On Mouseman Cloud, Guided By Voices frontman Robert Pollard is up to his same old genius. Lyrics and hooks circle and lend each other energy as the songs move forward—strange ones with clunky titles like “Picnic Drums” and “Obvious #1” gain fluid sense in the confident trill of Pollard’s unique voice. The guitars could gut a pachyderm, or make it head-bang anyway, the afterwash sneaking around its ears and into its heart.

On Ugly, the Jersey trio strikes an expert balance between grandiose metal riffage and brain-searing, infectious punk. There are urging head-nodders (“Rotten Apple,” “Expire”; the latter containing a particularly tasty touch of surf-rock swing), while others (“Doom 84,” “High”) lean on expanded bits of muddy guitar and much darker vocals from Marissa Paternoster. Opener “It All Means Nothing” swings the door wide open and closer “It’s Nice” is a rare quiet spot that brings Ugly to a real pretty close.

Since their formation in 2003, Toronto-based folk-rockers Great Lake Swimmers have made four full-length albums, none of which were recorded in an actual studio (opting instead for abandoned grain silos, churches, historic music venues and renovated castles). For their fifth LP, the band finally broke tradition. The result is an album that is altogether pleasant, but just doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself on the map from the rest in its genre. Location, location, location.

Another outstanding entry from the electro-enclave, Brooklyn-based Bear in Heaven’s I Love You, It’s Cool is a slick ride—harder to brush off than the “aw, shucks” title suggests. A tug towards the dancefloor, “The Reflection of You” pairs a towering wall of percussion with ’80s-influenced synths, crashing like waves against the shore. What are we to make of the album’s oversized ambitions? “Freak out!” leadman Jon Philpot demands on “World of Freakout.” Don’t mind if I do.

Several voices are at play on San Francisco quintet Young Prisms’ second album, yet all find proportion evenly awash in its blurred shoegaze swirl. Forgoing some degree of exploration, In Between maintains a palette in the realm of strangled-rainbow indigo. The result is a record that establishes an identity well, and is able to bottle its ethers for successful consumption. While the output feels a bit restrained at times, there is much here to suggest that In Between’s transition will deliver in Technicolor before long.

Anticipating At the Drive-In’s reunion, it’s best to think about The Mars Volta’s sixth album as a last purge before singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López rejoin their former band. Or maybe it’s best to not think about it much at all. Like its predecessors, Noctourniquet is a concept album of kitchen-sink noodling and lousy portmanteaus that makes absolutely no sense. It’s a mess—not without some tidy bits (“The Malkin Jewel” is duly grim; the title track tightly writhing, restrained even)—but what’s better: these songs could be the death throes, finally, of these guys’ unfettered id.

Twenty-three-year-old, Ethiopian-born Mirel Wagner plays grim and creepy acoustic ballads about necrophilia, love, loss and bike riding. With a voice like Martina Topley Bird doing Leonard Cohen, Wagner seduces with a ghostly, whispered-in-your-ear intimacy on these sparse and haunting folk songs. At once stoic and graceful, her brief debut is as chilling as it is hypnotic, her lonely, minimalist guitar reeling you in as her hushed, unflinching vocals sing of all the things you’d rather not know.

The debut of the Los Angeles-native sextet Races is better than many bands’ third or fourth records. Year of the Witch beautifully chronicles the heartbreak of both sides of a failing relationship, an emotionally broken individual and the death of a brother. Through the whimsical vocals and fantastic use of organ and percussion, Races has brought us something that is universally relatable. Maybe that is what makes it so tragic and brilliant all at the same time.

Where Miike Snow’s self-titled debut sometimes sounded like the minor side project of a major pop production team, Happy To You, its latest release, is a strange new kind of achievement. It’s amazing that Happy To You’s first track, “Enter the Joker’s Lair,” has emerged from the same band that gave us Miike Snow—resplendent with aquatic, pingy synth effects, beautiful and relaxed. It appears as if Miike Snow has acknowledged certain permissions granted by weirdo pop auteurs of the past that, with sufficient talent and sonically adventurous vision, you can do anything. Miike Snow clearly has both qualities at its fingertips.

“Enter the Joker’s Lair” exhibits the warm, psyched-out African...

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Katy Goodman makes music that plays like punk’s answer to Beach Blanket Bingo: albums awash in sun-drunk melodies and easily sing-able choruses. On her second solo album as La Sera, Goodman (who pulls double duty as a member of Vivian Girls, too) has got one thing on her mind: love. Specifically finding, keeping and chucking it. It’s lightweight stuff, as easy to wash off as a day of surf and sand. But it’s difficult to deny the buzzy delights of her aggressively rough-hewn pop. Breezy kiss-offs dot the chorus of spiky gem “I Can’t Keep You on My Mind.” The influences are obvious, the homage sincere—such as when Goodman gets her Dick Dale on, busting out “Break My Heart”’s surf memories...

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