Album: Kaki King, Junior (Cooking Vinyl)

Kaki King is a guitarist's guitarist. She's won a Golden Globe for film soundtracks, collaborated with the Cure, and been named a "guitar god" by Rolling Stone, the first female to receive this accolade.

Her fifth full album displays none of the show-off tendencies you'd expect from, say, a Satriani or a Vai. King's restraint is commendable, using her skills to create interesting sonics rather than pointless pyrotechnics, with touches of shoegaze and deceptively conventional college-rock songwriting which is invariably disrupted and reshaped.