It’s been three years since the last album by this wonderfully hard-to-pin-down Portland trio, and they’ve made the most of it: Mines outpaces anything Menomena has done before. Very weird, except for when they’re very normal, the 11 songs here lurch gracefully and stumble around conventional structure but always find their way to melody, harmony and rhythm in rewarding ways. “All my life I’ve run away from those who’ve begged me to stay,” sings—well, who knows? All three guys in the band sing, and despite typically ornate packaging (love the confounding insert poster—which speaks to the also-mysterious cover art) they’ve left out anything resembling a credit. (They have gone on record as being devoted to band-democracy.) That lyric does say a lot about this music’s character, though. So what’s here? “Five Little Rooms,” a creaking yet nimble pop-song-of-sorts that could unite Tom Waits and Bjork fans; “TAOS,” a howling tune that descends from arena-rock bombast (briefly calling to mind ELO!) into close-up harmonies and hand-claps; “Tithe,” which opens with plinking thumb piano and moves into TV on the Radio terrain; and eight other songs that baffle and amuse in the best of ways. (M.L. Thrope)

Oh, hell yeah. While NYC’s raddest badasses took their sweet ol’ time (11 years!) to get around to making Album No. 1, 2008’s Focus Level, Endless Boogie’s return trip took just two years. Full House Head is everything Focus Level was, and more of it: jammier jams, greasier grease, spookier voodoo. Like the Velvet Underground recast as a biker band, Endless Boogie takes the idea of the eternal riff to the vanishing point at the end of the horizon, like something that’s always in the air and just needed to be tapped into. Five of the eight pieces on Full House Head exceed the eight-minute mark, guaranteeing the maximum in hypno-head-nodding rawk. It’s all about frontman Paul “Top Dollar” Major, whose rabid growl and insanely cool lead-guitar work drive this hog. As the only two songs under five minutes, “Tarmac City” and “New Pair of Shoes” are recommended for those of you trying to program a radio show, but for my money, the jams that really put infinity to the test—“Top Dollar Speaks His Mind” and the epic swamp-mysticism of “A Life Worth Leaving”—are what Endless Boogie are all about. And what they‘re about is ROCK. (M.L. Thrope)

Composer, producer, pianist, ring-tone pioneer: Max Richter has internalized more apps than your phone. Infra, his latest, is a collaboration with the choreographer Wayne McGregor, written for the Royal Ballet and premiered at the Royal Opera House late in 2008. While the music is stark and lovely on its own the fact of its provenance is helpful to the imagination, picturing dancers finding their place in these sweeping but often somewhat opaque pieces. Dominated by strings and piano but also populated with static and other sonic ephemera lurking around the fringes of your ear-field (suggesting menace, alienness, dissociationness and other -nesses), Infra is a sumptuous listen; I hope to find video of the choreography that McGregor came up with, especially for the transition from “Infra 3” to “Journey 2.” (M.L. Thrope)

Now this is a welcome return—The Books with their first proper album in more than five years! The Way Out will sound familiar to old fans; like all of the duo’s recorded work, the only genre this mix of pop, folk and electronics fits into is just “music.” There is a stronger electronic presence in that some songs actually sound like electronic music, such as the IDM-nodding “I Am Who I Am” and the heavily processed “I Didn't Know That.” But the Books’ specialty remains electronic songs that sound like analog experiments, scotch-tape splicery that’s only incidentally been constructed on computer. “Group Autogenics I” uses (like much of the album) vocal samples from self-help and hypno-whateva tapes to add a heavy coating of mesmer to a typically brilliant and Booksish jigsaw-puzzle of sounds; “Thirty Incoming” proceeds at a medium gallop, with guitar, strings and choral parts flying alongside like passing scenery. Still, The Way Out’s best pop moment is easily “All You Need Is a Wall,” gorgeously sung and strummed by Nick Zammuto while Bookmate Paul De Jong ebbs and flows an ocean of textures. (M.L. Thrope)

Finally, amid the glut of dubious psych-rock reissues, we get something truly worthwhile: the terrific lone album by the Icelandic trio Odmenn. Formed in 1966 by the Jóhannsson brothers, Odmenn toiled around northern Europe for most of the late 1960s before recording this album in Copenhagen in 1970, and it’s a blast, a near-perfect representation of the period’s music scene. Like a lot of Scandinavian rock from this era, you get elements of jazz, prog, blues and pop, not just lengthy stoner jams but plenty of catchy hooks too, almost like a cross between Soft Machine and Chicago (don’t snicker, and I’ll bet you a buck that Dungen knows these cats too). These are billed as protest songs (they sing in their native Icelandic, for the most part, I think), railing against those quaint issues of war, pollution and social injustice. Comes with a 12-page booklet and extensive liner notes. Dig it. (James)

Few groups that you’d file under “electronic” have ever had the warmth, the presence, the sheer human-ness of the German trio To Rococo Rot, who’ve been proving it since the mid-90s. Speculation, their first album since a 2007 tribute to the Helvetica typeface (seriously!), is immediately gripping: the seductive slink of “Away” gets its legs from a pulsing bassline and the always-curious “are those drums live or electronic?” question. But Speculation is also a pop record, after the TRR fashion: “Horses” indeed gallops forward agiley; “Working Against Time” actually resembles the feeling you get as you’re racing the clock, only cooler; and “Seele” burbles and skips along, opening into some New Orderesque synth-washes but never breaking stride. The closing opus, “Fridays,” is for the abstract-techno nerds—and it is awesome. Great to see these guys back in the racks and in perpetually fine form. (M.L. Thrope)

Another fine reissue from Shadoks (these guys know what they are doing). John and Philipa Cooper were a brother-sister team from South Africa, and this is their sole recording, originally issued by EMI in 1970. The Cooperville Times is vintage 60s underground folk-rock, perhaps a little corny at times with its swirling vocal theatrics and arrangements, but trust me, you won’t mind. The group was perhaps a victim of poor geography, as South Africa was hardly a focal point for this kind of music, but here it is, fully remastered and restored, a real treat. (James)