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You have to travel pretty far back -- to Michael Zilkha's late-'70s/early-'80s Ze Records -- to find New York dance music as purely entertaining as the minimalist, thumping tracks of DFA's James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy. In the same spirit as the pair's first volume, Chapter 2 doesn't merely document; it selects tracks that hold together as an album.

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By cosmic law, the drummer is always the least interesting guy in the band. But Greg Eklund, the former backbeat of Everclear, and the Oohlas' co-songwriter/guitarist (and occasional drummer), makes a compelling rebuttal with his new Los Angeles-based crew.

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Lucero probably romanticizes alcohol-soaked working-class futility to an unhealthy degree, and Ben Nichols is hardly the first blue-collar bard to look for a way out of a dead-end town at the bottom of a shot glass. But on the Memphis roots rockers' fifth album, Nichols' gritted tales, sung as if he's gargling bourbon and thumbtacks, often achieve a Springsteen-ish grandeur.

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Following the weird, midlevel fame he experienced this past summer with "Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)," former Midtown frontman Gabe Saporta wanders rather smugly through this knowing collection of dance-punk workouts and plaintive electro-pop ballads.

Powered by a frenetic go-go beat, a warm, raspy hook (courtesy of Cee-Lo), and a clever YouTube marketing scheme, Mayday's first single, "Groundhog Day," became a left-field internet hit. The duo's debut album isn't quite as infectious. Their defiantly old-school beats, dark, slinky keyboard melodies, and MC Bernbiz's forceful, if not particularly fluid, rhymes don't always click.

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Jeremy Enigk's most memorable moments – mostly as leader of Sunny Day Real Estate – share a grandiose desperation, a feeling that he's always willing to flame out to make himself heard. That admirable, occasionally crazy, devotion helped spawn a thousand emo bands, and while Enigk is older and mellower, he remains capable of stirring souls.