BELLE AND SEBASTIAN ****
BBC Sessions
Matador/BBC
Belle And Sebastian’s BBC Sessions chronicles the Scottish band’s broadcast recordings during their early heyday from 1996-2001. The collection opens with “The State I Am In,” the lead-off confessional from their debut Tigermilk and takes listeners though some rarely-heard non-album songs from their first John Peel session — a progression which also foreshadows the band’s power-pop evolution. Improved-upon versions of If You’re Feeling Sinister tracks “Stars of Track and Field” and “Like Dylan in the Movies” predate the album’s entire revision on 2005’s Live at the Barbican, and an earnest and unselfconscious abandon permeates throughout. The accompanying disc, Live in Belfast, is both more spirited and sloppier, as B&S tear through “Me and the Major” and some oddball covers like Lou Reed’s “Waiting for the Man” and the venue-appropriate “The Boys are Back in Town.” CHRIS BILTON

WILD BEASTS **
Limbo, Panto
Domino
I feel confident assuming Hayden Thorpe is the first person to warble “woebegone” and swear by his cock in the same song (unless there’s a filthy Garrison Keillor bootleg somewhere out there). Unfortunately, he’s more histrionic than Byronic. Thorpe’s mercurial voice — sometimes a campy croon, sometimes a stage-left shout, seemingly always keyed up into a ludicrous falsetto — colours everything here with a primary shade. It’ll certainly be divisive. Ironically, the greatest flaw of Wild Beasts’ debut is that the rest of it is too understated. Their simple chords have an appropriate music-hall slant, among fleeting hints of other influences, but Thorpe shoulders most of the theatricality himself. It’s like walking onstage during a Harold Pinter play and breaking into “Cabaret.” The frontman himself doesn’t display much subtlety or shading in his vocals, so I wish the whole band had just vied for ostentatious excess; even a failure would’ve been more interesting than this. CHRIS RANDLE

LOS CAMPESINOS! ****
We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
Arts & Crafts
Conceived as a set of B-sides and released instead as a limited-edition album with a strict “no singles” policy, Welsh charmers Los Campesinos! have produced an admirable follow-up to this spring’s acclaimed Hold On Now, Youngster. Boasting 10 tracks of transcendent twee-pop melodrama (and a live DVD), the glockenspiels here kick out the jams as giddily as the guitars. “There’s future in the fucking, but there’s no fucking in the future,” laments lead singer Gareth Campesinos!, doing his best Robert Smith impression on the album’s titular track. Though their youthful freneticism may feel wearying to some, if navel-gazing were a political act, Los Campesinos! would be Che Guevara. CHANDLER LEVACK

THE MAYNARDS **
Date And Destroy
King Amos
Halifax garage outfit The Maynards create headache-inducing party anthems with a simplistic surf-punk twist. With clattering drums and yappy boy-girl choruses (“Dating leads to mating, mating leads to separating!” they scream in unison on the title track), The Maynards haven’t yet learned that being camp isn’t the same as having charm. Though their songs are ostensibly about the trials of love (“I want to break up with you!” goes the schlocky closer), The Maynards’ KISS principle can’t replace a lack of original thought. The main offender is a handclap-laden “Art Attack” about art-school bohemians that decays into a watery guitar solo and a cutesy Q&A. Just shoot me. CL

THE MAYNARDS PLAY WAVELENGTH AT SNEAKY DEE’S (431 COLLEGE) NOV 30.
 
LOVE IS ALL ****
A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night
What’s Yr Rupture?
Those irked by Love Is All’s unapologetic love of No New York–style post-punk will find little to like on the Gothenburg-based group’s sophomore disc, but the rest of us are thrilled. The band have retained the tinny, reverb-heavy production and Hives-like abandon that made their debut Nine Times That Same Song so much fun; producer Wyatt Cusick has cleaned up the previously muddy rhythm sound and the band stretch out their arrangements, displaying songwriting chops that were only hinted at on their debut. The added space gives saxophone player Johan Arrias room make his mark, and singer Josephine Olausson’s tales of romantic woe are finally audible through the fuzz. This is a feisty record that sounds great both on headphones and the dancefloor. IAN GORMELY

MARNIE STERN *****
This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That
Kill Rock Stars
In the video for “Ruler,” guitarist Marnie Stern (who looks and sounds like a moonstruck fairy — her high-pitched singing voice is small but sickle-sharp) makes like Rocky, chugging eggs and mock-training on the streets of her native NYC. It’s an insightful joke. Both of Stern’s albums display fearsome technical mastery: her fragmented, loopy guitar lines; her fret-tapping playing style that’s equally indebted to Van Halen and Sleater-Kinney. But Stern’s output coheres as songs, and not stunts, because of her vulnerability. Again and again, these frantic arrangements risk collapsing into chaos, before their locus — Stern’s shredding — steadies them and plunges them once more into the fray. Her best lyrics are existential battle cries. In “Transformer,” there’s a moment where the storm of notes briefly calms and Stern calls out: “The future is yours, so fill this part in!” Nothing else I’ve heard this year better captures our era’s scary/giddy eschatology. As she sings elsewhere, it takes pressure — and a few great melodies — to make diamonds from coal. CR

LAND OF TALK ****
Some Are Lakes
Secret City
Fierce Montreal threesome Land Of Talk meld multi-layered Broken Social Scene–esque shimmer with Rilo Kiley’s alt-country sass. Redheaded frontwoman (and newly minted BSS touring member) Liz Powell’s bleeding heart provides the beat that propels the band’s lo-fi fuzz. On the intimate love song-cum-death wish “It’s Okay,” Powell’s husky voice recalls Bonnie Raitt as she muses, “Maybe when I die, I get to be a car, driving in the night, lighting up the dark.” And like Land Of Talk themselves, the rollicking post-punk pulse of “The Man Who Breaks Things (Dark Shuffle)” boasts endless artistic mileage. This is one of the most inspired Canadian albums of the year. CL

LAND OF TALK OPEN FOR BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE AT SOUND ACADEMY (11 POLSON) NOV 27.

ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS ***
Another World EP
Secretly Canadian
He’s got one trick, and by most accounts it’s a good one. But that voice — heavy on the vibrato, somehow both ethereal and mannered — also threatens to be a millstone around Antony Hegarty’s neck. His sound, one that’s showcased on the title track of this EP (which is also the single from their LP due in January) is only really effective in one setting. Of a piece with 2005’s Mercury Prize–winning I Am a Bird Now, “Another World” is a mournful piano ballad whose themes are death and identity — hardly shocking. “Shake That Devil” takes half a crack at an up-tempo blues, but rather than suggesting new horizons, it merely sounds perfunctory. The other three cuts are Antony-by-numbers — swell, but limited. JORDAN TIMM

RADIUS & HELENA ****
Precious Metals
Independent
Radius & Helena frontman Christopher Felske sounds like the abandoned lovechild of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard. That may seem like an earsore on paper but, strangely, on record the combination of mournful mewls and winsome melodies really works. On their debut LP Precious Metals, these Toronto psych-pop songsmiths have carved out a sound for themselves that’s both cacophonous and euphonious. The songs here ceaselessly shapeshift between delicate atmospherics, upbeat dance interludes and vitriolic, off-metre riff eruptions. Never coming off as hackish, these are well-crafted, organic tunes. ALEX NINO GHECIU

NICK ZUBECK ****
Tracker
Independent
Nick Zubeck’s third album combines post-jazz experimentalism with seductive songwriting for what is easily one of the most accessible collections of songs to come out of Toronto’s Tranzac scene. After an atmospheric opening, Tracker’s first four songs showcase a decent cross-section of Zubeck’s exquisite pop sensibilities: the rootsy groove of “Sentimental Devil”; an elegant avant-smooth-jazz ditty (“Body Parts”) that sounds like Chico Hamilton meets Ween; languid crooning on “Track and Field”; and scorching distortion from guitarist Justin Haynes providing an odd but effective counterpoint to the bouncy horn-pop of “Tip of my Tongue.” Though the casualness of his voice sometimes underwhelms when paired with less imaginative lyrical sentiments, Zubeck’s arrangements become more intriguing with each listen. CB

CRYSTAL STILTS ***
Alight of Night
Slumberland
Like their equally buzzed Brooklyn pals the Vivian Girls, the Crystal Stilts are a crudely rendered throwback to early ’80s indie acts who themselves were crudely rendered throwbacks to The Velvet Underground’s own crudely-rendered take on pre-Beatles ‘60s pop. So the fun in Alight of Night is not so much in the content (pick up the recent reissue of The Clean’s Compilation, or that Jesus and Mary Chain box set for superior tunes), but in its ever decaying form — sounding like a cassette that’s been dubbed over so many times you can see through the tape, the album ponders the question of how degraded rock ’n’ roll can get before it ceases to be rock ’n’ roll. And rather than play up the contrast between their Phil Spector-schooled melodies and corrosive lo-fi production, Brad Hargett’s resolutely dour voice simply serves as another debasing device — sure, lots of dudes try to sound like Ian Curtis, but this one imagines what he’d sound like if he were buried alive. STUART BERMAN

PARTS & LABOR ****
Receivers
Jagjaguwar
Parts & Labor’s fourth full-length, the impressive Receivers, is the antithesis of stylish irony and indie-rock escapism. Direct, engaged and articulate, the disc’s eight tracks forge a dense lyrical reaction to the homogeneity and blandness seeping into modern society. And by blending messy electronics with hard-hitting post-rock, they’ve developed the Oneida-inspired drum attack of last year’s Mapmaker into a noise-pop masterpiece. (Apparently losing drummer Christopher R. Weingarten to the criticism side of the music biz wasn’t such a death knell after all.) Though the album is a bit slow to start, Receivers gathers momentum by the time “Little Ones” brilliantly appropriates a standard gospel chord progression, and hits its full stride with the exquisite poppiness masked in outright noise of “The Ceasing Now” as well as the keyboard assault of “Wedding in a Wasteland.” Not since Fugazi suspended operations has social critique sounded this great. CB

WILDERNESS ***
(k)no(w)here
Jagjaguwar
If Wilderness had one mantra — the form in which James Johnson bellows almost all his lyrics, chanting lefty agit-prop riddled with lacunae — it would be “bigger.” This album is really one song split into eight, and the band emphasize the latter half of “post-rock”: Guitars are loud; toms and kicks are hit a lot; echo effects are duly applied. Yet the quartet is more dynamic than that implies. Most of these songs eventually build to booming crescendos, but their path is seldom predictable — sometimes the cacophony coheres without warning and sometimes it looms audibly in the distance. Granted, even majesty becomes dull once you experience it often enough, and Johnson’s Godspeed!-esque barks and yowls sound like inane primal scream therapy, but at least they’re stuck going in a spiral. CR

ANATHALLO ***
Canopy Glow
Anticon
Somewhere between the epic chorales of Polyphonic Spree and the subtle chamber-pop of Stars Like Fleas, Chicago’s seven-piece melody factory Anathallo have carved out their own niche of gorgeousness. With their sophomore full-length, Canopy Glow, they’ve simplified their subject matter — 2006’s Floating World was based on a Japanese fairy tale — while deepening the music’s luscious poignancy. Stuttering rhythms propel the ascending melodies of “Cafetorium,” while “Italo” is as bright and hopeful as a family of white bunnies cresting a grassy hilltop in the rising sun. “Northern Lights” and “Sleeping Torpor” drip with a languid loveliness bordering on melancholy. Canopy Glow is almost fragile enough to be considered precious. CB