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Grime's relative nonimpact on America isn't puzzling: With its disorienting beats, unfamiliar slang, and melody-averse choruses, the U.K.-born genre has always felt forbiddingly local. Wiley only occasionally departs from that script on an album he's threatened will be his last.

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Returning to the Black Francis moniker he used when fronting the Pixies, Charles Thompson has fittingly made an album that sounds more like the Pixies than any of his previous solo efforts.  The outer-space-fixated "Captain Pasty" opens behind a rumbling surf guitar, then plows forward at a breakneck pace.

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Having split with Sony after insisting that her second album be a double-disc set like her first, this New York singer/songwriter/pianist knocks out her third, a brisk nine-song set that plays like the breathless first act of a stage musical decrying American fascism.

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Rob Crow and Zach Smith are perfectionists, and each Pinback album results from years of obsessive labor in their San Diego home studio. Their previous three albums were marvels of sublime prog pop, and there's more of the same here, with the stately piano and rarified vocal harmonies of "How We Breathe." But for a band defined by its

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Some years back, James Ford and Jas Shaw made two albums of dreamy Britpop in the group Simian. And despite their second act as a dance-oriented production unit, a twee undercurrent still runs through this debut album. Former Simian singer Simon Lord offers an operatic slice of electro-house balladry on "I Believe," and the Go!

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On the singer/guitarist's second, song-oriented solo album, he doesn't stray far from his main band's template -- the chord shapes are familiar (albeit acoustic), Lee Ranaldo's wonky leads are filled in by a violin (however mellow), and Trees Outside the Academy slots in beautifully with Sonic Youth's strikingly consistent 21st-century work.