Dion New York

If early 2006 is remembered for nothing else, it will go down in history for the two greatest urban Americana albums of the 21st century to date – Dion's Bronx in Blue and Willie Nile's Streets of New York, a swaggering braggart of a disc that is to the modern Apple everything that Lou Reed's New York was 15 years before. The opening "Welcome to My Head" sets the stage, raising the curtain on a fantasy vision of the city nightlife that sums up every dream Broadway and beyond have ever instilled in the mind of the outsider, and set to a crunchy guitar melody that is as real as the streets that stretch out from there. It might be Nile's first album in six years, but it sounds as though he's been planning it his entire life – even the songs that slip outside of the city concept ("Asking Annie Out" is the first) share the crowded, bustling air of the more "relevant" rockers, while "The Day I Saw Bo Diddley in Washington Square" paints the scene so firmly that you'll see him, too. Even more impressively, the backing rarely motors in the directions you'd expect. Fiddles keen and a mandolin pounds, while Nile borrowed his band from as far afield as John Mellencamp and Rosanne Cash.

A major influence on artists as varied as roots rocker Dave Edmunds, Lou Reed, and Bruce Springsteen (two of whose Lucky Town songs he covers here), Dion effectively mixes his tough yet delicate city-styled street corner harmonies with basic Chuck Berry chords to produce evocative tunes that, although embedded in the echoes of his youth, bubble with a soothing, low-key effervescence. Dion's perennially youthful voice delightfully swoops and swirls on the autobiographical "In New York City" and the Everly Brothers-styled "Hey Suzy," but it's on the Springsteen tracks, especially the beautiful a cappella ballad "If I Should Fall Behind," which seems like it was written with this arrangement in mind, that the concept fully clicks.