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Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp trade the savvy dance-floor moves of last year's Night of the Furies for haunted guitar pop on their mesmerizing fourth album. Joined by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Matt McCaughan (Portastatic), they use mopey melodies and nature imagery -- floods, dead foxes, elusive robins -- to evoke hearts near the breaking point.

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"There is no middle ground, no compromise," Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath howls on "Collapse (Post-Amerika)," the appropriately doomy opening blast on the band's fifth album. While such fist-pumping stridency might be politically counterproductive, for leftist punk rockers it's a reasonable governing philosophy. Unfortunately, the lack of nuance extends to the music itself.

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Sensitive souls, beware: Juana Molina will mess your head up. On her fifth album, the Argentinean TV actress emits powerful hallucinogenic vibes, creating a slippery soundtrack for the subconscious.

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Don't let the absurdist band name, surreal titles ("Hello Vagina," "A Children's Crusade on Acid"), and trippy atmospherics fool you -- these Indiana upstarts are exactingly crafty songwriters.

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What better metaphor for the prolific Madlib -- whose 2008 résumé includes R&B auteur Erykah Badu, hard-guy MC Guilty Simpson, and Brazilian drummer Ivan Conti -- than WLIB AM, the community-minded, black-owned New York talk-radio station?

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Since the mid-'90s, Nashville's Lambchop have casually corrupted familiar genres, bending every style they've tacled -- country, soul, rock -- to the overwhelming gravitational pull of Kurt Wagner's weary persona and solemn voice.