Cotton Jones’ second release, Tall Hours in the Glowstream, comes off like a twangier, more accomplished improvement upon the wispy folk strains of debut effort Paranoid Cocoon. The majority of the album hangs out somewhere in the indie folk realm — strains of pedal steel and windy echo make “Man Climbs Out of the Winter” the closest Cotton Jones comes to conventional country music — but just when you think the band has settled into some kind of sound, Michael Nau plops his drawl over a lounge jazz melody in “Dream on Columbia Street,” or sings a song composed completely of “oohs” (“Soft Mountain Shake.”) When Nau and bandmate Whitney McGraw put in the effort to buckle down and craft a real, honest-to-God song, Cotton Jones suddenly transforms from a rough sketch into a clearly defined individual. With The Parsons Red Heads, Quiet Life. SARA BRICKNER

Sun., Aug. 8, 9 p.m., 2010