Alt-country melodies, bedroom recording repetition, and swirling boy-girl harmonies wed in Lowertown’s Ugly Duckling Union. Press releases encourage us to follow the May LP through the trials and tribulations of Dale, a waterfowl who tries with his webbed-footed friends to defeat the fictional, tyrannical media corporation LBH. I’m more interested in Olivia Osby’s equivocating sighs in “Mice Protection” (“Maybe I’m good / Maybe I’m bad / It’s really up to who you ask”), or the rattling harmonica in twangy incantation “Big Thumb,” led by the NYC duo’s other half, Avsha Weinberg. North Carolina’s Truth Club – whose 2023 album Running From the Chase still smolders with melancholy intensity – opens. – Carys Anderson