Cloud Nothings is a one-man studio band: 19-year-old Dylan Baldi, the songwriter whose frantic, fuzz-toned but ever-tuneful home recordings, from a suburban basement, were discovered online. He’s a throwback to the melodic early-1980s punk-pop of bands like the Replacements, with the immediacy of being an actual teenager — a nerdy, nasal-voiced underdog falling in love or lashing out. “You’re not that important now and that will always stay the same!” he sneers in two-syllable bursts. His first full album, “Cloud Nothings” (Carpark) — 11 songs in 28 minutes — raises the production values only slightly, cutting back distortion while layering on guitars. But it keeps the sound of a guy holed up with his instruments, concocting hooks and strumming retaliation for every slight.
Aurelio
The Garifuna people, descendants of survivors from a shipwrecked slave ship, maintain a language and culture that’s now thinly spread across the Caribbean coast of Central America. The Garifuna songwriter Andy Palacio preserved that culture through strategic fusions — with rock and pan-Caribbean music — until his sudden death in 2008. Aurelio Martinez, a songwriter, singer and former Honduran congressman who recorded with Mr. Palacio, picks up the torch on the album “Laru Beya” (Next Ambiance/Sub Pop), which extends the fusion back toward Africa. A mentorship program linked him with the Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, and “Laru Beya” has guest appearances from Mr. N’Dour and other Senegalese performers. The songs are built on Garifuna rhythms with Senegalese embellishments, wah-wah guitars and community-minded lyrics, and they carry their sense of purpose with welcoming grooves.
Caroline
How considerate Caroline is, even in heartbreak: “Before you go, check your bags/make sure you have everything,” she sings in “Sleep,” one of the slow-motion goodbye songs on her second album, “Verdugo Hills” (Temporary Residence). Caroline, a Japanese songwriter whose last name is Lufkin, sings about loneliness and yearning in a high, guileless voice. She doesn’t give herself much cover, only some hovering, minimal electronics and an occasional guest instrument. The beat, if there is one, might be a glitchy bit of static; the harmony keeps its distance, with sustained synthesizer tones, a treated guitar or a music-box glimmer. There’s a sweet melancholy in her solitude.
Blaqstarr
Blaqstarr, the Baltimore producer behind M.I.A. tracks, remains a creature of the studio on “The Divine EP” (N.E.E.T./Interscope), his own collection of strange, mostly robotic love songs. Since he doesn’t have too much to say in his raps and Auto-Tuned melodies, what matters is how he places his woozy, manipulated voice amid the handful of dry sounds that surround him, like the chattering harpsichord-like notes in “Rider Girl” or the pulsing, droning synthesizer tones that make “Oh My Darlin’ ” sound dangerously obsessed. “Divine” is a two-parter of longing and leering: trance arpeggios and a female voice are suddenly exchanged for distorted guitar as he cackles, “Can I lick your ice cream?” But the outlier is “Wonder Woman,” which goes bluesy and semiacoustic — the guitar has an occasional digital stutter — as Blaqstarr admiringly sings, “She licked the gun when she done and said revenge is sweet.”
Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers
There’s a lot of shtick in Shilpa Ray’s act, much of it borrowed from a couple of CBGB-era bands, Blondie and the Cramps. The songs on her new album, “Teenage and Torture” (Knitting Factory), merge the garage-level girl-group rock of early Blondie with the psychobilly stomp and bloodthirsty imagination of the Cramps. (There’s some of the Dresden Dolls’ Goth burlesque in there too, along with an accordion.) Ms. Ray isn’t shy about unleashing her raspy howl or working up to a shriek. Yet behind all the hollering and the band’s frenetic buildups it’s not all comedy. Ms. Ray’s songs zero in on all the contradictory pressures women face: to be cosmetically perfect but authentic, independent but nurturing, flippant but honest, and more. “Follow the big star bright star rock star porn star,” she rants in “Erotolepsy,” “and you’ll get a gold star.” No wonder she’s yelling.
Seefeel
Formed in the early 1990s and dormant since 1996, Seefeel re-emerged last year just in time to join the resurgence of murky, ultraslow, distortion-soaked rock from newer bands like Salem. Seefeel has the lineup of a rock band — guitar, bass, drums, voice, electronics — but the approach of abstract electronica. The tracks on the new album “Seefeel” (Warp) are largely textural: huffs and scratches, gurgles and throbs, buzzes and echoes, proceeding to extremes of quiet and noise. Trudging, lurching beats and sullenly deliberate riffs are heaped with distortion and distraction, and every so often Sarah Peacock’s voice can be heard with possible explanations for the sonic wreckage, like the one in “Faults” that’s harmonized like a gospel chorale: “The very thought of you is too hard to bear.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 31, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the professional connection to between Blaqstarr and the rapper M.I.A. Blaqstarr made a remix of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” for a single, but he did not produce the song for M.I.A.’s album “Kala” in 2007. (Diplo and Switch produced that song, while Blaqstarr collaborated with M.I.A. as writer and producer of “The Turn,” another song on “Kala.”)
01/27/11 >> 
