So Pet Shop Boys have made a very modern-sounding pop album that’s also their most club-centric maybe ever, and that should fill me with despair (one of the musical lights of my life, also succumbed), but instead Electric is a great pulse of intelligence in a place that needs it badly. I wanted to cling to 2009’s more routine and song-oriented Yes as the best of their recent work, but Electric wins out as an attention-grabbing and firmly present tense piece. But will it work? Already I’m offended every time I don’t hear it on the radio or in public (a constant situation, all month long). But if I’ve already remade this as the summer of “So Hard” and “Always on My Mind,” then I can also make it the summer of “Love is a Bourgeois Construct.” How can all these songs coexist in the present? Well, the new one again reveals Neil Tennant’s cynicism as conditional: “…until you come back to me.” Ah, the currency we’ve spent.

I was pretty sure I was hearing a great album the first time I listened to this (right after someone said there are no people in indie rock anymore—immediately challenged!), and I haven’t yet shaken that feeling. Unreal’s gonna have to inhabit quite a few more expansive nights of “Katy Song” clarity and endure a lot more critical neglect before it assumes the mantle of my first impression, but even now some past-averse kid is learning all she or he needs to know about long guitar songs from this album. Guy (Daniel Blumberg) leaves promising band (Yuck) after excellent debut (Yuck), releases totally dissimilar solo album that reveals him as crazy enough to have done something like that but that also confirms melodic genius (those were never just nostalgic riffs) as a great ghost that will haunt him, so soon. It’s a good story alone.

Better than the last two Magnetic Fields albums and the last Future Bible Heroes album. That puts it more than a few steps beyond “worth hearing,” and though I can no longer recommend Stephin Merritt to anyone who doesn’t already love his 90s work, Partygoing has good melodies, good lines, and a feeling of coherency that’s more musical than theoretical. “Sadder Than The Moon” might be his first “moon” song that doesn’t deliver its central object inside a neat rhetorical structure (so different from “You Pretend To Be The Moon,” on the first Future Bible Heroes album), but the plainness of the lyric makes it proof of sincerity and sweetness, to anyone who thought Merritt had lost his sense of non-irony.

Two great things, Tree the rapper a given: I. The production – “The King” sets the tone, beautiful and eerie, proving that two decades after “Fight the Power,” poking the ghost of Elvis, in less outspoken and forceful terms, now, is still work better undertaken by those who do not love him (but what’s the feeling here?; an unrelenting mystery). II. The guests – e.g. There’s no greater thrill in modern music than waiting for Danny Brown’s verse…

…with the possible exception of the quiet moment that precedes Big Boi’s song-ending verse on “Banana Clipper.” This is a 33-minute album that justifies its existence in the first couple tracks alone, or even just that one, which also shows, before Big Boi arrives, why we need these guys together in the first place. Killer Mike: “…said it’s the beat of the year. I said El-P didn’t do it so get the fuck outta here.” If the album later becomes a little redundant with sexual conquest material, no matter.

Last time around they aimed for perfection, mostly got there, and received no attention for it. So if Imperceptible UFO is slightly less pressurized, equally structured but more whimsical (as it seems), that’ll be to its advantage, long term. Still I’m doing it no favors by listening one song at a time, because that’s what made “Albatross” and “Chicago Train” loom so mightily over the rest of 2010’s Roaring Night, though perhaps this band’s obvious peaks are inevitable.

The exquisitely sensitive Jack Tatum has always been as in love with the moments and visions of his life (street lamps, bodies in rainfall, etc.) as in the atmosphere that contains them. So his incorporation of new styles in his music has never distracted from its insulated romance, but is an ongoing feature of it. His glam-leaning Empty Estate is a little lightweight, song-wise, and might disappoint as album no. 3, but since this is just an EP, its expansion of his palette makes it crucial, for him and even for us.

I still anticipate every reappearance of Boards of Canada, but due to a totally imagined post-90s schism in electronic music, I’ve zoned out from newer acts, when really all that’s changed is that they’re being called “producers” now instead of musicians. That’s the reassurance of this single, anyway, on which the producer Lone calms my technology fears by recalling the future of the past, with breathy synths on the a-side that put it somewhere in the 1993-96 golden age.

Upon closer listen, this is seriously great. Contents: the year’s best guitar playing; trio logic (a song really only needs three verses, after all); brilliant character work (mis- and ill-conceived narrator problems plague Brad Paisley but I can’t imagine anyone being confused or troubled by the level of craft here); depression; reality that undercuts or becomes grounds for fantasy (the only thing that would make the album better would be if “Unhappily Married” followed “Loved By A Workin’ Man,” though the way the latter lurches to a halt and then goes out of tune accomplishes nearly the same thing); Angaleena Presley (the least famous outside of this group, but the star within it) singing “I’m finally alive but it’s killing who I’m living for.”

Dang, I somehow didn’t see this coming, again, but Gibbard never fails to impress. An excellent solo album whose variety seems more geographical than stylistic. So, silenced and inspired, he travels into the South and comes up with a verse about the central dilemma of living in warm places that’s nearly as perfect as when New Mexico’s Sad Baby Wolf sang about how “all this beauty makes me restless.”

“It’s a comfortable life and a beautiful place, but something’s rattling…” (“and it only gets louder with time”).