“A band very much in the mode of its latest creation,” I wrote when Callahan played the Cedar a couple years ago in support of Apocalypse. That’s still true, now that his great new album is Dream River, so the sharp contrasts of 2011’s “Drover,” for example, sounded a little overworked while the subtler drama of Dream River came across beautifully. His band’s set featured all eight of its songs, and most of these build toward song-defining electric guitar solos from Matt Kinsey, almost the star of the show. Kinsey and Callahan make an interesting pair, the way Callahan plays guitar with a sort of grimace as if he still doesn’t know what sounds it’s going to produce, contrasted with Kinsey’s complete ease and certainty. Callahan’s certainty is reserved for his words, which lay simple waste to the mystery they might superficially seem to contain.

Opener Circuit Des Yeux is Haley Fohr, an incredible performer with a special talent for creating unsettling moments. I’m trying to imagine the bleakest PJ Harvey or Nico or Lisa Germano song I never heard and it still doesn’t come close to a Circuit Des Yeux song: guitar that’s all reverb and voice that’s all deep vibrato and, sometimes, as an aspect of storytelling, a sharp laugh, scary breathing, strange declarations told straight to the audience from Fohr’s chair until you realize she’s not really with us or anywhere but inside her song, and, finally, screaming and moaning worthy of Pharmakon. On a few occasions she folded some of these elements into more straightforward folk songs, and these were particularly good, somewhere in the realm of Sharon Van Etten’s Tramp. A new album, called Overdue, is indeed overdue, but it’s set for release this week and I can’t wait to hear it and find out if what I remember hearing live is in any way able to be captured.

The consensus is that Ex Cops are a fine if unremarkable dream pop act, but the first time I heard True Hallucinations I felt that I’d never uncovered so many great songs in such short order, and that the attitude containing them was such that I’d never encountered in a sweetly melodic boy/girl duo before. Or anywhere. That’s the story of anyone who ever fell helplessly in love with a band, I suppose, but I really believe in this one. They’re some kind of punk band laid to rest in an age that seems incapable of adding to history, so instead of making noise they make pretty songs as clear and infinite as the black portal on their album cover.

Easily the catchiest and most gratifying pop/R&B album I’ve heard since Grimes’ Visions. Cold sounds gain warmth from beautifully spare productions and from, of course, Kelela’s voice. Some have suggested that the voice could be improved upon, and it’s the special curse of the R&B singer to always be told that her physical voice is the only one that needs work, but Kelela is already light years beyond the need for constructive criticism.

A concept album that’s tougher to identify, noisier than 2011’s great XXX. But Old, despite its two clearly divided halves, is, in terms of the nature of its thrills, the location of its greatest weirdness, audacity and surprise, another 19-song story of thirds, and this time the middle third’s a high, not a low. I especially like “Lonely,” which straddles the line between utopia and reality as brilliantly as Chance the Rapper, as coolly as P.M. Dawn. Brown has awesome and wide-ranging taste in beats, though I still can’t tell if it’s that, or maybe the unavoidable empathy of lines about cold houses, etc., that makes him so easy to love no matter what angle you approach him from. The only thing I’m missing from XXX is the feeling of stark raving loneliness, but of course I’m glad that Brown, and myself as a listener, survived it. He speaks about some of the same things on Old while benefiting to a greater degree from hindsight. Not the end of the story, but an interesting place to find him in.

An album of frequent grandiosity, made by three professionals (one of whom is Neil Halstead!), that exists sonically somewhere between Halstead’s careful masterpieces Sleeping On Roads and Slowdive’s Pygmalion. So you wouldn’t necessarily expect messiness to be one of its best qualities. But I like this album most when it seems that the only way it can achieve its desired volume (one hour; walls of guitar) is with an impressionistic approach. Highlight: the feverish, recklessly beautiful peak of “This Is How It Feels.”

An excellent guitar, bass and drums trio whose organic live sound translates to a debut album of unflagging energy. With a bit more sonic ambition and formal daring they’ll end up in the company of Weekend, and that seems likely and maybe even necessary, but Grin celebrates and fulfills their base level of talents, which is all any band has, frills or no frills.

Sometimes packaging informs the music, not vice versa. I haven’t followed The Field closely enough to understand why Axel Willner trades the blank pale yellow design of his first three albums for the black of Cupid’s Head, but no matter, I’m mostly interested in the way the music inherits a darker mood as a result. The colorless expanse, and Willner’s obvious passion, give meaning to these long, subtly varying tracks.

Maybe only because I’m finally hearing these summer singles in the fall, I can’t quite share in the general enthusiasm for the songs, which are diverting enough but not really entertaining. “Back 2 The Wild” would probably work as a punk song with guitars, or in any kind of arrangement that would support the dumb lyrics with primal rhythmic force, but as it is, it’s the flattest Basement Jaxx have ever sounded. This is the first time I’ve downloaded their music rather than bought it at a store, so I hope the depthlessness of the experience is just some defect of the mp3s. There is, however, one pretty good new Jaxx song, “Mermaid of Salinas,” featured on the “What A Difference” single. It finds space amid typically relentless excitement, that amazing trick these guys used to pull off all the time.

The title alone gives me shivers. In particular, Harry Nilsson is the only other person fit to sing Randy Newman’s “Dayton, Ohio 1903,” the only person who can strike that tone of nostalgia undercut by irony, and simultaneously vice versa (no, not that at all, but I don’t know how else to say it), so that we’re left with the stated feeling of peace and a tiny, multiplying feeling of disease. I still prefer Newman’s version from Sail Away, for certain small details of timing and phrasing, but whoever that is asking someone to “put a lot of echo on it if you can,” and whoever that is putting echo on some ghostly, unidentifiable instrument, makes Nilsson’s version beautiful and troubling in even stranger ways.

Lost albums like Shonen Blue don’t have an absolute context, but if I had to give it one, I’d say it borrows important guitar textures from ’85 R.E.M., offers a less structured and driving alternative to ’88 For Against, and predicts ’93 Red House Painters. The Wilfully Obscure blog, which has offered up this captivating find, also indicates that Alex Chilton and Game Theory’s Scott Miller were fans, and that should give a further idea of what it sounds like.