Anya Marina's childlike voice doesn't jibe with her randy album title. But that doesn't stop the San Diego singer from growling come-ons on "Afterparty at Jimmy's" ("You got soul onstage, boy/How about soul in the sack?") or purring like Jessica Rabbit on the cabaret-style "All the Same to Me." She dials it back on "Vertigo," a sweet ode to a dizzying dude. With blippy drum loops, it sounds like a play date with a Casio — proof that Marina still has G-rated fun.

"I was bored listening to the same chords," Powderfinger's Bernard Fanning sings in "Lost and Running." He doesn't mean it. The Australian band, together since the mid-Nineties, spiritually hails from an older intersection: mid-Eighties U2 and (no shock, given Powderfinger's name) the fuzz-toned Seventies of Neil Young's Crazy Horse. The best songs here do not stray far. Dirty-guitar shriek and burnt jangle fortify Fanning's earnest romanticism in "Head Up in the Clouds" and "Long Way to Go."...

This New York trio of ex-Secret Machines guitarist Benjamin Curtis and twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza is the sum of hip contradictions: om-drone modernism coated with the Dehezas' antique vocal blur of Gentle Giant's prog-choir counterpoint and the harmonies of a medieval Shangri-Las. The effect is warm goth — New Order with more eros. "Chain" veers close to electro-candy Madonna, but the Neu-like zoom and robot-nun chanting in "Sempiternal/Amaranth" are more beguiling, like an evening...

Anya Marina's childlike voice doesn't jibe with her randy album title. But that doesn't stop the San Diego singer from growling come-ons on "Afterparty at Jimmy's" ("You got soul onstage, boy/How about soul in the sack?") or purring like Jessica Rabbit on the cabaret-style "All the Same to Me." She dials it back on "Vertigo," a sweet ode to a dizzying dude. With blippy drum loops, it sounds like a play date with a Casio — proof that Marina still has G-rated fun.

Tobacco's Tom Fec just made one of the year's best stoner-rock records — only it's powered by synths, hip-hop beats and vocoders instead of guitars. Moonlighting from his electronic psych-rock band Black Moth Super Rainbow, Fec crafts spectacular, Air-style instrumentals ("Pink Goo") and expertly spins reedy Mellotrons into indelible hooks ("Hawker Boat"). Bonus points for lyrics that get lost in pot-smoke profundity: "Honey Bunches of Oats is the greatest cereal ever."