to sweet (and vice versa) also shadows tracks like “Sonny Feeling” and “Deeper Down,” which finds the “comfort of a kiss” buried inside its apparent “insult.” But the album’s emotional center is “You and I,” a lovely duet with Feist, which celebrates the mystery of the other. And “Everlasting Everything,” a gorgeous orchestral closer that echoes Sky Blue Sky’s “On and On,” reminds us that in a world where “everything goes, both the good and the bad … everlasting love is all you have.”

Like the man said: Wilco will love ya, baby.

Last year during an unprecedented live tour, Lucinda Williams recreated five of her classic albums in their entirety. Were she to try that concept again, Little Honey wouldn’t make the cut. With several tracks devoted to finding true love—great for personal fulfillment, if not for artistic development—a gal who cut her teeth on shattered dreams and spat out broken hearts was bound to get a little lazy rolling around in all that bliss. Still, it’s a fine album for the iPod age, studded with flashes of brilliance that stand up with the best of her work.

Williams rocks hard out of the gate with “Real Love,” capturing the first giddy flush of romance: “You squeeze my peaches / send me postcards of girls on beaches.” Later, she gets down to business in “Honey Bee,” using her sexiest 5 a.m. voice to vamp “your sweetness all up in my hair.” Yowser! But while the true-love rockers ring true, sentimental ballads “Knowing” and “Tears of Joy”—in which she pledges “I’ll be your woman / be your everything / you’ll be my baby / be my king”—seem more suited to a suburban wedding reception.

Luckily, love ain’t the only thing she’s selling here. “Jailhouse Tears,” a campy trailer-trash duet with Elvis Costello, provides just the right dose of comic relief. Tabloid readers will have a field day guessing which bad-behaving celeb serves as the model for “Little Rock Star,” a lovely elegy for death-wishers who fly too close to the flame. Even more compelling is “Rarity.” Buried deep inside the album, the song paints a vivid picture of a wildly talented singer-songwriter who’s impossible to cage or sell. But that doesn’t stop the industry from trying: “They suck the gristle off the bones of your art.” Williams should know; she’s fended off the jackals all her life while fighting her own inner demons, and always come out on top.

If anyone’s earned the sigh of relief that comes with finding your soulmate, it’s Lucinda Williams. But a little of the mushy stuff goes a long way, and provides scant solace for the bitter-hearted. Next time out, she’ll likely be past the honeymoon stage. Meanwhile, download the keepers, like her scorching version of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top.”

Longtime Blues Traveler fans baffled by the band’s detour into faux ’70s prog rock on the Jay Bennett-produced Bastardos! (2005) should welcome their latest effort with open arms—and open ears. The set list reads like a greatest hits album, but Cover Yourself does exactly what the title implies: It makes the old faves fresh by reinventing them.

Ben Wilson’s chiming piano chords set the stage with “But Anyway.” The classic crowd pleaser off the band’s first album, which predates Wilson’s tenure by a decade, gets a reggae-style treatment with deep acoustic bass that works surprisingly well and is neatly capped by Chan Kinchla’s original acoustic guitar riff. G. Love drops by to trade raps and harmonica riffs with John Popper on “Just for Me” from Bridge, the band’s first album after the death of bassist Bobby Sheehan in New Orleans in 1999. Tad Kinchla’s big, fat bass notes call Sheehan down to stalk “Defense and Desire,” which turns BT’s sweaty New York bar band days into a rock opera, while “Mountains Win Again,” Sheehan’s signature song, becomes a wrenching blues lament.

As on any tribute album, not every cover works. The band’s biggest hit “Runaround,” off their platinum album four, is Cover Yourself’s biggest miss; horns and a reggae backbeat just dilute its quintessential bubblegum appeal. But the military cadence of Brendan Hill’s drums on “Hook” is a stroke of genius, tracking the inevitable march to the pop-song hook that “brings you home.” And the band scores a direct hit with a scorching “Carolina Blues” that heads deep into the Delta with guest guitarist Charlie Sexton’s snaky slide and earns John Popper serious props as a blues belter.

After years of doing things the hard way to brilliant effect—Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the masterful afterbirth of very public labor pains, while A Ghost Is Born burrowed under the skin to the festering core of addiction—Jeff Tweedy takes the easy way out with Sky Blue Sky, relaxing into a groove with his band and actually allowing himself to have fun. And, damn, if he isn’t just as brilliant refracting light as he was sparring with shadows.

Sky Blue Sky doesn’t lay you flat on first listen, the way Yankee and Ghost did. It invites you in, disarmingly, like a shy suitor who wants you to stay. “Maybe the sun will shine today,” Tweedy sings on the opening line of the opening track, setting the tone for the CD. “Maybe I won’t feel afraid.” The band picks up the thought and turns a simple acoustic line into shimmering currents that ebb and flow, mirroring Tweedy’s reflections throughout an album which, like its predecessors, is meant to be heard in its entirety, iPod Age be damned.

“I trust no emotion / I just believe in locomotion,” Tweedy declares on “You Are My Face.” Proving his point, the band slow-burns into one of those Ghostly, full-body Wilco vamps that feature the band, and particularly avant guitar god Nels Cline, whose work on this album is a marvel of subtle implosion.

“Impossible Germany” (“Unlikely Japan”) is one of those marvelous Tweedyian turns of phrase that makes its own kind of crazy sense. “This is what life is for: be out of place,” he instructs us in life lesson #2 (Or is it #3? There’s one on almost every track). If Sky Blue Sky had come out before Lost in Translation, I have no doubt that Sofia Coppola would have snagged several of Sky’s unflinchingly honest, truly grownup love songs for her movie’s soundtrack.

“Please Be Patient with Me,” Tweedy asks gently, instead of demanding sympathy, as he’s sometimes been wont to do. “I should warn you I’m not well.” Later, he stands in awe of a lover who offers the ultimate gift: “You leave me like you found me.” Then he pulls back for the Big Picture, moving beyond eros to agape and embracing the universe with “What Light”: “If the whole world’s singing your songs / and all your paintings have been hung / just remember what is yours is everyone’s from now on / and that’s not right or wrong.”

In a world of inflated celebrity egos, it’s a remarkable gesture of generosity. It’s also just plain enlightened, like the rest of Sky Blue Sky, which reclaims white light from the New Agers and gives it back to the misfits. “Please don’t cry, we’re designed to die,” Tweedy reminds us in the lovely closing track, which goes “On and On and On” and is destined to be played at hundreds, nay thousands, of weddings-to-be: “On and on and on we’ll stay together yet / until we disappear together in a dream. / I will live in you and you will live in me / until we disappear together in a dream.”

Lucinda Williams has always worn her heart on her sleeve, but on West it’s a mourning band. Written after the death of her mother and a painful romantic breakup (is there any other kind?), her meditation on love and loss picks up the broken pieces and turns them into poetry.

“Are You Alright?” the album’s quietly obsessive opener, reaches out to an ex-lover but will resonate with any New Orleanian who read or wrote those words repeatedly in the subject lines of emails. In “Mama You Sweet,” Williams dives deep into her grief and finds a vivid metaphor for the mechanics of weeping: “Ocean becomes heavy and tries / to push its way out / through these ancient eyes.” And no one ever begged for redemptive love with more visceral urgency than Williams does in “Unsuffer Me.” That plea is seared by the strings of violininst Jenny Scheinman, one of several guest artists brought in by producer Hal Willner, whose work on Marianne Faithful’s Strange Weather echoes in the atmospheric West.

Willner did not produce Faithful’s scurrilous “Why’d You Do,” but Williams’ spitting-word rant, “Wrap My Head Around That,” is in the same deliciously vengeful vain. “Come On,” with its double entendre kiss-off, is even funnier. It’s also the closest West gets to rocking out, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Willner creates a cohesive ambience with avant jazzbos like Bill Frisell that meshes well with Williams’ sensual, laconic drawl. But the album does settle into a mid-tempo groove and bogs down with a couple fillers. “Where Is My Love?” name-checks cities like she did when she went looking for “Joy,” but lacks the earlier song’s musical and lyrical grit. And Joan Osborne asked “What if God were one of us?” years ago to far greater effect than Williams does on “What If,” a series of goofy topsy-turvy questions that could (maybe) make a good kids’ song if Imagination Movers sped it up to double time.

But hey, Lucinda Williams released three perfect albums in a row, beginning with her 1998 breakthrough, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. If she drops the ball a couple times on West, it hardly matters in the iPod age. The vast majority of these songs aren’t just keepers but Williams’ classics, including the title track. The future opens up like a vast horizon on “West,” where she’s ready to “close my eyes and let my imagination run.” Can’t wait to see where it leads her next.

Lucinda Williams plays Jazz Fest Friday, April 27 at 5:35 p.m. on the Gentilly Stage