If you love music, but don't have the time to keep up with what's new, you should listen to Tuesday Reviewsday. Every week our critics join our hosts in the studio to talk about what you should be listening to, in one short segment. This week, music journalist 

Artist: Patty Griffin
Album: "Servant of Love"
Songs: "Everything’s Changed," "Good and Gone"
Summary: This is the sound of a broken heart: A guitar strummed in a clipped, unchanging two-chord pattern, an mbira tinkling along with it, at times barely audible and a voice, somber and subdued, as if in a darkened room with no one else around. 

This is the sound of Patti Griffin’s "Everything’s Changed," arguably the emotional center of her new album "Servant of Love": Devastating, brutal, perfect. Though calling it a "center" may be inappropriate. Little on this album is centered. There’s a disorientation inherent in what, we must assume, is her musical account of her breakup with Robert Plant, with whom she worked in his Band of Joy project and shared a house and life in her hometown of Austin for a few years. 

Now, two things to keep straight: This is not an answer album to Plant’s "Lullaby and … the Ceaseless Roar," one of the most impressive works of 2014. In that, the ex-Zepper sang of endings and leavings and of returning home to England amid a bracing mix of African-tinged psychedelic folk and blues. It was hard not to see it as being about the split. And it was hard not to wonder how Griffin would respond.

Well, she doesn’t respond. Rather, she makes her own statement, her own internalizing of the process, her own dissection of her experience, to the point that you might wonder if she even heard his album. Perhaps she did not.

And the other thing: Despite the tone of "Everything Changes," this is not bleak. Well, it is. But it isn’t. It’s both. It’s many things, many of them contradictions, as one feels when grieving, as she was here. At times she’s stuck in  dark despair, at times she’s fought her way out into the light. At times she’s bent on revenge, at times ready to — well, not forgive or forget, but to come out on top, on her own terms.

In the opening title song, she sings of being taken over by love’s ecstasy — possessed by it and betrayed by it. It’s just a plunked piano, a bowed bass drone, a trumpet that could have been taken straight from a noir film score. And over it, a voice rising from suppressed, resigned and clearly pained to a howl at once anguished and resolute. against that spare, sketchy sonic wall of just piano, noir-esque trumpet and bowed bass.  

Then in the next song, "Gunpowder," over scratchy guitars, pointedly unsteady drums and that trumpet again, this time more cajoling or even mocking, she sings of it all blowing up to nothing, of taking merciless revenge:

You will never see my face

And then my kids will own this place

And then my kids will own yours too

If you were me, wouldn’t you?

And after that is "Good and Gone," kicking off with her wanting to "make sure he’s good and dead," the music building around a drone like a bad thought that you can’t get out of your head. This is no elegy, rather it’s a personalized take on the murder-ballad motif that is a core of American folk music. 

And that’s what this is. American folk music, on its most personal, primal level. And at its most gripping.

Artist: Luciana Souza
Album: "Speaking in Tongues"
Songs: "At the Fair," "Filhos de Gandhi"
Summary: "Speaking in Tongues" is right. For most of the album Souza, a Brazilian-born singer based in Los Angeles with a very wide-ranging and impressive track record spanning jazz, bossa nova and other styles, sings in no language, at least no recognizable language — just what seems to be wordless sounds. Only two songs, coming at what on vinyl would be each side’s end, have lyrics, both from Leonard Cohen with somber music by Souza. But it’s the other material that really stands out here, her voice freed from concrete meanings to dart and fly into territories words can’t touch, as a great instrumentalist flies. 

She’s not the only one "speaking," as it were. "Tongues" is a full-out conversation with two other lead musicians, guitarist Lionel Loueke and harmonica player Gregoire Maret, as well as with the rhythm section of bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Kendrick Scott, each a formidable artist in his own right and each contributing to the writing on this album. Together they evoke the classic Brazilian jazz-fusion of the ‘70s and ‘80s of such artists as Airto, Flora Purim, Hermeto Pascoal, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, Egberto Gismonti and even the poppier Sergio Mendes, but move beyond into their own fresh territories. 

Loueke, born and raised in Benin and trained in Paris and at Berklee College of Music, has shown himself one of the most inventive and dexterous guitarists in jazz today working alongside such luminaries as Herbie Hancock and Terence Blanchard, his touch at once delicate and powerful. The Swiss-born Maret may be the real revelation here, his bright, fleet chromatic runs often doubling Souza’s voice, or at other times darting around her, the pair like two swallows at play.

It’s in two Souza compositions that finds this interplay at its most exhilarating and delightful: opener "At the Fair" and "Filhos de Gandhi." The former establishes the wide field on which these considerable talents get to work, while the latter, Portuguese for "Sons of Gandhi," is a tribute to the colorful Northeast Brazilian carnival parade society that grew out of a 1948 dockworkers strike inspired by the nonviolent tactics of the Indian leader. Little in the way of words. Plenty in the way of meaning.

Artist: PHASES
Album: "For Life"
Songs: "Cooler," "I’m In Love With My Life"
Summary: Remember the early ‘80s? Ever catch yourself wishing for something new that matched the DIY electro-pop of the Human League and Thompson Twins with the breezy spirit of early Madonna? Well, here it is anyway — with a better singer, but the same kind of feeling, and made by four musicians who certainly don’t remember the early ‘80s themselves, or just barely at best, as they were barely sentient, or in the case of singer Z Berg still a few years away from being born. 

Maybe because of that, Los Angeles’ PHASES plays it with affection and without irony, which is why it works so well, both on the very era-specific, plunky synth tracks a la the opening "Silhouette" and on the higher-pop-aiming tour-de-force "Cooler," with a little taunt at someone Berg thought was, well, cooler. No question this is an accomplished quartet, Berg (formerly of the Like) joined by Alex Greenwald (from Phantom Planet), Jason Beosel (Rilo Kiley) and Michael Runion (the Elected). The four of them were previously 4/5 of the group JJAMZ, with a more contemporary sound on a solid 2012 album, but given its origins at a Hollywood karaoke night, perhaps it was inevitable that it would morph into something more like this. 

One key is that while Berg is a fine singer, she never overshoots her mark, never negates the having-fun spirit here. There’s an authenticity to this that transcends nostalgia exercise — and yes, it’s kind of funny using the term authenticity with something modeled on music marked by artificiality. But that is the case, a project that really is just for fun. Nothing wrong with fun, right? As they sing in "I’m In Love With My Life," "feeling good ain’t going out of style."