RELEASE OF THE WEEK: PJ Harvey – "Shaker Aamer": Not an album, but the most important piece of music you'll hear, internalize, and hopefully reblog this week. For all the disillusioned indie-rockers who think the Knife's sprawling new album plays political dress-up with disjointed slogans or that Nas' revolutionary Untitled album was an embarrassment, PJ Harvey brushes off the last thirteen years of her least direct music to do a protest song right. The lyrics leave no wiggle room for a 1,400-word thinkpiece, they simply detail the facts and horrors of Guantanamo detainee Aamer, like the necessity of depriving one's body of food to protest being deprived of water, being force-fed and detained for over a decade, having his pad taken away so he can't become too familiar with his own thoughts — all without ever being charged of a crime. In his voice at the end, Harvey pleads, "don't forget…don't forget." And that's where the second part of her genius comes in: she imbued this reporting with her best chord progression in years, a glassy, catchy sideways moan of a riff ensuring people will more than get an album's worth of plays this week and likely a great deal after Aamer's released as well. It's so good and simple it could give you hope that every artist is just saving their best rations for a meaningful cause.

The Civil Wars – The Civil Wars (Columbia): In case the oeuvre-depleting "Safe and Sound" wasn't enough evidence, Taylor Swift's been hanging with the wrong crowd. If you thought John Mayer was bad, how about Nashville's answer to Evanescence? Won't any emo kids blush when they realized they're checking out the full-band equivalent of Sting and Alison Krauss' "You Will Be My Ain True Love"? Because emo kids are for whom Joy Wiliams and John Paul White want to make country cool. Not that they don't make passes at others in the room; the attractive fuzz-banjo sizzle of "I Had Me a Girl" should diddle Black Keys and Bon Iver fans at once. "The One That Got Away" is pretty good acoustic Paramore, "From This Valley" is a real uptempo one, but they're rarely so focused on turning a phrase and by the end the melodrama is like Vaseline so thick you can't see (or hear) what's inside it. These oversingers are overfeelers and underwriters above all else.