love for, well, everything, and then sing innocently about how their latest crushes “Do It Better.” Even the coquettish, trash-talkin’ “Sweet Potato” features the bouncy chorus “Anyone, anywhere, anyway, let’s go!” LINDSEY THOMAS

Junior Senior Hey Hey My My Yo Yo ITUNES MYSPACE “Move Your Feet” duo return with dance-pop celebration On their follow-up to 2003’s D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop the Beat, this Danish duo condense pop’s last 45 years into the pure, simple essence of an early Jackson 5 single. In word, style, and sound, they exude cross-cultural idealism with scratchy soul guitars, joyous bubblegum hooks, shape-shifting harmonies, stuttering rhymes, and live beats. When guest vocalists from the B- 52’s, Le Tigre, and ’60s Motown girl group the Velvelettes drop by, the call-and-response and musical counterpoints stack up high enough to reach disco heaven. BARRY WALTERS

to witchcraft. Here, blazing opener “Plaster Casts of Everything” flips the aggro electro-pummel of early-’90s Wax Trax into organically surging rock, “Houseclouds” is dance pop of hit-worthy catchiness (and Liars-worthy weirdness), and the taut, pounding “Freak Out” puts to shame most contemporary psych outfits. ANDREW EARLES

Liars Liars ½ ITUNES MYSPACE This time, the concept is a really frickin’ good rock album!

It speaks volumes that the fourth Liars album is eponymous. Gone are the frantic post-punk throwbacks of their 2001 debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, and the heavy-handed conceptual experimentation of the following two LPs, which combined electronic noise and allusions

Magnolia Electric Co. Sojourner ITUNES MYSPACE Ramblin’ collective gradually reveals its doleful charms

A four-CD-plus-DVD behemoth packaged in a wooden box, Sojourner was recorded in four different locations by Magnolia singer/songwriter Jason Molina with help from a cast including engineer Steve Albini, Cracker’s David Lowery, and singer/ violinist Andrew Bird. In small doses these acoustic dirges and country-rock laments—played at tempos that make Crazy Horse sound like Slayer—pass by indistinctly, but over time, the slow-blooming guitar solos and age-old folkie melodies of tracks like “Bowery” and “Trouble in Mind” reveal their sturdy, dignified strengths. DAVID MARCHESE

tour was a devastating setback), Manic Street Preachers have spent a career combining meaty protest rants and slick stadium hooks. Send Away the Tigers emphasizes the latter, with audacious, rosy-cheeked paeans to tomorrow (“Indian Summer,” “Rendition”); even the love song that references Lee Harvey Oswald (“I’m Just a Patsy”) sounds hopeful. And for the record, their cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” totally schools Green Day’s. KYLE ANDERSON

Mavado Gangsta for Life: The Symphony of David Brooks ½ ITUNES MYSPACE Jamaica’s hottest gangsta is bummed—profoundly It’s a good thing Mavado sounds so miserable. If he didn’t, the dancehall don’s debut—a barrage of drum- and bass-heavy tunes about guns, guns, and more guns—might become just another bloated, repetitive exercise in glorified clichés. Instead, the product of Kingston’s “Cuba” ghetto has a nihilistic half-sung, half-chatted flow—part plaintive wail, part angry moan—that transforms brutally boastful lyrics like “they fear me” and “marrow will fly” into mournful, hypnotic laments. On the Tupac-indebted “Don’t Cry,” Mavado, whose dad was murdered, practically pleads with his mother over incessant, martial drums. BAZ DREISINGER

Does she ever
get confused
and call herself
V.I.W.?

Immigrant Songs

Dance-floor rebel blows up the spot

Manic Street Preachers Send Away the Tigers ITUNES MYSPACE Welsh agit-rock lifers attempt to accentuate the positive

Treated like deities in the U.K. but ignored Stateside (guitarist Richey Edwards’ tragic disappearance before a 1995 U.S.

M.I.A. Kala ½ ITUNES MYSPACE

FROM LEF T: DAN MONICK/COUR TES Y TAG TEAM MEDIA; JANE T TE BECKMAN

Earlimart’s Aaron
Espinoza and
Ariana Murray

Mekons Natural ITUNES MYSPACE Aging rebels sound like they’re just getting revved up During an unpredictable 30-year run, Britain’s Mekons have taken their scruffy ’70s punk roots and pieced together a wonderfully literate version of American honky-tonk, among other eccentric strategies. Muttering Jon Langford, golden-toned Sally Timms, and the rest of this sweaty eight-strong mob are at their red-eyed best here, skirting the edges of chaos on ragged-but-right tunes like the harmonica-fueled tall tale “The Old Fox” and the fractured reggae shuffle “Cockermouth.” They’d be the perfect support band for Bob Dylan, if he decides to get rowdy again. JON YOUNG

“Every wall you build, I’ll knock it down to the floor,” the Sri Lanka–raised, London-based Maya Arulpragasam testifies over the syncopated clang of someone knocking mightily on a cold metal door. And with that, she captures nothing less than the sound of the third world demanding entry to the first.

Like its creator (who was denied a U.S. visa while making much of this album), Kala is rooted in several cultures, but resides in none. Quoting the Modern Lovers’ proto-punk “Roadrunner” in the opening “Bamboo Banga,” the lifelong refugee goes 100 mph throughout this intensified follow-up to her acclaimed 2005 debut, Arular. It’s so heavy with percussion, both internationally man-made

and machine-generated, that it evokes a street fair where each reveler is banging away on every available surface.

There’s the occasional fleet-footed love song, like “Jimmy,” where a Bollywood string melody skips across a bed of oompa-loompa Europop synths; and the menacing “ 20 Dollar” nicks chord changes from New Order’s “Blue Monday.” But mostly there are just drums,

There are drums,
gangs of children,
and gunshots.
gangs of children, and
gunshots building tension like
a ghetto marching band, but
denying melodic release.

At a time when more Americans than ever feel like outsiders in their own country, M.I.A.’s border-crossing dance pop is a revolutionary manifesto set to the victory-party vibe of the future. BARRY WALTERS