As the frontman for Alabama’s Verbena, Scott Bondy cushioned himself in the band’s grungy gauze, smashing Keith Richards’s guitar-slinger swagger against Kurt Cobain’s disaffected drawl. But as Auguste Arthur Bondy, he’s stripped away that veil of distortion, along with his backing band and any other excess. what remains is an archetypal troubadour. The relentlessly touring Bondy plucks gorgeous, autumnal folk. While a warm rasp keeps his music dark and moody, Bondy emits a hopeful, if faint, glimmer.

His latest for Fat Possum, When the Devil’s Loose, continues to explore good and evil with a slow, gentle delivery. The album’s “Oh the Vampyre” is probably the most gorgeous and vulnerable vampire tune ever written (”Lord what I would give for just one drop of red / Now the dew is on the grass and I am late for bed”). Let’s hope the Twilight people don’t get their hands on it. Haunted and beautiful as a Southern lullaby, the song reveals Bondy’s effortless authenticity.

As with Bondy, Elvis Perkins’s lived-in voice sounds far older than his 33 years. But he’s quirkier, more unpredictable and surprisingly upbeat, tossing in kitchen-sink flair on this year’s Elvis Perkins in Dearland (XL Recordings). The man knows more than his share of tragedy, having lost his famous father, Anthony, to AIDS and his mother, Berry Berenson, in one of the planes that hit the Twin Towers.

Like his debut, Ash Wednesday, Perkins’s latest LP mines that morbid source material with his chin up. Dearland’s “Doomsday” details his September 11 loss (”Now in all of my wildest dreams / it never once would seem / that doomsday would fall anywhere near a Tuesday”), but Perkins’s playful, poetic musings are vivid and lively, soaring over furious strumming teeming with accordion and brass. “Oh I don’t plan to die,” the Hollywood legacy hollers, “nor should you plan to die.”

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