The Best Albums of 2008 So Far

After splitting with his former band (DeYarmond Edison, who, after relocating to North Carolina, reformed as Megafaun), Justin Vernon holed up in a remote Wisconsin hunting cabin for four frigid months, recording the tracks that would later comprise For Emma, Forever Ago, his haunting debut as Bon Iver. For Emma was self-released by Vernon in 2007 before being picked up by Jagjaguwar in 2008, and while the record may now be an official, bar-coded release, it still feels more like buried treasure, caked with dirt and full of secrets.

Vernon’s high, lonesome yowls are multi-tracked over (mostly) spare acoustic strums; unsurprisingly, Vernon’s guitar feels secondary to his vocals, which are pretty and threatening, primed-to-pierce icicles dangling from a rooftop. Tracks like “Skinny Love” — which, like most of For Emma, sees Vernon lowing about failed relationships — feel distinctly cautionary, with Vernon earnestly admonishing his listeners to be patient, fine, balanced, kind. For Emma is packed with these sorts of tiny lessons and Vernon’s spooky, otherworldly instrumentation only cements the celestial vibe — the cumulative effect is enough to make you momentarily consider camping out in an ice-crusted hut for a long winter, just to see what you can learn about life.

At the age of 38, Beck Hansen may not exactly be surprising us anymore. But being reliable ain't no crime — Modern Guilt is yet another great Beck record. Producer du jour Danger Mouse’s unique, organic way of reconciling clunking lo-fi beats with classic pop and rock textures has enabled Beck to make a discreetly psychedelic album, one that avoids pastiche while retaining a radio-friendly accessibility. In fact, it recalls both DM’s work on Demon Days by Gorillaz and, less predictably, 13-era Blur.

As for what it's all about — well, as always, Beck’s a difficult lyricist to fathom. It's not that his penchant for the gnomic non-sequiturs or scattershot improvisations he calls ‘scratch lyrics’ are incomprehensible. But Modern Guilt is another Beck record that feels suffused with a fear of being pinned down to anything that could be considered A Statement… which is probably why he’s always sounded so perfect for his times. "I’m tired of evil," he croons on the stately closing track "Volcano," and you find yourself wondering who isn’t. But, much like the rest of the best moments here — the infectious psych-pop of "Gamma Ray," the choirboy beat-balladry of "Chemtrails," the bittersweet jauntiness of the title track — the music is so full of mood-altering melody and clever rhythm you also find that you don‘t much care what it means.

So while Modern Guilt probably doesn’t contain any great new insights into the human condition, it does feature two of 21st century art-pop’s major maestros gelling completely and doing what they both do best. And that’s a tough double act to quibble with.

Believe it or not, we actually prefer the Sun Giant EP to the self-titled full-length debut that followed it. Condensed here to five haunting country-rock songs, Fleet Foxes feel particularly provocative and evocative: cut off the relative fat of Fleet Foxes, the absurdly young Robin Pecknold and Skye Skjelset's vocals and songs are nearly worthy their obvious ancestors. "Drops in the River" and "English House" are the two best songs here (just as they are on the full-length), and they cascade like '70s singer-songwriter stuff right outta Laurel Canyon ("Mykonos," on the other hand, cascades right outta CSNY's Déjà Vu). Certainly not much new, but plenty worth hearing.

Mahler is mostly remembered as a tortured soul, forever at odds with the audiences and critical establishment of his day. It can be surprising, then, for casual listeners to discover how much beatific contentment can be found in his music. These short-lived moments of peace are inevitably swept aside, but they are made all the more sublime for their fragility. Take, for instance, the opening to his First Symphony, which is rendered here by the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev’s baton with an appropriate sense of wonder. It opens hushed, with harmonics in the strings evoking the hum of nature. This holy quiet is pierced by small, piping notes of birdsong, then by horn calls, before gathering into a vibrant tune that babbles its irrepressible excitement in tumbling figures. You would never know, from such beginnings, that two movements later the double basses would be groaning a dire funeral procession.

This gratifyingly warm and immediate-sounding live recording of the work, taken from a performance in Barbican Hall, adeptly captures both the warmth of this enchanted opening as well as the grief that follows. Few works scale such exultant heights and plunge to such devastating lows as a Mahler symphony, and Gergiev and company maintain a sure grip on the work’s arc. The famously sardonic funeral march of the third movement, which recasts “Frere Jacques” in a minor key, proceeds with just the right measure of dolefulness and black humor. Gergiev works the orchestra, which plays with vitality and assurance, into a furor for the finale, and hits a ringing climax. There are fleeting moments of pitch wobbliness, which are to be expected in a live recording and in any case are a fair trade for the continuity and coherence of this performance. Otherwise, this is a fine, stirring recording of this monumental work.

Like the stories of Raymond Carver and the films of Kevin Smith, Hold Steady songs exist inside a specific, self-contained universe. There's a big Catholic church on the corner, a crumbling parking lot where hoodrats hang out and inject questionable substances; there's a water-damaged harbor bar where the jukebox always plays Meatloaf and a series of all-ages hardcore shows where restless teenagers show up to either experiment with toxins or to angrily refuse the same. The characters all know each other, too: Hallelujah and Charlemagne have stumbled in and out of enough Hold Steady songs to warrant above-the-title billing and even some of the second-tier characters are starting to look familiar. Close quarters like these tend to drive away casual listeners, but for die-hards it creates a kind of community — one long, never-ending narrative that just gets more complicated and circuitous with each new outing.

On Stay Positive, the character arcs are still mostly the same — there are screwed-up Catholics trying to get their heads straight, on-and-off drug fiends ambivalent about their habits and lonely girls doing the wrong thing to get attention — the difference is that the sets have gotten more elaborate. No longer content to rely on shaved-down classic rock riffery (though there's still plenty of that), Craig Finn & Co. now drag out the harpsichord and the Theremin and the banjo, preferring texture over power. Finn has changed, too; he used to just bark, but now he sings — and sings well — yanking the songs across their peaks and valleys.

2006's Boys & Girls in America attempted a similar sonic expansion but fell flat due to logey production that waxed the guitars to an unearthly gleam and made the background vocals sound like they were happening in a different song. Stay Positive is tighter and darker, less concerned with the payoff than the setup. People like to compare the Hold Steady to Springsteen, but the truth is that they're doing Springsteen's career in reverse, starting with Born in the U.S.A. and moving backwards to the complexity and relative subtlety of records like The River and Darkness at the Edge of Town. Stay Positive is best at its bleakest: "Joke About Jamaica" is a slow dive downward, a grim tale of a poor used girl poured out over sub-basement riffs and villainous piano; "Both Crosses" — the album's haunting centerpiece by a mile — is another of Finn's strange Catholic visions. Acoustic guitars cluster like gathering storm clouds as Finn croaks out stark prophecy: "She saw the footage right before it got cut/ And she saw the body and she saw the blood/ She saw the angel put the sword in his side/ And baby, that's how we got canonized."

There are still plenty of carousers — "Sequestered in Memphis" is a straightforward shout-along, "Constructive Summer" is Hold Steady Anthem Rock 101 — but the best of these also branch out. "Yeah Sapphire" is a perfect example: patiently midtempo, it lazily repeats a single circular guitar pattern, blossoming slowly into a bright and gorgeous chorus. "I know the last time we touched I came on a bit rough, please forgive me," Finn pleads. This is the Hold Steady Universe circa 2008: a little more subtle, a little bit wider, a little more prone to gentleness. And, underneath it all, just as fucked-up as ever.

Velocifero, Ladytron’s fourth studio album, couldn’t have been made by any other band — it’s a Ladytron album from the highest shining hi hat to the bottom of its fuzzy synthesized bass. It builds well on the darkling foundations laid by previous release Witching Hour, but is by no means identical.

The band stops at the usual Ladytron lodestones: Gary Numan, Roxy Music, the more deviant side of the Pet Shop Boys — all the English art-pop they’re magnetically attracted to. They’ve also restored the balance of mic time, absent on Witching Hour, between the two contrasting vocalists, sweetly singing Scot Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo, a compellingly monotone Bulgarian.

So what’s new? Or, being Ladytron, what’s retro-new? Velocifero takes the band’s usual jumpy edginess and refines and expands it into glistening paranoiac panoramas. It’s not just Aroyo’s use of her native language that gives the album a sense of Cold War romance: “Predict the Day” traps Marnie’s sung protestations (“I never thought/ I didn’t think twice”) between sinister whistling and an oppressive crunching synth. “Season of Illusions” is as wooze-inducing as a flickering overhead light bulb.

But Ladytron have also always had elements of Futuristic Noir and those come across strongly, too. The synthetic, dreamy, blade-running grandeur of “Deep Blue” is reminiscent of a modernized Vangelis or a restrained Jean Michel Jarre. "Runaway" is dark and handsome enough to get away with shamelessly borrowing from Heaven 17’s “Let Me Go.”

Velocifero shows Ladytron stepping firmly into the shadows, but not everything is veiled in gloom. The occasional sweet sound or upward lifting chord is all the more effective, silver spotlights in the darkness, and the overall effect is compelling.

Released with exuberant haste, The Raconteurs' follow-up to Broken Boy Soldiers is rich with energy, invention and dynamics. Although its heartbeat is heavy guitar rock, the album takes countless brief, brisk detours into modern variations of folk, garage-thrash and even (whisper it) Prog-Rock. So much is crammed in that you wonder how Jack White succeeds in retaining any fresh ideas for the White Stripes.

And it is all about White. When The Raconteurs formed in Detroit in '05, much was made of their being a "super-group". The term flapped rather loosely: while White's co-singer-guitarist-keyboardist Brendan Benson had something approaching a name, few outside the immediate circle can have known much of killer rhythm section Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler. Now that the band has been Grammy-nominated and laden with accolades, they stand as their own entity. Consolers Of The Lonely presents that entity as a fully-charged yet complex beast, deeply in thrall to both loud Led Zeppelin and quiet Led Zeppelin and given unique flavour by White's wired performances (both as histrionic vocalist and unapologetic axe hero).

Throughout, a backdrop of murmurs and giggles can be heard (along with studio-speak including a matter-of-fact "we'll double track that"). It makes the whole thing feel loose and spontaneous, as do the count-ins, the hollers of "Woo! Awlright!" and the frequent false starts/stops of White's licks. The title track roars in like AC/DC only to wrong-foot you with a second, dominant riff. White sounds high-pitched and gravelly, and '70s rock outfit Nazareth are recalled — for the first time in a long time.

Single "Salute Your Solution" maintains the momentum, boasting a cheesy riff that wouldn't have been rejected by Cheap Trick or Raspberries. "You Don't Understand Me" shifts into soft-rock mode, piano at the fore, and though it feels wrong to mention The Feeling or Daniel Powter, the comparison is unavoidable. The surprises continue with "The Switch And The Spur" (which utilizes almost Tolkien-esque in imagery — it dares to use the word "doth"), the "Ramble On" rip-off of "Top Yourself", and the Benson-led Eagles/Queen homage of "Rich Kid Blues". The rest is near-basic blues: often as abrasive as The Hives, sometimes as retro as Black Crowes.

With the volume set permanently to "piercing", there is always enough going on to keep you alert, alive and, frequently, alarmed. On the electric folk finale of "Carolina Drama", White drawls, "I'm not sure if there's a point to the story, but I'm gonna tell it again…" This may compress the history of rock into one big, bravado-fuelled monster, but it makes brand new shapes, screams like a banshee and kicks like a mule.

Exactly why the Scandinavians have rocketed past the Brits in recent years as purveyors of supercharged, edgy rock isn’t exactly clear. In-depth analysis tends to get bogged down right at the off, when whoever first mentions Abba gets clobbered by a comment about long cold winter nights and high suicide rates. I tend to settle for the pragmatic observation that bands like the Wannadies, Motorpsycho and Grass Show know how to rock in weird ways but aren’t ashamed of showing their love for the music’s rich historical tapestry.

The result, and it’s there in spades in Lust Lust Lust (L3 in aficionargot), is music that instantly engages the feet and fingertips, but then, as it seeps in with repeated plays, reveals hidden depths, subtle layers and quirky textures.

This is the Danish duo’s fourth album (if you count 2002’s eight-song debut, Whip It On, as an album). It’s also, after five years with Sony, the band’s first indie-label offering — a move occasioned, say the band, by a desire to exercise more control over their music.

There’s no denying that Lust Lust Lust is a gutsier outing than its 2005 predecessor, Pretty in Black. With mainman Sune Wagner now in charge of production as well as songwriting, they’ve restored the swirling, frenzied miasma of repressed rage and sexuality that made their exhilarating debut so vital. Five years, however, have come and gone since then, so Lust Lust Lust also benefits from Wagner’s increasing skill as an arranger and Sharin Foo’s enhanced confidence as a vocalist.

The twelve tracks here are said to have been selected from 100 demos Wagner came up with in the past two years and, if the other 88 are even in the same ballpark, he can now take a break from songwriting for another eight albums.

The band sets out its stall from the opening track whose title, "Aly Walk With Me," is an undisguised reference to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk With Me. As soon as its opening vibraslap hit melts into a filthy sludged-up bassline (underpinned by a rattly line of distortion that any self-respecting engineer would eradicate), you know you’re off on a wrong turn, headed for a backwoods shack with blood-rusted chainsaws propped against the rocking chairs on the porch. Indoors, an inbred family waits to welcome you for dinner. Their dinner.

As in any classic horror movie, once you’re into Lust Lust Lust, there’s no turning back. Logic tells you not to open that locked door down the hall, not to go down those creaky stairs, not to prise up the lid of that man-sized box on the table, but how can you not? Just when you expect the monster to jump out, the Raveonettes hit you instead with the cute Tommy James and the Shondells bassline of "Hallucinations," combining the pop smarts of "I Think We’re Alone Now" with the acid-fried pyrotechnics of "Crimson and Clover" before lurching into a nastily overdriven guitar jangle. The track is nailed shut by a percussive thwack, reminiscent of a crowbar attempting to pound an oil-drum full of bolts down to the size of a sardine tin.

All of this, of course, is just the top layer — the sonics. It’s when the lyrics start to register that the album assumes its darkest aspect. Is Foo really singing, “In this dream I call life I get so lonesome with you,” in the sweet-sounding "Hallucination"? Yes, she is, and the lyrics become progressively more despondent until she delivers the closing track's poignant couplet: “The first love you can’t escape, the second love feels like rape.”

One obvious point of comparison is the Jesus and Mary Chain’s classic Psychocandy but, for me, this is the better-constructed album of the two. Wagner’s huge slabs of furnace-hot guitar distortion, for example, are always placed for maximum impact, while Foo’s erotically wacked-out under-emoting vocals float free over riffs that evoke everything from Phil Spector in "Black Satin" to Eddie Cochran in the zip-along "Blitzed." (To hear Foo at her dreamiest, check her achingly forlorn multi-tracked vocal harmony on "Sad Transmission"). The poptastic "You Want the Candy" is particularly intriguing, being an obvious answer-song to "I Want Candy," a '60s smash for the Strangeloves, written by the Raveonettes’ former producer Richard Gottehrer. Are they trying to say they still harbour a sneaking affection for him?

Despite the lack of live drums and bass (they’re both computer-generated) Lust Lust Lust feels remarkably alive, with only the awkward drum-pattern of the closing "The Beat Dies" taking a while to settle in comfortably. In the fullness of time, this album may well be remembered as their first truly great moment, the point where the Raveonettes and their myriad influences merged seamlessly into a perfect unity.

Sea Lion is uproariously psychedelic. That's a term which can cover a dizzying array of bases, but in this instance it means a generous soaking of reverb and a tendency to indulge in impressive sonic gymnastics, sound whirling softly around the stereo channels like big woolen jumpers in a tumble dryer. It's the warm, fuzzy type of psychedelia — as opposed to the bad trip paranoia and nightmare monsters variety — reaching out to wrap up the ears with comfort and reassurance. The Ruby Suns, in their hazy, woozy way, want you to feel grand about life.

In charge of Operation Keep People Cheery is the aptly surnamed Ryan McPhun, a California chap living in New Zealand. Which is an example in minutia of the album's other major strength: the wide-eyed joy of globe-trotting. Happily, it's no mere smash-and-grab raid. Vibrant, international templates are integrated without fuss; a fresh burst of an unfamiliar rhythm or sudden appearance of a marimba signify precisely that and nothing more — rather than acting as a jarring spot-the-global-music-influence test.

When all goes right, the elements segue into the spectacular. "Oh, Mojave" jangles with plucky amounts of chirp before inviting hula-harmonies and, curiously, a meandering siren to join the festivities. "Ole Rinka" embarks with nursery rhyme melodies on glockenspiel, slowly blossoming into a boisterous carnival song which subsequently frays and unravels to a close. When it goes wrong...well, not a lot goes wrong really — although naming a track "Kenya Dig It?" is perhaps asking for trouble. Such indulgences are easily forgiven, however, when faced with a record as energising as the first moments of a sun-drenched holiday.

This quartet of recent Columbia University alumni pick up as much press for their boat shoes and for being social-networking hype-cycle poster children as for their lyrics about French architecture and serial commas and commuting from New England. But their biggest selling point is their incorporation of African and Caribbean guitar and drum lilts into baroque indie pop-rock — alternately lifted by roller-rink keyboards and chamber-group string cheese.

Not the easiest pursuit to pull off: “This feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel, too” goes one line in the instructively titled “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” But sifting the global appropriations through ‘80s British pop helps. “A-Punk” follows ska hooks from the English Beat’s “Best Friend” with polite gang shouts; “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” walks on the moon like the early Police; “One (Blake’s Got a New Face)” mashes “Another One Bites the Dust,” New Order and the electric slide into a rhythmic call-and-response. And Ezra Koenig’s drama-club diction can be endearing, especially when the melody’s as sweet as in “Walcott,” about escaping Cape Cod. Not shy about rhyming “campus” with “romances,” Vampire Weekend almost convince you they’re the only living college boys in New York. Paul Simon would be proud: So long Frank Lloyd Wright, hello Mansard roofs.

The 22-year-old Randolph Chabot is Deastro, a one-man machine synthesizing Death Cab for Cutie, M83, LCD Soundsystem and other future-rock practitioners into a glitzy world overflowing with regret. Keeper's' ten songs are culled from demos and home recordings Chabot pieced together in his parents' basement, a land decidedly far from the dance floors and neon-lit city streets of his music, a place where his bald yearning and incredible talents find no boundaries, a place where he still lives. Like any dreamer, Chabot's imagined world is infinitely better than the one where he resides, "a place where I am free," as he sings in "The Goodman of the House." After learning more and more of his life, I can't help but to think of Chabot as Bastion of The Neverending Story, a young man subtly shifting from spectator to hero in a world of his own creation.

And make no mistake: Keeper's is wholly Chabot's. Certainly M83 has influenced the cut of Chabot's jib, and his voice unmistakably shares qualities with that of Ben Gibbard. But the crisp, sparkling environs of Keeper's come from one young man, and one man alone. Chabot has no other collaborators, and his songs — even with their swooping electronics, enormous guitars and startling self-assurance — ring with a vulnerability that can only come from a belief that no one would ever hear them. Sure, they are about love and longing — universal inspirations — but they are also acutely idiosyncratic, the product of an imagination that has yet to meet an obstacle it can't thwart.

"The Shaded Forests," the album's amazingly pop track (if someone told you this was the new Killers single, you wouldn't blink), is built around the following lyric: "When the wolf lays down to marry the lamb/ He'll lay down his fangs, he'll lay down his plans/ I told you, we're gonna be fine/ I t-t-t-t-told you, we're taking our time" (that last stuttering revealing a bit of Ric Ocasek in our boy), as if he's Hansel telling Gretel to hang in there, we ain't no cake, yet.

Spiraling out from "The Shaded Forests" — and "spiral" is the perfect word for the towering, Autobahn tones of "Michael the Lone Archer of the North Shore" and the spaghetti sci-fi instrumental "Light Powered" — the album's heart rate ebbs, songs like "The Green Harbor" and "The Floating Cradle" emotionally naked and fragile: in the latter, Chabot's self-harmonizing falsetto beckons like a Greek siren. And then there's the cathartic "Leah's Daughter the Giraffe," strings plucking while Chabot gorgeously coos "Oooooh/ The difference is your… eyes."

It bears repeating: Randolph Chabot is only 22-years-old. Music like this doesn't just happen, especially not when only one person is involved. That wunderkind word used at the beginning of this review was carefully weighed, and we stand by it. To return to the fairy tale idea, this could absolutely be one. Except fairy tales end, and for Randolph, this is merely the beginning.

Mary Pearson and Rob Barber are Brooklyn-based duo High Places and 03/07 — 09/07, as the title suggests, collects the band's work from a six-month period in 2007. Some of it has been released on 7-inches and compilations, some of it is available on eMusic exclusively for the first time. All of it is eMusic Selects. The best description I've heard of the band's tunes? "Every national anthem going off at the same time in a bucket of water." Indeed, High Places ride that careful line between unadulterated anthem and a muddy effects-laden mess, emerging with discombobulating dubby masterpieces.

"Head Spins" bounces along on aquatic steel drums, good vibes and a melody built from samples drained almost completely of their source material. "Sandy Feat" is Beat Happening via King Tubby. Perhaps the most surprising moment is a commission that the group received from Pearson's mother. She asked the duo to write a song for the elementary school at which she teaches. "Jump In" doesn't have a lot of the murkiness that colors much of High Places output thus far. Instead, it nakedly showcases the bells, whistles, woodblocks and doodad's that the group buries underneath. It's a revelatory moment here — Pearson and Barber aren't just noiseniks having fun, they're first-rate pop songwriters.

With their short songs and inclination toward miniaturized releases, it's clear that High Places aren't big on mission statements. You could fairly say that 03/07 — 09/07 reflects what happens when a classically trained bassoonist heads out of the academy (Pearson) and a former hardcore kid gets into the noise scene (Barber). Sure, it's awfully specific and honest, but that's pretty much the charm of High Places. Jump in.

The only bad thing about Let's Wrestle is that they make it impossible to listen to anything else. There's catchy and then there's catchy, and somehow these three London boys have invented a whole new CATCHY that scientists worldwide are currently devoting resources to cure. If you think I'm joking, you obviously haven't listened. Yet.

Let's Wrestle really like minor chords, but they make them triumphant and happy to be sad, a bit like Modest Mouse's "Trailer Trash" or the Clash's version of "Police and Thieves." There should probably be a Sebadoh song in that list, too, because they sound like them as well, nothing at all new here but all of it done better than 99% of the other shameless indie-pop records in existence. Plus, the album's opening lyric goes: "No matter how many/ Records I buy/ I can't fill this void." Do these kids know their target audience or what?

Also wonderful is "Song for Man With Pica Syndrome" — amazingly a confessional biographical tune — and its opening line, "In 1971 I did something I should not have done/ It made my mother and father worry," the lyrics barked in a bored way, like he's right back there when he got caught by his folks. It's a great performance. But even more wonderful is "Insects," which is about bedbugs which are not wonderful. The song is genuinely touching and emotional despite the fact that the chorus goes "I'm gonna buy a new mattress" with super dramatic oohs in the background. How do they do it?

The only song that's not so good is "Music Is My Girlfriend," but that's because it reminds me of Art Brut. Who I don't like, but I know others do. So that one might even be a plus for some people! This album has it all!

Breathe Owl Breathe sing of folklore and homespun miracles, oral histories left to thaw in the earth's crust until pre-history's giant ice cubes rolled their wet bulk down the North Pole and into Canada, finally settling into extinction in what we now call the Great Lakes. It's from the shores of these bodies that Breathe Owl Breathe come (Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be precise), and it's in the shadows of those hollowed troughs that these eight songs rest. These are songs about being left behind, songs about being dead, songs without geography, songs worth repeating.

The music is very economical — guitar, cello, drums, piano, other organic sounds — and the vocals float between folk and country, a very earnest mood. It sounds a lot like Smog — singer Micah Middaugh and Bill Callahan have similar voice boxes — and at other times early Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams and, in the case of "Your Cape," even Loretta Lynn. There's a distinctly — and very specifically — American folk tradition at work here, and I don't get the feeling that Breathe Owl Breathe at all mind their limited scope.

The kinda stuff that drew Alan Lomax and Harry Smith deep into Appalachia and the American South forms the foundation of Breathe Owl Breathe's spare, rustic sound. When singer Micah Middaugh belts, "I've got a toboggan," in the last cut, it could easily pass for a boast, a cataloguing of lower-class luxury the way bluesmen might sing of women and whiskey. Mostly Middaugh and his Colombian co-vocalist/cellist Andréa Moreno-Beals sing about ghosts and winter (it is a descriptive album title), sometimes literally ("Playing Dead," "Toboggan," "Sabertooth Tiger") and sometimes in the context of a relationship ("Your Cape," "Sylvia Plath").

The marriage of their music and lyrics is the sort of chance meeting that becomes a 60th anniversary in a blink. Middaugh, Moreno-Beals and drummer Trevor Hobbs are easy and fluid with one another, enabling their songs to (deceptively) feel more like happy accidents than serious, premeditated songwriting. That's where their charm lies. And that's why we chose them for eMusic Selects. Whether or not you're listening hardly matters: this music has always existed, and always will.

Au, a not-particularly-easy-to-classify band from Portland, play a weird, welcoming brand of quasi-ritual music with alternating strains of futurism and anachronism that run on parallel tracks. No talk of them can go long without mention of Animal Collective, but Au take that obvious influence into some less-than-obvious corners. Dense with handclaps and whoops of elfin provenance, “Are Animals” sounds like Animal Collective hanging out a carnival booth where feats of derring-do are rewarded with toy thumb pianos — but only before it swerves, halfway in, towards jazz-fusion with a squirming bass line and vintage organ sounds. The same sense of sepia-toned history drifts into “RR Vs. D,” which mixes would-be showtune murmurs with hints of barrelhouse piano before launching into full-bore parade music. Likewise “Prelude,” which slows down to an ambient crawl but still derives its drama from what sounds like an old accordion or hurdy-gurdy. Some of the other slower songs, given to wandering lines of languid guitar, sound slight and bare in comparison to Verbs’ more unique highlights. But then there’s an arresting exception like “Summerheat,” which builds an ethereal singing-saw mood into something more brash and cathartic with splashy cymbals, sliding strings and flecks of good old-fashioned banjo.

Thao Nguyen's We Brave Bee Stings and All is an astonishing mash of herky-jerked D.C. punk and Olympia-style folk. Thao, an Asian woman whose voice sounds like that of a young man, favors an acoustic guitar, a vaguely rootsy take on literate indie-rock in the vein of Smart Went Crazy and other nerdy in a brawny kinda way bands of that ilk. "Beat (Health, Life, and Fire)" is the best song here — and an early fave for song of the year. Over upper-fret hummingbird-strums Nguyen sings, "Beat my chest/ Beat the ones who love me the best/ Oh, how could they be liars/ They assured me health, life and fire" with a slight Bjork lilt, her voice breaking bread with a country twang. The song is ridiculously catchy and propulsive, and it's about as close to a must-download as there can be. Elsewhere, We Brave does not let up. "Swimming Pools" is super-cute and catchy (imagine Kimya Dawson all grown'd up) and "Big Kid Table" is mega-cute and loveable. Don't overlook this one.

Some compilations that highlight a particular sound during a particular time follow a straight line. But when that time and place is as relatively under-documented as early ’70s Nigerian pop, such tidiness isn’t so necessary — it’s enough to just crack the door and to keep it open for an enticing while. That’s why Nigeria Special, a brilliant two-hour tour through a musical world that ranged far more widely than even a serious fan of this era and place might have been aware, is such a triumph. Covering the period just after the Biafran War (1967-70) had ended, Nigeria Special concentrates on the region’s late highlife and the post-Fela Kuti fallout of Afrobeat — Kuti was an exemplar of the style, but by no means the sole model of success. If that means the collection’s focus blurs a little, that’s more than made up for the sheer breadth, range and intrigue on display here.

Many of Nigeria Special’s cuts are so juicy it’s impossible to believe they’ve never been made available outside of Nigeria before. The Funkees’ “Akula Owu Onyeara” — originally released in two parts, and edited together here for the first time — works like Fela at his most rhythmically sinuous; the simple keyboard figures could be Morse Code signal for uncut funk, and it has one of the most perfect endings you’ll ever hear. George Akaeze & His Augmented Hits’ “Business Before Pleasure” is delectably light-footed Afrobeat with laconic chants and jazzy horns so friendly they belie the title: this is business as pleasure. The nonstop forward motion of the Semi Colon’s “Nekwaha Semi Colon” is formally disco — the hi-hat/kick-drum pattern points right at it — but it’s so hypnotic it seems rooted in something far older (and more intrinsically Nigerian). The highlife tracks are equally hot: St. Augustine & His Rovers Dance Band’s “Onwu Ama Dike” is made even lovelier by its slightly messy rhythmic feel, not to mention the semi-sweet horn line.

Compiler Miles Cleret claims that there are thousands more such goodies that have just been sitting in Nigeria waiting to be rediscovered. The 26 included here are such a pleasure to listen to that, for anyone who loves them, they could inspire fantasies of booking a flight to Lagos and starting a treasure hunt of one’s own.

For their third album, mischievous Parisian duo Nicolas Sfintescu and Ezekiel Pailhes have forsaken the conventional techno that made their name and fully embraced a Brechtian bierkellar aesthetic. The result is a 47-minute mini-masterpiece that should, if there is any justice, make Nôze the disco Gogol Bordello.

Songs on the Rocks opens with its best shots. "L’Inconnu Du Placard" finds the hitherto hidden connection between Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits, funky house and Walt Disney’s "Pink Elephants on Parade." Based around a timpani-charged rhythm, an ever-circling three-note marimba riff and Nicolas Sfintescu barking "Uncle Charlie!" in a Franglais growl, it's close to being the perfect globally-informed dance tune for a pop scene rediscovering the pleasures of witty disco. It's followed by the irresistible "Danse Avec Moi," which manages to showcase saloon bar piano, a dreamily-arranged orchestra and a deliciously sexy French duet between guest vocalists Dani Siciliano and David Lafore.

You could argue that the waltz-time "You Have to Dance," with its junkyard percussion, Dixieland clarinet and Marc Ribot-style guitar, wears its Waitsian influences a little too proudly on its whiskey-soaked sleeve; it sets the tone for much of the rest of the album, including "Childhood Blues" (Waits goes acid house), "You Have to Dance" (Waits goes ska-house) and "Slum Girl" (Waits goes Isaac Hayes). Nevertheless, "Slum Girl"’s epic arrangement — all stabbing brass and huge, sinister strings — exemplifies both the grand ambition and the come-hither humour of Nôze’s muse. And when they tear themselves away from the swordfishtrombones, the result is wonderful music like "Ethiopo," which takes the entire notion of tribal house to its natural conclusions. Add the extraordinary, lo-fi piano-house club hit "Remember Love" and it becomes patently obvious that, purely on the basis of melody, rhythm, arrangement and production, Songs on the Rocks is one of 2008’s finest, all-killer-no-filler albums.

Small towns have a healthy place in musical history. Reading, though, makes something of an odd entry. Famous for its annual rock festival, it’s nonethless lacking in famous musical sons. There’s Mike Oldfield, Antony from Blue and, well, the Cooper Temple Clause.

So what chance does Reading five-piece Pete & The Pirates have? When you’re young, male and pedalling offbeat upbeat pop tunes, there’s always a chance. Clocking in at a brisk 35 minutes, with a hint of early Blur swagger about the proceedings, Little Death is all about picking up girls, staying up all night and legging it in the morning. Sure, there will be knowing glances at the line “Get out of bed, it’s the wrong one,” from single “Knots” — but, then again, it’s all about bed here (and how bewildering life is once you’re up).

What Pete & the Pirates do well is pack real pop punch. Some cars can’t accelerate as fast as “Dry Your Wings,” which builds to a discordant, swollen jangle in under three minutes. No worries: they also do gentle thrum with aplomb — “Humming” and “Moving” show they have more in the tank than just gas. Ultimately, this is an impressive debut of charming backwater sonnets that tread a similar path to Stereophonics’ fine debut Word Gets Around — a record they never managed to better.

With Little Death, Reading expects. No pressure, boys.

Miami-born, New York-raised Sarabeth Tucek may at first glance seem “just” another Dylan-doting folk-rock chanteuse, her soft vocal decorating pleasant, laid-back guitar music. Yet on closer inspection, there are twists and furrows here which reveal her unique background. Having sung with Smog and Brian Jonestown Massacre, she’s happy to let a darker, indie haze creep into her ballads and color them with ambivalence. It’s clear that, like Mazzy Star or Elliott Smith, Tucek is as influenced by the Velvet Underground as she is by '60s sweetness and light. Producers Ethan Johns (Ray Lamontagne, Ryan Adams, Kings of Leon) and Luther Russell (Richmond Fontaine) seem equally keen to steer this to a listenable — yet not lightweight — place. The ambition reaches full fruition on beautifully arranged, string-sodden closer “Home," which could almost be Karen Carpenter fronting Neil Young’s Crazy Horse.

The bittersweet sighs of “Something for You” and the psalm-like “Stillborn” lead us in, eschewing any attention-seeking flash and oozing understated sincerity. Tucek rarely projects, preferring to mutter, but her voice revels in that rare ability to lure us in, making us curious to hear what’s stewing amid those brooding, pained emotions. “Ambulance” is as sparse yet complex as prime Tom Waits. If “Come Back Balloon” does teeter close to exposing her twee side, there’s a rockier edge to both “Nobody Cares” (close-harmony Byrds pop with just a whisper of My Bloody Valentine’s focused mania) and “Blowing Kisses” (like Cowboy Junkies riding through a ghost town, brittle and bruised) that keeps the warmth cool. “Wound you up to see you spin/ Rock and roll has done you in," she intones on the latter. “It gives and gives then takes it all/ Blowing kisses as you fall.”

It’s this wry world-weariness, filtered through a melancholy shrug and smile, that separates Tucek from so many run-of-the-mill female singer-songwriters with a passion for their parents’ record collections. This album grows on you until you’re faintly, gently smitten.

Swedish duo Studio follow up their Yearbook 1 album in typically understated, low-concept fashion — with another album of remixes. The standard is uniformly high — they enhance, rather than obscure the subjects of their mix-ology with a cleverly paradoxical mixture of Balearic golden sunset warmth and synthetic Techno sheen. Many of the remixees are fellow Swedes, such as Love Is All, to whose winsome “Turn The Radio Off” they add both pop glitter and sleek sophistication.

When dealing with indie-pop, they inject vital flavor and color to a genre that has suffered progressive anemia these past few years — though in the case of Rubies, whose shuffling, lilting “Room Without a Key” they version, a metamorphosis is hardly required. For deep Techno denizen Brennan Green, they pay tribute with a mix of woodpecker sequencers and paradisal slide guitars. However, the real catch here, and probably the album highlight, is their take on Kylie's “2 Hearts,” which has won the ardent admiration of Ms. Minogue herself. It's a fireworks display of Flamenco curlicues, tangential, rotorblading sequencers and Balearic beats, in which Kylie's cut-up and discorporated vocals luxuriate.

Simplicity has never come naturally to Tindersticks. Their best songs are marked by excess, from their lush orchestrations to the doomy quaver of Stuart Staples’ voice. But with their numbers reduced by half, the former sextet was forced to cut back. For The Hungry Saw, their first album in five years, the core trio of Staples, guitarist Neil Fraser and keyboardist David Boulter decamped to Staples’ home studio in rural France, limiting their recording time to eight days to cut down on studio fatigue.

The result, not surprisingly, is the sparsest album in the band’s career and, musically at least, the most upbeat. Discarding the soul flourishes of the albums before their half-decade hiatus, The Hungry Saw returns Tindersticks to their spaghetti-western roots with a smile on their face and a tongue in their collective cheek.

Anchored by Fraser’s swooping guitar and a beatbox loop, the title track sounds positively sunny — at least until you listen to the lyrics, which concern the devil’s attempt at open-heart surgery. The opening “Introduction,” one of three instrumentals, is a study in moody minimalism, delicately plinked octave piano resting atop a clipped organ pulse, with just a hint of vibes and a subliminal bass riff to carry the mood.

Longtime fans may take a while to warm to the lounge-pop embellishments of “The Flicker of a Little Girl,” whose fluttery flute and oboe parts hardly jibe with their mopey past. But they’ll be rewarded by the album-closing “The Turns We Took,” whose swelling strings echo the band’s most glorious indulgences. The Hungry Saw is not the Tindersticks of yore, but it’s either the start of a promising new chapter or a worthy epitaph.

Esperanza documents a 23-year-old prodigy near the onset of her career, wielding her ambition and effervescence to put the development of her myriad talents on fast-forward. It's a shrewd showcase, giving full measure to the jazz bass chops that have made Spaulding the second-youngest faculty member (behind her friend Pat Metheny) ever to teach at Berklee. Also on display are Spalding's lithe, airy vocals (sung in English, Portuguese and Spanish), and her compelling knack for songwriting and arranging.

As a singer, the Spalding gravitates toward the breathy-but-rich female vocal tradition of Brazil, from Elis Regina to Ceu, with Astrid Gilberto as the touchstone for common reference. Thus, Milton Nascimento’s lush “Ponta De Areia” (one of only three cover songs among the dozen tracks) is an ideal opener; the rapid-fire “I Know You Know” is cute, catchy, clever and somehow not cloying; and the ballad “Fall In,” with just piano as accompaniment, relies on a beautiful blend of melody and narrative to cover for its limited tonal range.

On the next two numbers, Spalding the jazz bassist steps forcefully to the fore, her playing creating a dazzling, scat-pluck duality with her vocals. Spauling's penetrating tone — rounded, scampering notes, like Charles Mingus although obviously not as advanced — acts as a catalyst for her highly-regarded horn players (trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and saxophonist Donald Harrison). And her sexy, elegant put-downs of would-be and past lovers on “She Got to You” and “Precious” are kinetic jazz-pop and, with any justice, full-fledged radio hits. Throw in her funky good looks, and stardom seems likely — if not inevitable.

Much of Oakland, California-born veteran Seasick Steve’s appeal lies with his story. Ousted from his home at age 14, the self-styled "Pied Piper of the low down hobo blues" spent itinerant years hopping freight trains, sleeping rough and working as a carnie. He met and played with John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and when he sings “Xmas Prison Blues,” you know it’s a diary entry not a flight of fantasy. Been there, done that? Damn right.

Crucially, his story is also that of the ill-starred outsider who eventually triumphs. When Seasick Steve made his 2004 debut, Cheap, in his early 60s, it appealed to young indie fans whose initiation in gnarly country blues had been done to the likes of the White Stripes and the Black Keys.

Soon came November 2006’s better promoted, bigger-selling Dog House Music, and a Mojo gong for “Best Breakthrough Act,” an honor wonderfully perverse given its recipient’s advanced years.

Cheap, though, saw him step out with Swedish rhythm section the Level Devils. Jo Husmo is on drums and Kai Christofferson is on double bass. The pair’s accompaniment is as lean as a pile of old bones; a perfect match for the rough-hewn blues motifs Seasick spirits from economical, custom made instruments such as his Three-Stringed Tranz Wonder and his One-Stringed Diddley-Bo.

We’re mostly talking venerable Delta, rather than Chicago blues. You can hear the John Lee Hooker influence — albeit turned up to 11- on the title track and on the more laid back “Love Thang.” Here, as on nuggets such as “8 Ball” and “Rooster Blues,” the grooves are flypaper-sticky and a joy to get caught up in.

Like Tom Waits, Seasick Steve has music in his lived-in speaking voice, so the albums parlando narratives “Story # 1” and “Story # 2” also work well. When our hero recalls sleeping rough by heat-omitting machinery outside a grocery store called Lucky’s one winter, it’s with affection, not sadness.

One of the oddest of this decade’s Finnish groups (which is saying something), Paavoharju are a musical collective of born-again Christians formed around two brothers, Lauri and Oli Ainala. The title of Paavoharju’s sophomore release translates as A Song about Flowers of the Valley, and the album has the feel of a song cycle or opera — albeit one fractured by short interludes and sound collages. The occasional voiceover narration in their native tongue and fever-dream juxtapositions of computerized and acoustic sounds make listening to Laulu sort of like watching a science fiction movie about aliens landing on a post-apocalyptic shoreline.

The music is a fairy-tale mixture of laptops, pianos, music boxes and field recordings of forest animals. While Paavoharju are capable of a Leonard Cohen-style accordion waltz like “Italialaisella,” they're also not afraid to break out a big Europop number (“Uskalian”). “Kevatrumpu”’s tremulous female vocals and jingling organ even recalls the great '60s/'70s Danish cult band Savage Rose. Citing influences as disparate as Portishead, landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, director Ingmar Bergman and black metal band Burzum, Paavoharju create a compelling meditation on the dilemma of being caught between both the natural and technological worlds and the experimental and commercial music worlds. Fans of Björk at her most eccentric would do well to seek this album out.

Don’t let the title mislead you. British Sea Power aren’t selling any kind of retro-rock revival on their third album. Instead, they’ve maintained the momentum of their first two outings by allowing their socio-politically aware lyrics and distorted, over-driven rock to evolve towards accessibility without abandoning the scorching vitality that marked them as England’s most stimulating new prospect.

A couple of tracks here, "Atom" and "Down On the Ground," were previewed on last year’s exhilarating live EP Krankenhaus?, but the studio versions realise their potential much more convincingly. Ultimately, for the band too, the realisation of potential is the major achievement of Do You Like Rock Music?

Having fabricated a fabulously fast-and-furious debut with 2003’s visceral Decline Of British Sea Power and pushing their catchy melodies and weird lyrics nearer the front on the follow-up, Open Season, British Sea Power has now gone whole hog, shamelessly revealing themselves as big, intelligent tunesmiths while remaining unafraid to hit the cacophony button whenever necessary to propel any given song from bloody marvellous to mind-bogglingly stupefying.

In the space of just two minutes, the understated opener, "All in It," moves from a mesmeric bass-drum thump to a trance-like chant to a hugely majestic Nordic choral stomp shot through with blasts of white noise before winding down with singer Scott Wilkinson quietly repeating the song’s only two lines: "We’re all in it, and we close our eyes." And, of course, we are, aren’t we? This simple little dirge is saying that this TVOD life, this gesture-politics world, is our fault — but we do next to nothing to make it better.

And that is why British Sea Power have the edge on most of their UK contemporaries: they give a damn, and they’re engaged with every aspect of modern life. Who but British Sea Power would fashion huge rocking pop hooks around such topics as light pollution in "Lights Out for Darker Skies," and economic migration in "Waving Flags"? And who, else could pull off the nerve-shredding wrecking-ball rush of "Atom" and immediately follow it with the tender, slo-mo plaint of "No Need to Cry"? Don’t bother even attempting to answer.

"Open the Door" and the aforementioned "Atom" represent both ends of the band’s sonic spectrum. The former starts out like a wistful rock-lite rumination on life and death, climaxes briefly with a stunningly brief but cataclysmic guitar solo, then ends as it started. The latter batters along relentlessly before imploding into an atonal heap of sirens, feedback, mumblings and clattering cymbals.

The comparison that gets trotted out most often is with Arcade Fire and, while both bands offer an organic, “live” rock sound (built mainly on splashy drums and relatively unprocessed guitar tones) that’s about where the comparison stops. What I hear is more like the crazed abandon of Spiritualized leavened with the intelligence of Bright Eyes.

Around the time of their debut, Give Me a Wall, ¡Forward Russia! were examined and then neatly categorised as Bloc Party’s younger Yorkshire siblings — lighter on melody, but saturated with energy; their full-throttle, bony dance-punk was urgent and bright. Two years on they still sound as though they’ve been assembled from twisted lengths of Wire and vocalist Tom Woodhead still sings like the Cult’s Ian Astbury howling at the moon. But their scope has widened and they’ve broken out of the three minute attack-rewind-attack formula that was previously characteristic.

Life Processes shows the four-piece trying to grow up, exchanging bratty thrust for slow-burning epic density. "Some Buildings" illustrates this nicely, with unexpected hints of Godspeed… but closing track "Spanish Triangles" is the best example, winding upwards from small roots over the course of nine minutes to eventually spread into a huge, expanding sound, grandly declaring “we are all Armadas now.”

“We could do something in a new location,” sings Tom on "Prospector Can Dream." ¡Forward Russia! have managed to shift themselves into a different area, and what they’ve done is really something.

F*** Buttons — aka Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, two experimental noiseniks from Bristol, England — might be a relatively unknown quantity right now, but they have connections in all the right places. Their debut album Street Horrrsing enlists the help of Mogwai’s John Cummings (as producer) and Shellac’s Bob Weston (for mastering) at Part Chimp vocalist Tim Cedar’s studio. While radio DJs have had a hard time working out ways to introduce the obstinately-named duo, they’ve been quietly building support at low-key British festivals and at All Tomorrows Parties, whose label arm brings us this.

It’s a beautiful experiment, at once aggressive and encompassing, confrontational yet strangely familiar. It sees tribal rhythms and rigid patterns share space with meandering digressions. Think the drone of Sunn O))) with the folktronic playfulness of Four Tet, or the Locust on a lazy Sunday afternoon dreaming skywards. Animalistic sounds and demonic howling make an appearance midway through first track “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” and reappear over the course of the album. At first they’re unwelcome, but as the waves of feedback shift your perspective over repeat listens like longshore drift, they become as integral as more conventional vocals. Like the questionable urban sport the album’s title refers to, this flies in the face of normalcy, but somehow it pulls it off.

“Couples”, the follow-up to this Sheffield-formed band’s sharp 2006 debut Someone to Drive You Home, arrives with its title swaddled in quotation marks, as if to reinforce its sense of detachment and cool irony. The emphasis wasn’t necessary: this is an icy, haughty offering, giving off the impression that it’d be deeply shamed to admit to experiencing an emotion. While such aloofness might merit criticism in most genres, in the world of Pop Art it’s a badge of honour. And Pop Art — or at least art-pop — is what the Long Blondes most certainly aspire to be.

If Blondie were the epitome of self-conscious Warhol-influenced pop, all attractive surfaces and a narcissistic refusal to acknowledge the true turmoil of angst, their modern-day heirs are every bit as clinically effective. Erol Alkan’s production is willfully one-dimensional; Kate Jackson’s vocals are precise and thin. As the band look down their noses at the frantic sweatiness of most rock, the results resonate with chilly sexuality. Almost every track deals with foiled lust and dysfunctional romance while tinting its voyeurism with a dash of grim, Jarvis Cocker-like realism.

There’s an '80s sheen to the slim-line sonics: you can detect Soft Cell or Human League in the clipped rhythms of “Nostalgia” or the pre-emptively titled “Too Clever By Half.” “Guilt” and “I Liked the Boys” are equal parts caustic and confessional. They’re in love with retro-futurism. Only on “Round the Hairpin” do they take a darker twist, throwing Banshees-esque shards of guitar and primal drums into the equation.

It’s not an easy trick to pull off, this deadpan silk-screening of the passions which drive pop home. Yet the Long Blondes have it down so fine they may be the glassy gurus of a new blank generation. “Couples” is a singular success.

If you are already a Michael Nyman fan, you can skip all this and just start downloading any tracks you don’t already have (if you own the soundtrack to the Peter Greenaway film Drowning By Numbers, you won’t need tracks 3-8). If you’ve come here following the trail of Mozart, though, read on.

These days, Nyman is best known for his film scores, including the evocative and best-selling score for the Holly Hunter film The Piano. But Michael Nyman is, along with Gavin Bryars, one of the founders of a distinctly British branch of minimalism. Taking a page from America’s Philip Glass and, to a lesser extent, from Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Nyman began creating splashy, rhythmic, tonal music back in the 1970s — a terribly unfashionable thing to do in “Serious Music” circles at the time. Nyman was also a critic, and has claimed to be the first to actually apply the term “Minimalism” to Glass, Reich, etc. But Nyman has also had a career-long obsession with Mozart, and this album brings together most of his Mozart-derived works. If you are a Mozart fan, you will recognize much of the thematic material here.

“in Re Don Giovanni” might have been Nyman’s first acknowledged composition. It takes a small fragment from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and weaves it into something delightfully irreverent yet still respectful. The six tracks from film Drowning By Numbers are all built around the remarkable second movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat for violin, viola and strings. If you know that piece (eMusic has several recordings of it), you can have a fine old time watching Nyman spin his pastoral English soundscapes out of whole passages from 18th century Austria. Of the remaining works, taken from a BBC special in 1991, “Revisiting the Don” is the most immediately appealing. “Profit and Loss” and “I Am an Unusual Thing” are songs, the latter originally for the great German-American chanteuse Ute Lemper, and the former a vocal ensemble piece that highlights Nyman’s ingratiating way of writing for the voice.

Ponytail is the sound of ecstasy: tall exclamation points of guitar, mad rambunctious percussion and wild-eyed ululations, an enormous blast of shocking pink bouncing off the walls and shooting up toward the sun. It's absolute happiness, a drill boring straight down into the human id, recording everything it finds.

You could call it no wave if it wasn't so bright-eyed and busting with joy. Old-time noiseniks embraced chaos as a weapon, but Ponytail are more interested in hugging than haranguing. The guitars prick like apostrophes, skipping across the top of songs, the drums are hollow and throbbing, tribal rhythms from some Martian colony. It's like a deconstructed Life Without Buildings: wild scrambles of sound that wild-out, wobble and collapse. Scrambles of guitar briefly kick out into stern, linear solos, then set back scrambling again, loose and playful and eager as young puppies.

It's singer Molly Siegel who's the chief catalyst here. Possessing a voice somewhere between a baby Björk and a baby banshee, she pouts, huffs, yips and ha-ha-ha's all over these songs. There are no words, just whoops, all of them bubbling over with exhilaration. As the album progresses, Siegel comes to serve as a kind of over-sugared band leader: she spends the front half of "7 Souls" cackling and shrieking amid swinging fists of guitar; but then, at the halfway mark, she lets out a triumphant "Houyya houyaaa!" and the whole thing suddenly changes tempo, pogo-sticking instead of marauding, falling obediently in line behind Siegel's drawn-out yawp.

You've got to buy into Siegel's vocalizations not as empty yammering but as a kind of secular version of speaking in tongues. When the spirit moves her, she has to testify, and her testimony comes out as great euphoric babbling.

The closest she gets to coherent speech is at the end of the marvelous "Sky Drool," where she coos "Ooh baby, ooh, ooh" just before a pair of bright guitar phrases signal to sit down, the ride's about to begin. Sure enough, the tornado takes off again: guitars spiraling up and up, tossing around a drum kit, tangling up a bunch of staccato bass notes. And there's Siegel flailing around in the center, eyes gleaming, grinning broadly and hollering, "Oooowwabba! Oooowabbba! Oooooo!" You never understand a word, but you know exactly what she means.

In dance music, the pseudonym reigns supreme. So it's not surprising to learn that half of the duo Quiet Village is Matt Edwards, the British DJ-producer who’s worked under numerous monikers; he’s best known for the frequently brilliant singles he’s put out as Radio Slave. (He also issued a legendary Kylie/New Order mash-up under that name.) The attention to detail Edwards shows on Radio Slave tracks like "Bell Clap Dance" and "My Bleep" makes Silent Movie, the first album he's released with Quiet Village partner Joel Martin, less surprising than it might be — but only slightly. Martin is a former film editor who venerates cutout soundtrack and cheesy-listening vinyl as much as his partner does, and they fill Silent Movie with enough out-of-nowhere snippets to turn even obviously familiar elements on their head.

The album is an exercise in opulence. "Victoria's Secret" opens things with gulls and waves lapping ashore alongside serene strings and woodwinds. But it’s also slightly seasick, befitting its despondent source material, the Chi-Lites' "Coldest Day of My Life." Similar strings underpin "Circus of Horror," but the main attraction there is a guttural guitar riff reminiscent equally of blaxploitation-soundtrack funk and hairy ’70s sludge-rock. “Free Rider” crosses trip-hop atmospherica, stoned acoustic folk, wah-wah guitar that calls to mind the lonesome whistle from Ennio Morricone spaghetti western themes and oddly unsettling crowd noises. "Singing Sand" sounds like its title. Chimes, pitter-patting bongos, filtered whispered exhales, sideways strings and a ponderous piano line — on paper, it seems like treacle, but the elements are arranged to unsettle, and succeed.

Of course, flirting with cheese means you sometimes fall in — "Keep on Rolling" is a little too yacht-rock for its own good, for example, even if that's its explicit goal. But at its frequent best, Silent Movie is head-spinning, sample-slaw exotica, one of the best albums of its type this side of the Avalanches' debut.

Luminarium is the work of an ambient trio from Stockholm, Sweden, called Tape. Tortoise's TNT plays a big part in songs like "Fingers" and "Beams" (the latter's clean guitar loop strongly recalling "TNT" the song), but unlike Tortoise, Tape are happy to merely stay in place, digging ruts with their melodies that their songs have little ambition to escape (it's this lack of ambition, along with the melodies themselves, that make the album so addictive). Hooks flow in and hooks flow out with nary a beat to buttress them, and the album is entirely instrumental. "Mystery Mutiny" sits halfway between a gloomy Trans Am and a backing track from the latest Portishead album, "Parade" could appear on any of Colleen's records and "Illuminations" brings it all back to Tortoise once again. The sound and feel is consistent, with occasional flirtations with glitch, but most of it feeling more like a moody film score. It's not an album to get excited about, it's just an album that rarely misses and always sounds right.

In a rock world clogged with whiners, Patrick Stickles is a blurter. The Titus Andronicus frontman shreds his vocal chords with enough foolish disregard to strike fear into the heart of any decent laryngologist, and his snotty passion suggests how Conor Oberst might sound if he wasn't always partly angling for you to spend the night with him. Stickles poses callow, often funny questions about God, parents, love and mortality as a grand phalanx of four (or more) guitars chases him through some fairly epic compositions, sprawling enough to allow room for musical digressions like a fancy hammer-on mid-section and a harmonica-wheezing intro that totally rips off Springsteen's "The Promised Land."

Any band that follows "No Future Part One" with "No Future Part Two: The Days After No Future" knows how to play punk nihilism for laughs, but Titus Andronicus aren't just being cute — they're girding themselves for the long slog ahead into adulthood. And fittingly "Titus Andronicus" encapsulates their worst fears. Prior to a singalong chorus of "Your life is over," they list off the creature comforts you're denied once your life ends: no more cigarettes, sex, drunkenness, and — what? "No more indie rock!"? Jeez, these guys aren't kidding around.

Chicago’s Vandermark 5 are both prolific and predictable, yet usually fingerprint each album with an enticing twist. For Beat Reader it's the increased influence of newest member Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello, whether adding liltingly hummable bowed lines to the chamber jazz of “Further from the Truth” or igniting a Hendrixian bonfire on “Speedplay.” Elsewhere, Vandermark retains his penchant for making interlocking chock-a-block rhythms into toe-tapping melodies, and for creating compelling sonorities with saxophonist Dave Rempis on baritone sax or a variety of clarinets (like his wonderfully burred bass clarinet tones on the opening “Friction”). The rhythm section, especially tommy-gun drummer Tim Daisy, is typically staunch.