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

2.5 stars (out of 4)

At one time, Harris’ voice was like country’s angelic consciousness, a reminder of its essence as the Nashville sound became increasingly suburban-ized. Her brief early ‘70s partnership with the late Gram Parsons left her with a sense of mission to carry the music forward without forgetting its past. She slipped between the cracks of genre, touching on rock and gospel, soul and folk, even as she hewed to country’s plainspoken truths. By the mid-‘90s, her voice had lost some of its pristine luster, but she plunged into even riskier, less-well-defined territory as an artist, spearheading Nashville’s progressive wing with Buddy and Julie Miller, Gillian Welch and Steve Earle.

“Hard Bargain” (Nonesuch) was recorded with just three musicians; Harris, Giles Reeves and producer Jay Joyce play pretty much everything on the album. Its intimacy settles around the listener like a fog, Harris’ voice drifting past with spectral fragility. Never the most innovative songwriter, she relies primarily on earnest originals that touch on big subjects without offering much in the way of insight or revelation: an infamous civil-rights-era murder (“My Name is Emmett Till”), Hurricane Katrina (“New Orleans”), Parsons yet again (“The Road”). But she brings a conversational grace to “Darlin’ Kate” (a tribute to her late friend, songwriter Kate McGarrigle) and a forlorn dignity to “Lonely Girl.” It’s not so much what these songs say but how -- the sound of a slow, disintegrating beauty that Harris in her fifth decade of music-making has mastered.

greg@gregkot.com 

2.5 stars (out of 4)

Recorded in hotels on ring-leader Damon Albarn’s iPad while Gorillaz toured North America last year, “The Fall” (Virgin/EMI) was originally made available only to fan-club members, but now receives its official release. In comparison to the three previous Gorillaz albums, laden with guest stars and ambitious production, this comes across as a far more modest affair, with its bedroom beats, gentle guitars, purring keyboards and wistful vocals. A sinister vibe burrows into the buzzing foundation of “The Snake in Dallas,” but most of the 15 tracks come off as a dreamy travelogue – America as seen from the window of a tour bus. In keeping with the album’s sparse tone, the star turns are reduced to a bare minimum – the Clash’s Mick Jones and Paul Simonon add a bit of guitar and bass, and Bobby Womack sings the folk-soul lament “Bobby in Phoenix.” Mostly, this is Albarn making one for the headphone-obsessed in his fan base, a soundtrack for kicking back in the back seat and watching the world drift past.

greg@gregkot.com

2 stars (out of 4)

On its self-titled debut album, the Seattle co-ed sextet specializes in misty ballads and piano-driven sing-alongs that long for an America that doesn’t exist anymore. The wistfulness shares some characteristics with the music of (more accomplished) Sub Pop labelmates Fleet Foxes and Blitzen Trapper, with all its references to a more spiritual sense of self tied to a bucolic, idealized past. Like the hippie bards and folkies of the ‘60s, these 21st Century songwriters take personally their generation’s lost innocence. In addressing just how rootless we have become, the Head and the Heart fill their songs with romantic images of deep valleys, “whiskey rivers” and home. The earnestness can become cloying: “we were young, so many years ago.” More problematic are the melodies and the songs themselves; they strive for rousing resonance, a deep sense of loss, but often settle for pat prettiness and easy sentimentality.

greg@gregkot.com

3.5 stars (out of 4)

After the home-made, decidedly low-fi charms of her 2009 debut album, “Bird-Brains” – recorded on a Dictaphone – Merrill Garbus ups the ante on the follow-up. Whereas its predecessor was quirky and small, “Whokill” (4AD) is quirky and expansive; an offbeat personal statement that frequently morphs into a killer dance album.

Garbus adds not only a bassist and songwriting partner, Nate Brenner, but a horn section to flesh out her one-woman-band: strumming a ukulele, pounding drums, layering and looping her voice into a choir. Garbus’ one-of-a-kind voice is a thrilling, go-for-broke instrument, an uninhibited cry of joy and vulnerability. It rides a wave of polyrhythmic percussion – everything from tribal drums to what sound like ticking alarm clocks and clattering pots and pans.

“I need you to press me down before my body flies away from me,” she demands on “Powa,” a literal translation of just how uplifting and transformative the sound of this music can be. For all its eccentric details and occasionally fractured flow, the songs brim with ecstatic blasts of saxophone and undulating waves of rhythm that suggest Afro-pop’s endless groove.

greg@gregkot.com