The Electric Six's fourth album "I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master" is just as sprawling, excessive, and absurd as its title suggests...and then some. The album's first single "Down At McDonnelzzz" is one of the group's finest efforts to date. The song's sharp set of lyrics about depressed food service workers getting drunk and partying after hours at work is set to a heavy disco-rock groove that incorporates a catchy piano figure and a sultry saxophone part straight out of a late night dirty movie on cable. As usual, singer Dick Valentine's words drip with humor and irony, but his bold, hyper-masculine voice sells even his most ridiculous lines with a great degree of commitment and authority.

The Lichens's second album "Omns" begins with a hum of distorted vocal samples. At first, the hum seems alien and vaguely unsettling, but as it continues throughout the track, it begins to feel comforting and serene, especially when it is accompanied by gorgeous, meandering lead guitar that sounds as though it gently winding up a stairway to heaven. The minimal arrangement is filled out with the slow, steady strum of a few low-pitched chords. That mesmerizing rhythm is the calm center of the track, but it recedes into the background as if it were intended to be a subliminal suggestion entirely unnoticed by the listener.

Linfinity's "Chu Chu Train To Venice" is a manic, rollicking rave-up that sounds as though it is being sung by a crazed hobo playing the crude, urgent piano part by jogging in place on the keyboard. It's a compelling and incredibly fun piece of music that sounds simultaneously insane and comfortingly old-fashioned. The song is all the more surprising when you take into account that despite this super-charged bit of madness, the band also has written some other tracks that sound rather like the stadium ballads of Coldplay and U2.