Albums From Las Malas Amistades and Cooly G "Maleza" (Honest Jon's) sounds like a first album, but it's far from it. Las Malas Amistades, four low-key visual artists in Bogotá, Colombia, with a modest attitude toward musicianship and high investment in tone and concept, have been playing together since 1994, and they still make their living-room folk with acoustic guitars, voices, melodica and a bit of cheap electronics. The buzzes and discrepancies between phrases and rhythms are clear; you're aware of the home-studio room sound, and, in one track, rain falling on the roof. But there's been refinement over the years, as there always is. The 28 short, quiet, lived-in songs on "Maleza" are mostly about life after a relationship. Those featuring Ximena Laverde are the best, like "Ya No Quiero," in which she sings with dry assurance, over a repetitive guitar phrase, words that translate as "I already got rid of everything you gave me/I deleted all your messages/Only your memories are left, and they won't last." It sounds like a song in someone's head, carried around all day, arbitrarily snipped to create a beginning and end. Cooly G Toward the end of the last decade the British producer and singer Cooly G - real name Merrissa Campbell - came out of the dance-music scene known as "U.K. funky," which typically mixed lean, hard, repetitive beats with Caribbean rhythm. Since then, in her own music, she's been turning her music toward some vague dance-floor interzone with traces of R&B, using her voice and lyrical ideas as much as beats and loops to get her music over. "Playin Me," her new album on Hyperdub, isn't quite there - some of its tracks feel like mysteries better left unsolved - but it's got moments. She's singing, rather than using sampled vocal tracks, but it's a weird kind of singer-songwriter music: the narratives are fractured or boiled down to nearly nothing. The best song is the title track, growing dire within its restricted form, building up an eerie, cavernous bass sound. It's a two-word song - just the title - with a big, layered mood. Greg Lewis Thelonious Monk's sense of harmony was so fresh and savory that it would be nice to have individual moments of it frozen, expanded and prolonged, just to let the sounds get deeper in the ear, to let those mixed colors intensify and explode. One could do it digitally, feeding Monk's music through the right tools, but an organ player can do it in real time by keeping the keys pressed down. The New York-area organist Greg Lewis has made a recent project out of transferring Thelonious Monk's repertory to the Hammond C3 organ. He plays in a quartet with tenor saxophone, guitar and drums. Two years ago he released "Organ Monk" on his own label, with Cindy Blackman on drums. Part 2 of the idea, called "Organ Monk: Uwo in the Black," with Nasheet Waits on drums instead, has just come out. It's a feast. This has been done before. Mr. Lewis likes Larry Young, the organist who pushed against the standard clichés of jazz organ playing in the 1960s and "70s, and the spirit of both these albums might have come out of a version of "Monk's Dream" from Young's 1965 album "Unity." But it hasn't been done a lot, and Mr. Lewis floods the music with swing and volume-pedal ministrations. The best are the Monk ballads "Ugly Beauty" and "Crepuscule With Nellie": slow and distorted, filthy and graceful. Holograms On the heels of the Danish band Iceage, here are more very young and aesthetically certain post-punks bringing the anxious and unsettled side of the Scandinavian brain to this country, playing as if their aim is to invent recombinations of records from 1979. Holograms" rhythms are fast and spindly or slow and processional, sometimes full of spark and paranoid energy, sometimes drained of it. It's hollowed-out guitar music with an analog synth generating squelchy melodies or long-tone chords, and a singer (Andreas Lagerstrom) who makes all songs dire, yelping chants. Several tracks from this Swedish band's first, self-titled album on Captured Tracks are right on the money: "Apostate," "Stress," "A Tower." Holograms plays its first New York show at 285 Kent in Brooklyn on Sept. 8; I have a feeling it's going to be good. Arnaldo Antunes, Edgard Scandurra and Toumani Diabaté "A Curva da Cintura" (Mais Um Discos) is the result of a recent collaboration in Bamako between two 1980s Brazilian rockers - Arnaldo Antunes, once of Titãs, and Edgard Scandurra, once of Ira! - with the Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté. There are good counterweights and challenges here: Mr. Antunes is a vocalist of great dryness, with a flexible but croaky baritone, singing lilting and beautiful songs (particularly "Kaira" and "Grão de Chãos"); Mr. Scandurra is a less noteworthy singer and guitar hero who's compressed his skills for the occasion, maybe in deference to Mr. Diabaté, who can unspool extravagance in the tightest spaces, sometimes running his harplike kora through echo and wah-wah pedals. A breeze blows through these songs, metaphysical meditations on time and music and relationships mostly written by the Brazilians. The trio finds ways to fit Mr. Diabaté"s soloing within minimal Western-pop structures, with hand drumming or no percussion at all.