3.5 stars (out of 4)

Battles -- a collection of indie-rock stalwarts with tenure in Helmet, Don Caballero and Lynx -- is busy proving that complicated, sometimes noisy music can be fun. Its 2007 full-length debut, “Mirrored,” combined electronic distortion, hypnotic rhythms and the oddball vocal melodies of Tyondai Braxton, who has since left the group to pursue solo projects. In his stead, holdovers Dave Konopka, Ian Williams, and John Stanier have brought in a handful of ringers to augment the tracks on “Gloss Drop” (Warp). Gary Numan sounds more robotic than some of the machines the trio employs, and members of the Boredoms and Blonde Redhead contribute effects that function more as textural and rhythmic scenery rather than traditional lead vocals. The heavy lifting is once again done by the core instrumentalists, who place a premium on springy groove and tonal brightness no matter how tangled the arrangements, from the Caribbean effervescence of “Dominican Fade” to the glitchy celebration of “Ice Cream.” “Playful” isn’t often the first word that comes to mind when listening to music with this kind of cerebral veneer, but it’s a perfectly apt description of Battles’ subversive and frequently delightful brand of avant-pop.

greg@gregkot.com

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 4)

F Up (a shorthand version of the band’s explicit name) is almost ridiculously prolific. Since forming a decade ago, the Toronto sextet has released more than 50 singles, EPs and mixtapes, plus three studio albums. The latest, “David Comes to Life” (Matador), provides an epic capper to that era: a four-part, 18-song, 78-minute rock opera.

Once a hardcore punk band with its allegiance to speed, volume and violence, F Up is now a band that embraces grand, anthemic arrangements that at times evoke the drama of the Who, the reverbing guitars of U2, even the Broadway-sized ambitions of the latter-day Green Day. Not that “David Comes to Life” sounds anything like a Broadway hit-to-be.

Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham isn’t a varied or expressive enough singer to carry a five-character narrative about a factory worker who falls in love, loses his partner in a violent death, struggles to unravel why, and ultimately is redeemed. But he gets by on sheer will, barging through these arrangements like a rogue rhino, his gruff bellow balanced by the occasional female backing vocal. The band layers on the instruments and plays with dynamics; for the guitar playing alone --- not the solo virtuosity so much as the intricate interplay, shifting textures and counterpoint melodies – “David Comes to Life” is an achievement. In “Turn the Season,” “Ship of Fools” and “Life in Paper,” the guitars suggest a torrent busting through a dam, sweeping away all in its path. It’s an exhilarating, engulfing sound that might’ve been better served by a more concise album. But then F Up never has been much for holding itself back.

greg@gregkot.com

2.5 stars (out of 4)

When they’re at the top of their game, Jim James and his longtime Louisville quintet My Morning Jacket specialize in thundercrack moments. Over six albums, they’ve developed a knack for splitting songs open with one of James’ sky-piercing wails, a guitar solo or a wondrous, where-did-that-come-from? choir. One such moment arrives in the middle of “Circuital” (ATO), the seven-minute title track from the band’s sixth album. It ambles sedately until a guitar crackles into the foreground, at first just a brief, violent intrusion then eventually taking over the song, until the silence folds in back around it. The song is the centerpiece of what in the vinyl era would’ve been Side 1 of the album, with the tracks sequenced to melt one into the next. The ascending, trance-like “Victory Dance,” the undulating finger-picked guitar and yearning vocal of “Wonderful (The Way I Feel),” the surreal combination of Beach Boys-like vocals and pedal-steel guitar on “Outta My System” – it makes for a brilliant start and raises expectations that My Morning Jacket has finally made its classic.

Unfortunately, the album’s second half isn’t nearly as strong. “Holdin’ on to Black Metal,” with its cartoonish horn flourishes and female chorus, is this album’s answer to “Highly Suspicious,” the rogue funk track that divided longtime fans and sunk the band’s 2008 album “Evil Urges.” Things crawl to a close with two sleepy sign-offs, the aptly named “Slow Slow Tune” and “Movin’ Away.”

It’s a by-now-familiar lament. Though My Morning Jacket has been one of the most consistently brilliant live bands of the last decade, its studio albums remain hit-and-miss. “Circuital” is no exception.

greg@gregkot.com

3 stars (out of 4)

Death Cab for Cutie’s seventh studio album, “Codes and Keys” (Atlantic), pulses with the sound of tires on pavement, life blurring past a bus window on the road. Tucked inside its shifting scenery is a yearning that nags like a toothache, the desire for some semblance of permanence in an impermanent environment.

The word “home” comes up a lot in Ben Gibbard’s lyrics. A touring musician, he recently found himself married (to actress Zooey Deschanel), and this album tells the tale of how he got there. Along the way, anxiety and disconnection (“And if you a feel just like a tourist in the city where you were born") are transformed into resolve.

In contrast to the live-in-the-studio immediacy of Death Cab’s previous album, “Narrow Stairs,” the new album is about turning the studio into an instrument – a hive of sound that suggests background noise from a distant freeway or a disturbance just over the horizon. Producer-guitarist Chris Walla is the primary architect, and he showcases the versatility of the band’s rhythm section. They evoke wheels clicking down the freeway on “Doors Unlocked and Open,” which borrows its groove from the German art-rock band Neu. Nick Harmer’s bass bobs to the surface of “Underneath the Sycamore” like a life preserver, and underlines the voice of reassurance in “You are a Tourist.” The album’s narrator may have settled down in the closing pop celebration, “Stay Young, Go Dancing,” but his band sure hasn’t – and that’s a good thing.

greg@gregkot.com

3 stars (out of 4)

The former rhythm section of slow-core masters Galaxie 500, Damon Krukowksi and Naomi Yang make music that takes its time, in no hurry to impress on "False Beats and True Hearts" (20/20/20). It glides rather than gallops – especially when Yang sings in a voice as light as a breeze rippling through lace curtains – which makes it perfect background for all sorts of civilized activities. But zoom in on the jewel-like songs and the group’s rigorously controlled brilliance – wedding acid-folk’s hazy glow to chamber-pop’s lush detail – can be hypnotic.

With Michio Kurihara’s guitar lines twisting around becalmed vocals like vines, the duo builds miniature gardens of sound – deceptively serene settings for songs about deception, memory, the knowledge that “the dawn won’t come till the night settles down.” That fragile perspective has proven remarkably resilient over 25 years and seven quietly impressive studio albums.

greg@gregkot.com

3.5 stars (out of 4)

The projects by serial collaborator Danger Mouse, a k a producer-songwriter Brian Burton, have ranged from cultish (“Dangerdoom” with rapper MF Doom) to spectacularly (if unexpectedly) commercial (the 2006 Gnarls Barkley album, “St. Elsewhere”). Almost all of them have yielded music that shows omniverous range and a sure feel for melody.

On “Rome” (Capitol), Danger Mouse joins composer Daniele Luppi to revisit the golder age of Italian film scores, specifically the “Spaghetti Westerns” of Ennio Morricone. This is about big-picture soundscapes rather than individual star turns, so even high-profile guests such as Jack White and Norah Jones meld into the concise but richly detailed songs (Jones’ self-effacing personality is well-suited toward that sort of approach, while White allows his voice to become just another creepy texture on “The Rose With a Broken Neck”).

Burton and Luppi are wise to employ many of the original musicians and singers featured on classic ‘60s soundtracks such as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West.” They also recorded in Rome’s Form Studios, founded by Morricone. The wordless harmonizing by Alessandro Alessandroni’s choir, the evocative vocals of soprano Edda Dell’Orso, the melancholy chime of a celesta, the queasy rumble of a carnival organ, clipped guitars playing against a swooning string section – each of these sounds connects with a beloved, bygone era. But “Rome” does one better than conjure nostalgia; it puts those vintage signifiers in service of fine, contemporary songs.

greg@gregkot.com

2.5 stars (out of 4)

 The name fits. The Cars manufactured sleek, gleaming new-wave jingles, beginning in 1978 with their still-spiffy debut album. Turn on a Cars song, and instantly the world becomes a sea of androgynous boys and girls dressed in vinyl, wearing sunglasses and cruising for anonymous hook-ups.

After nearly three decades apart, the surviving members – Ric Ocasek, Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes and David Robinson – have reunited for “Move Like This” (Hear Music), their seventh studio album (cofounding bassist Ben Orr died in 2000). Fans who loved the old Cars will find little has changed. Ocasek turns oddball phrases (“I heard your glockenspiel pounding soft”; “The world is full of quackers/And bellybutton rings”) in a deadpan voice well-suited for reading a William Gibson novel aloud. Jittery sixteenth-note rhythms coalesce into choruses fit for an army of androids to shout into space (“Sad Song,” “Free,” “Hits Me,” “Blue Tip”) while Hawkes breaks out his armada of keyboard squiggles and curlicues.

Though the band hired Garret “Jacknife” Lee (whose credits include Weezer, R.E.M. and the Hives) to produce half the album, his tracks sound interchangeable with the band’s self-produced efforts. The band’s ballads were always a bit draggy, and “Move Like This” contains enough slower or midtempo tracks to make it a bumpy listen. Outside of that immaculate first album, the Cars always made better singles anyway, and that’s still true here.

greg@gregkot.com

Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 4)

Transgression is crucial to pop culture. It defines the outer edge, the forbidden zone, from Elvis Presley’s censored pelvis and Eminem’s revenge fantasies to the Rolling Stones’ black-and-blue misogyny and Marilyn Manson’s fascist send-ups. And now, in a world where “American Idol” sanitizes future chart-toppers, there is the boyish hip-hop crew Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All lying in ambush.

“They are them, we are us, kill them all,” goes one of the group’s risibly nihilistic chants. Their moment is now.

Odd Future has self-released a dozen mix tapes and albums in the last few years, developing a huge word-of-mouth following that climaxed with a series of high-profile appearances at the South by Southwest Music Conference last March in Austin, Texas. At the upscale industry event, the Los Angeles collective brought boundless energy, bleak humor, boyish petulance, scalding anger and horrific fantasies that described everything from murder to rape. It’s stomach-churning stuff, but to a generation raised on explicit video games and splatter movies, Odd Future amplifies a violent discontent that most pop music wouldn’t dare address. And, like all transgressive artists, Odd Future thrills its fans by stepping over the line, over and over again. It becomes an in joke shared by the group and its fans as they annihilate taboos like so many assailants in a “Grand Theft Auto” shootout.

3.5 stars (out of 4)

The plaintive harmonies and get-back-to-the-country imagery of Fleet Foxes’ well-received 2008 self-titled debut helped define a musical movement of 21st Century bands in search of lost, 19th Century ideals: Midlake, Blitzen Trapper, Bon Iver. Now the Seattle sextet returns with the far more ambitious “Helplessness Blues” (Sub Pop).

Though the melodies aren’t quite as instantly memorable, the album is in many ways superior to its predecessor. The band’s multi-part harmonies function more as a piece of the wide-screen arrangements rather than the dominant feature. The voice of Robin Pecknold is more out front and lyrically direct; against an intricate web of counterpoint melodies, he plays the troubled narrator wrestling with his place in the world. Employing everything from woodwinds to Tibetan singing bowls, with finger-picked acoustic guitars sailing atop rumbling timpani, the band makes a wonderful sound: rich but not overstuffed, intricate but not labored, virtuosic without sounding like anyone’s showing off. The songs don’t stick to verse-chorus formula, they’re more like mini-suites that turn and twist without drawing attention to their complexity.

If there’s a shortcoming, it’s that the band is almost too subtle for its own good; all that beauty and detail is rarely played for dramatic effect. When Pecknold’s pristine voice rises and finally cracks on “The Shrine/An Argument,” followed by a free-jazz freak-out, it’s the type of musical jolt the rest of the album lacks.

But such outbursts probably wouldn’t make sense in fleshing out the album’s central theme. “Could I wash my hands of just looking out for me?” Pecknold sings on “Montezuma.” On the title song, he declares his desire to “be a functioning cog in some great machinery, serving something beyond me.”

In striving for more self-less version of self, Pecknold and his excellent band have made an album that embraces modesty. Which is why it may take a few listens for its rarefied combination of beauty and anxiety to hit home. In this case, another virtue that Pecknold extols -- patience – has its rewards.

greg@gregkot.com

3.5 stars (out of 4)

The Feelies are famous for moving at their own, ultra-deliberate pace in a career that has yielded a mere four studio albums since the late ‘70s, and none since 1991. So it’s appropriate that the New Jersey quintet begins album No. 5, “Here Before” (Bar/None), with a knowing wink.

“Is it too late to do it again?/Or should we wait another 10,” Glenn Mercer sings, and then time melts away as the band slips into one of its patented trance-grooves, as if it were surfing atop a wave of guitars and drums rather than playing them.

Mercer, Bill Million, Dave Weckerman, Stanley Demeski and Brenda Sauter remain resolute minimalists, playing only what each song requires and nothing more. The building blocks of the band’s sound are as stout as ever: Million’s driving rhythm guitar, Sauter’s melody-gorged bass, Mercer’s deadpan vocals and guitar solos that alternately sing and drone. Weckerman’s array of percussion ornaments Demeski’s relentless, subway-train drumming in a way that sets the Feelies apart from virtually every other post-punk, post-new wave band to emerge from the late ‘70s New York/New Jersey scene.

The lovely twilight chime of “So Far” and “Bluer Skies,” the tumbling ferocity of “Time is Right” and “When You Know,” the mesmerizing glide of “Change Your Mind” -- the Feelies evoke their past without imitating it, balancing the pastoral, folk-based melodies of “The Good Earth” (1986) with the pinballing overdrive of their last album, “Time for a Witness,” released 20 years ago.

“Is it too late to do it again?” Clearly not.

greg@gregkot.com