Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it’s been a while; good to hear from you. As the band has said, It’s Blitz! sounds different than past YYYs music, but it also is unmistakably them. This is due to Karen O’s distinctive Karen-O-ness—she’s never been a great technical singer but has developed an undeniably unique vocal style, and strange as it might seem to fans who watched YYYs come up through the clubs as a scrappy garage-punk band, she seems more at home within the electronic/rock hybridisms of It’s Blitz. A big reason for that is the fact that her bandmates, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase, are two of the better musicians to come out of NYC’s rock scene this decade, no matter the context. The change in sound is neither superficial nor too dramatic or complicated; the energy and moods, from high wattage to stray voltage, remain familiar and welcome. Plenty of could-be hits across It’s Blitz!’s ten tracks, and this album’s “Maps” will be either “Skeletons” or “Runaway”—maybe both. (The deluxe version of the CD includes acoustic versions of four album tracks.) (M.L. Thrope)

One of the most anticipated releases of 2009, Fever Ray’s self-titled debut is the sound of one Knife cutting. Of course, this isn’t your standard debut—Fever Ray is Karin Dreijer Andersson, the sister half of Swedish sibling duo The Knife. Like that outfit’s Silent Shout, Fever Ray is composed of primarily electronic materials and moods, but the vantage point is, to state the obvious, more singular. The first track, “If I Had a Heart” (find the video online and watch it—now!), marks the charcoal depths of Andersson’s m.o., but the ten songs cast their gaze around a wide world of shadows and illuminated nights. Check out the bizarrely evocative “Seven,” for example—OMD comes to mind, but so does Sinéad O’Connor’s earliest vocal trajectories (if not her sound). Highly recommended for fans of the early Mute and 4AD rosters, as well as Björk’s prettier moments and, naturally, the Knife. (M.L. Thrope)

In which NYC’s favorite post-avant-electronic-noise trio follows up its Paw Tracks debut with a subtly tweaked updating of its M.O. That is to say, given Black Dice’s art-school provenance, we can read into their aesthetic a bit via their covers, and on Repo that means collage. Also: fucked-upedness. The Dice’s seventh (!) album is a cracked-lens view of the world—culture, music, life in general. So you get beats and melodies on Repo, but everything is swirled together—warped, bent, underwater and sun-blistered. Adjust the vertical and horizontal if you must, but do not touch the audio: Black Dice is at the controls. (M.L. Thrope)

In a career as long and brilliant as Neil Young’s, there’s bound to be peaks and valleys. We all know he went into a legendary tailspin in the 1980s after a staggering output of great music in 1970s, only to rebound with a series of superb records in the first half of the 1990s. His recent output has been a spotty affair. Some records (Chrome Dreams II, Are You Passionate?) outright sucked, while others (Greendale, Living with War) offered their moments of pleasure but came nothing to close to the glory of a classic Neil Young LP. Fork in the Road, his concept album about a green revolution, is his most solid album in nearly 15 years, since his 1995 Pearl Jam collaboration, Mirror Ball. Inspiration from current events has long fueled great records of his, and his eco-tale of electrical cars and global warming not only has its charms but has also focused his music. More important, he’s rocking again and having a ball in the process. So will you. (James)

Broken Record Prayers, a collection of singles and rarities from the longstanding British pop group Comet Gain, opens with “Jack Nance Hair,” which boasts multiple spoken testimonials over its four-minutes. “We have torn ideals,” the most resonant of them states, and that tension—between idealism and realism, between rigorous theory and blissful pop—suffuses the nineteen songs that follow, ranging from the gently played chords of “You Can Hide Your Love Forever” to the far more uptempo “Orwell Library Dance”. What they all have in common is an unflagging pop sensibility: limitless energy aided by hooks and quirks that stay buried in your mind. (Toby)

This two-CD package comprises the music from a 2001 box set that also included a third disc with an audio documentary with interviews (a note in the booklet shows where that’s available for free online). This reissue thus has all the stuff that the average fan would play more than once. There are a few familiar names sprinkled through the tracklist, such as Fela Kuti, Tony Allen and King Sunny Ade. In recent years, though, interest in this music has also brought compilations devoted to Orlando Julius and Sir Victor Uwaifo. What’s great about the Nigeria 70 compilations is that they provide a fuller context in which to view the stars, while also providing many new-to-me gems. It’s worth noting for neophytes that the Nigerian idea of funk is quite different from American funk: more polyrhythmic, more elliptical in its grooves, more complex. The liner notes, which are both informative and entertaining, include a tidbit about highlife pioneer E.T. Mensah, who was inspired by a 1956 Louis Armstrong concert but who also complained that “We wanted more rhythm.” Nobody listening to this set could complain about that! (Steve)

In 2002, friends Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster had just completed their debut album, Hutch & Kathy (think low-fi folk pop), when Harris went through what must have been one hell of a breakup. Because in a matter of weeks, Harris wrote and recorded the ferocious, harrowing songs that would become the pair’s first album under The Thermals name, More Parts Per Million. And short, frequently scathing yet always catchy indie-rock songs have been their stock in trade ever since. Now We Can See is the band’s fourth album, and it picks right up where 2006’s The Body, The Blood, The Machine left off, only now the production values are more crisp, placing Hutch’s vocals perfectly front and center—which is great because he’s still writing some of indiedom’s catchiest rhymes about love lost and found (“I Called Out Your Name” and “At the Bottom of the Sea”). My favorites on Now We Can See are “When I Was Afraid,” a sort of ode to terror (“Fear is by my side/It kept me safe/Hell it kept me alive”) and “I Let It Go,” which is one of the best songs Hutch has written since More Parts. (Wendy)

Vs. Children is Owen Ashworth’s fifth album as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and it’s a game changer. Each song feels like incredibly potent flash fiction, fully formed narratives in the tradition of Nebraska-era Springsteen, telling other people’s stories. “Optimist Vs. the Silent Alarm” is a rollicking ride inside the getaway car of two bank-robbing lovebirds (“We tear out of the parking lot/The engine at full throttle/And you mapped a route of all right turns/So lights won’t get us caught”), while “Killers” is an anthem for couples who just aren’t quite ready to be parents yet (“I think you’ll be a good mother/But honey look at us now/We barely support each other”). Ashwood still relies mainly on piano, drums and his namesake keyboard, but his production values have become increasingly clear, and his vocals have grown noticeably more confident. The entire album lasts just a little over 30 minutes—how he manages to tell so many compelling stories in such a small amount of time is a mystery, but the results are nonetheless impressive. (Wendy)