After 2004’s magnificent Set Yourself on Fire, it seemed that Stars were ready for (no pun intended) stardom, but twas not in the cards. Now they rebound by reuniting with Set Yourself on Fire producer Tom McFall and thinking smaller. Though there are still string arrangements ornamenting a few tracks, this is a more intimate album, its stripped-down sound more revealing of the electronic rock foundation of the band’s earlier work (even the strings get fuzzed-up electronically). The most important part of Stars’ sound, the complementary male/female vocals of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan, is immediately to the fore on the beautiful opener “Dead Hearts.” Postal Service comparisons have been immediate, but since when has that been a bad thing? When married to soaring melodies, as so often on The Five Ghosts, it’s one of the most infectious sounds in recent indie rock. (Steve)

While the experimental trio Emeralds has piles of small-run CD-r and cassette releases, each a snapshot of a particular moment in the Cleveland band’s existence, we can best chart the group’s course through its more prominent recordings. And Does It Look Like I’m Here? is nothing if not a prominent recording. While often lazily genrefied as a “noise” act, Emeralds have never sat comfortably in that bin, and have in fact been building to the heart-startingly gorgeous kosmische sounds heard on Does It Look for a good long time. Put simply, it’s one thing to say your band uses guitars, analog synthesizers, electronics and sequencer; it’s another thing to use them as Emeralds does: reaching back and grabbing the Teutonic psychedelia of the 70s by the ass and hurling it into the right now, with spires of synths cascading upward to heaven (or whatever’s up in the sky), their heights marked and tracked by Mark McGuire’s sympatico guitar work and, on tracks like “Genetic,” a choir of fallen angels. Just awesome. Where Emeralds have favored longer tracks in the past, Does It Look is broken into 12 mostly shorter pieces, each with its own way of saying “beautiful.” Everything just bursts with fiery color and intensity—the title track (one of the longer pieces on the record) will leave you shaking down to the molecular level, and you will like it. (The vinyl, by the way, is very limited, so don’t wait.) (M.L. Thrope)

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more simple charmer of a guitar-pop record out there than the full-length debut by Beach Fossils, AKA nouveau Brooklynite Dustin Payseur. In fact, a review of this sweet lil' album is almost unnecessary; you could get a pretty accurate read between the band name and song titles. “Vacation” is like one long hook, a circular picked guitar line providing the partly-sunny side to Payseur’s medium-cool, shaded vocals (which exist in that softly downcast, echoed-out space that the Captured Tracks label could more or less patent at this point). “Daydream,” similarly, evokes the tonal vibe of a pleasant daydream, with a melancholic lining that comes from what we all know: daydreams ain’t real life. “Lazy Day,” well, do we have to say it? And it has perhaps the album’s nicest undulating lilt, a gentle lope that, like most of the record, simply streams along as Payseur sings, “All we have to do is nothing at all.” Yeah man. (M.L. Thrope)

Menace and mood: Though Rene Hell, AKA Jeff Witscher, is an electronic artist (synths? computer? anything that plugs in?), Porcelain Opera is a bona fide work of sound art, something that begs not to be shackled with limiting genre-terms. Witscher’s sound field is incredible—even listening on little earbuds you’ll encounter a vast landscape springing to bustling life in your mind, with perfectly sculpted events going down all over: simple percussive effects to keep things rooted, skittering digital creatures darting to and fro, disembodied voices and anything, everything, all unified by the artist’s ultra-keen sensibility. In other words, descriptions will fail to account for how this makes sense as music, but man does it ever. The opening “Razor. P+” draws you in with a shadowy post-tribal beat that flares out into a metallic crashing tone before pulling back to give way to an ominous synth progression, a dark crystal of sound. The next piece, “Prize Mischief Hold,” reconfigures old Coil with its whipping strangeness, ghosts and angry spirits tooling around a thumping beat that sounds simultaneously wooden and metallic. Final verdict on the whole of Porcelain Opera is an enthusiastic “wow!” Highly recommended for the sonic adventurers out there, but accessible enough for the curious newbies. (M.L. Thrope)

A Nina Nastasia song is worth a thousand pictures. And at ten songs, her new album, Outlaster, sprawls over a vast canvas indeed, images and emotions and colors that do right by the art form of the album. Her sixth effort, recorded like most of her other work with big fan Steve Albini, Outlaster sets Nastasia’s plainly brilliant songcraft in beds of simple and sophisticated yet unstuffy strings, arranged with keen hand by Paul Bryan. On “You Can Take Your Time,” the strings flit and swoop around her pristine, sheenless voice in complementary formation, while the dramatic mind-blower “This Familiar Way” borrows a tango framework, the supporting instrumentation dotting the periphery before taking over and hurtling the song into the depths of passion (and I’m not overstating a thing here). Singular and necessary, Nina Nastasia is too good a singer-songwriter to be confined to cult-fandom. Give Outlaster a listen and you’ll only regret not having been a fan already. (M.L. Thrope)

The 90s dance-music wave that made the Chemical Brothers worldwide stars has receded a bit (at least from its central prominence in indie music), so those not dedicated to the Chems (or their scene) might roll eyes at the group’s ongoing existence. But years of headlining ginormous festivals with all kinds of other artists has certainly taught these guys a few things: the eight massive tracks making up Further, the seventh studio album from Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, incorporates all kinds of moves, from total pop melodicism to psychedelia-through-repetition. “Escape Velocity” proves that Rowlands and Simon haven’t lost their love for dancefloor dramatics, building a synth castle that could house both the muddy-field dancers and the Neu fans. “Another World” makes use of a looped vocal hook, again importing pop methodology to its dance-music realm, while “K+D+B” sounds like an ecstasy trip without any of the dated 90s-style associations (dumb pants, drooling teenagers, etc.). Hail the once and current kings of cool electronic dance music! (Deluxe CD/DVD version features visuals for each track.) (Bosco)

After years of being lumped into the “post-rock” ghetto (whatever and wherever that is), the roving band known as Windsor for the Derby reveals its true genre on Against Love: What this now Austin-based band plays is called “music,” and on this album the Windsor sound takes many excellent forms. “Autumn Song” cooks itself up to a quasi-shoegaze blaze (kind of like a marriage of Seefeel and Yo La Tengo), while “Queen of the Sun” and the spectral “Alex Lucero” similarly slow-burn themselves into a shimmering, heady sound. On the opening title track, as well as “Moon Shadows” and the choral-abstraction “Tropical Depression,” the band—led by core-members Dan Matz and Jason McNeeley—go into instrumental reverie, at times (again) evoking Yo La as its most haunting. On “After Love” and “Our Love’s a Calamity” (both somewhat sunny-sounding, it should be noted), Matz and McNeeley take center stage as pop-songwriters, with plenty of picked, jangly guitars and sweet harmonizing. Now that the genre-wars of the ‘90s are over, Windsor for the Derby can be known for simply being good—at whatever they do. (M.L. Thrope)

Stop thinking Krautrock: This two-CD compilation picks up four years after the birth of Krautrock and mostly stays true to its title across 24 tracks. The concentration on electronic music provides focus, but there’s plenty of variety beyond the usual suspects, notably the exotica-prog of Between’s “Devotion,” the sweet West Coast-style psychedelia of Gila’s “This Morning,” and keyboard-heavy tracks by Michael Bundt (“La Chasse Aux Microbes” is my favorite new-to-me track here) and E.M.A.K. Most of the bands one would expect (except Kraftwerk and Achim Reichel) are here: Popol Vuh, La Düsseldorf, Amon Duul II, and of course Moebius and Roedelius (a solo track each) and their bands Cluster (once) and Harmonia (two tracks; “Veterano” shows the influence of Minimalism’s phase music period). The robotic electronica of Conrad Schnitzler’s “Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal” and Tangerine Dream’s iconic “No Man’s Land” are key. A few acts don’t really belong, but nonetheless this is a very enjoyable set. (Steve)

Hot on the heels of last year’s Get Color, the L.A. weird-dance outfit HEALTH repeats its move subsequent to the release of its self-titled debut with a remix album. Disco2 adds one new track, the crystalline “USA Boys,” and 11 wildly varying remixes of seven of the album’s tracks. It isn’t hard for nu-fashion-gothers Salem to stand out, both in terms of sound—a wan, almost Screw-styled entry with cascades of vocals—and the fact that they’re the only ones to work with “In Violet.” At the same time, the three versions of “Before Tigers” displays the open-source quality of HEALTH’s music (as well as the pros and cons of remix records), resulting in sweetly alluring electro-pop (Cfcf’s version), slightly anachronistic IDM that wisely adds a 4/4 (Gold Panda) and a downright ecstatic and heavenly coda for this entire collection (Blindoldfreak’s remix). A mishmash of sounds that is a necessity for all HEALTH fans. (Both the CD and LP include a code to download 12 additional remixes.) (M.L. Thrope)

The first volume of Strut’s Soweto-themed compilation series was great; this one’s even better if you’re a connoisseur of cross-cultural pollination, as the mix of Western R&B styles and South African flavor is both super-fun and super-funky, with some familiar riffs appropriated (for instance, Philip Malela & the Movers’ “Intandane (Part 1)” sounds suspiciously like Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” near the end). Mahotella Queens and Mgababa Queens return from Vol. 1, but otherwise this is a new artist lineup, and as usual Strut mixes in plenty of material on CD for the first time. There’s a huge amount of stylistic variety, running the gamut from a few tracks bordering on garage rock, to organ-powered instrumentals Booker T would be proud of, to funk grooves that could jumpstart a party anywhere, to vocal-heavy tracks that could have been on Vol. 1 but (barely) qualify here based on the rhythm guitar riffs. The one characteristic that seems constant is that the music’s played by small combos, not sprawling Parliament-Funkadelicesque collectives, and horns are relatively scarce, usually just one saxophone. Recommended for both Afropop and soul/funk aficionados. (Steve)

Textbook dynamics power the second full-length effort from Canadian quartet Tokyo Police Club, bassist Dave Monks’s confident (can we say “pro” without it seeming like an insult?) vocals always finding firm footing on his bandmates’ surging quiet/loud moves and ringing, rhythmically precise melodies. Champ is the sound of your hometown’s ragged indie-rock band going global: All the things that made you like them are intact, just played better, sung better and arranged better. This once hyper-enough indie band takes a breath and turns out a song called “Breakneck Speed” at a coolly restrained pace, keyboardist Graham Wright providing a memorable, 90s-caliber hook. “Gone” finds Wright nodding back to the 70s, but the song keeps its feet planted firmly in the now with a wrist-flickingly sharp guitar motif. And “End of a Spark” encapsulates the band’s appeal: the underdog reaching for something epic without surrendering its soul. (M.L. Thrope)