Sufjan Stevens

Rhyming "Decatur" with "alligator" is clever. Writing a whole album about people and places in Illinois, the second in a projected series of albums about all 50 states, threatens to be insufferably gimmicky. It's not. "Sufjan Stevens invites you to: Come on feel the Illinoise" (Asthmatic Kitty) creates a kind of psychohistory via Americana in songs that metamorphose from wistful to grand, from historical character study to private reminiscence, from banjo to orchestra, from minimalism to fuzz-toned rock. Even the most elaborate constructions come across as homemade, touched with an optimism that is by no means naīve.

Café Tacuba

The groundbreaking Mexican rock group Café Tacuba earned the screams and singalongs on its live album, "Un Viaje" (Universal Music Latino), with more than a decade's worth of smart, manic rock en Espaņol. Ska, punk, the Beatles, electro, rapping, garage-rock, funk, whistling and all sorts of Mexican roots get crunched into Café Tacuba's catchy songs; so do poetry, rebellion and wit. Yet in the studio, and until recently onstage, Café Tacuba had built its songs on a drum machine. Lately, it has been rocking onstage with a human drummer, and that makes a difference. Now the songs can breathe.

Jaguar Wright

Now and then Jaguar Wright tries to make nice on her new album, "Divorcing Neo 2 Marry Soul" (Song/Artemis). She fitfully succeeds, as when she sums up the joys of true lust in "So High." Yet with her tart, jazzy, highly mobile voice and her hard-nosed attitude, Ms. Wright is far better when she's confrontational. She warns a rival to stay away from her man - "woman to woman, you better have a good dental plan" - and advises a friend to dump a guy who beats her. In her songs she more than holds her own in a world of cheaters and hustlers. Despite the album's title, Ms. Wright hasn't wholly abandoned neo-soul; most of the album uses lean, modern, studio-built tracks. And then comes the 12-minute "Do Your Worst": an old-fashioned, string-laden, inexorable soul vamp that reacts to a man's betrayals with contempt, fury and vengeance.

Stephen Malkmus

"All my stray thoughts, they are impure," Stephen Malkmus sings on "Face the Truth" (Matador), and he's putting it mildly. The unkempt sound and immodest ambition that Mr. Malkmus brought to Pavement - and to a generation of 1990's indie-rockers - have evolved further during his solo career. His new songs are a joyfully wayward melding of Pavement's lurching yet clear-cut melodies, jam-band instrumental passages, shards of garage-rock or funk, unruly analog synthesizers and lyrics full of philosophical aphorisms. "Normal is weirder than you would care to admit," he sings, but how would he know?

Shannon McNally

She has the voice: bruised, smoky and ornery, right at home where country and soul meet. She has the melodies and the timing to stretch a phrase and let it snap back right where a word will cut deepest. On her second album, "Geronimo" (Back Porch), Ms. McNally also has superb roots-rock production from Charlie Sexton, the Texas guitarist and longtime sideman for Bob Dylan, that can be rollicking or resonant. Her lyrics sometimes lose focus, but when she homes in on a pithy chorus "I never learned nothing but the hard way/ 'Cause at the time it felt so good" - she's irresistible.

Electrelane

Take a riff, expand it into a chord or two, repeat and crescendo and speed up until the big drone is everywhere. It's a simple strategy, but it still works for Electrelane on its third album, "Axes" (Too Pure), whether the band is circling through a keyboard pattern or flailing a guitar tremolo. Sometimes Verity Susman sings a few lines, or an entire borrowed song - it's Leonard Cohen's "Partisan" - amid the blare. Occasionally the momentum stops for some arty noise. Skip that, and head for the next big buildup.

Alarm Will Sound

Yesterday's avant-garde is today's dance-floor hook, as anyone can testify who's heard the sometimes minimal, sometimes atonal, sometimes melodic, sometimes cantankerous music of Richard D. James, or Aphex Twin. "Acoustica" (Cantaloupe) is an elaborately daft project by the chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound, which transcribed Aphex Twin's sampled and computer-processed tracks for orchestral instruments played in real time. Tempering the beat - a second drum kit would have been welcome - and choosing meditative pieces as well as dance tracks, Alarm Will Sound retrofits Aphex Twin as a compeer of Steve Reich and Stravinsky. Some remixes bring back the digital edge, and they keep those unplugged instruments from sounding too primitive.