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For NPR music, you're connected to all songs considered on Bob Boylin.

It's the top of the month and time for the extended NPR music staff to share their

loves for the month gone by.

And so on this edition of All Songs considered the best of February.

And we begin with the host of the World Cafe, Renter D'Arrest.

You know every so often someone writes an article proclaiming that rock is dead.

Guitar music is over.

And then inevitably an artist comes along to prove that proclamation wrong.

This time, Aaron Lee Tastion is that artist.

A guitar virtuoso who's lent his talents to many bands over the years, Aaron's latest

solo album called Tastion, Tastion, Tastion, sees him continuing to explore new ways to

use his instrument.

Many of the sounds you hear on the record that you might mistake for synths or percussion

are actually him experimenting with different things his guitar can do.

And while there are some nods to 60s and 70s rock, that experimentation, along with lyrics

that are firmly planted in the present with themes of anxiety and alienation and isolation

...