It’s not easy to create a distinctive brand of music that the everyday listener can categorically describe as “yours,” but that’s what Brooklyn-based duo Ratatat have managed to pull off since their 2004 debut. That combination of Mike Stroud’s signature high-pitched guitar sound and Evan Mast’s fluid bass lines and break-beat drum rhythms is practically a trademark, having that rare ability to be heard and immediately attributed to these electro/house/indie rock/whatever practitioners even if one is barely familiar with them. It’s even tougher to sustain that kind of success in an instrumental genre, where ideas fly past their expiration dates even quicker than usual and bands with an innovative sound soon find those same ideas turning on them, sapped of originality and joie de vivre.

New Pornographers frontman Carl Newman recently told Pitchfork in an interview that “sometimes the songs are definitely about something, but sometimes I just like the sound of things.” If there’s a better logic behind the long and impeccably catchy career of this indie-pop “supergroup,” I can’t find it. From 2000′s Mass Romantic to Together, the band has churned out some of the best, most intricate indie pop this side of Belle & Sebastian, but with a hell of a lot more muscle than most of their contemporaries. And it’s never been about just what exactly Newman or Neko Case or Dan Bejar have been trying to say, but rather how they’ve said it: in Case’s throaty, powerful vocals; through Bejar’s quirky, avant-pop compositions; via Newman’s distinctive brand of hyper-charged, sugar-rush pop. It’s fitting, then, that the appropriately named Together shows the band working more in sync with each other than ever before, following more along the softer side of things that Challengers explored but beefing up the hooks that that record so often lacked.

It’s almost as if all those nine-minute-plus compositions, sung in a nonsense tongue and eventually swelling to musical and emotional heights that practically exploded with a mix of tension and joy, have been compressed into the perfect four-minute pop song. It’s still Jonsi Birgisson, it’s still a vast palette of sounds, and it’s still that same Sigur Ros message of love and inner peace . . . except with none of the restraint that other members of Iceland’s most famous band had on Birgisson in the past. Go is undoubtedly Jonsi, a being of such unrelenting optimism and jubilant celebration that he apparently has rainbows shooting out of the back of his head. It’s not really surprising, considering the increasingly poppy direction Sigur Ros was heading in, but here the best attributes of Sigur Ros and Jonsi’s effervescent personality have been magnified through a multichromatic array of sounds and feelings. That post-rock standard of tension and release has been transformed, filtered through the (relatively) strict dimensions of a pop song and made into something that just wants you to stand up and be filled with joy at everything around you.

The first step to accepting Justin Bieber is getting past his age. It’s everywhere on this record, impossible to ignore, and, frankly, if Bieber was simply a twenty-something white boy with an R&B fetish, My World 2.0 would be easy to acknowledge as a disposable adult contemporary record in the vein of latter-day Backstreet Boys. But Bieber is just following in the proud tradition of plenty of vapid pop stars before him, from the Mickey Mouse club to Miley Cyrus, and although his voice stubbornly refuses to conjure up images of anyone older than thirteen, it would be shortsighted and irresponsible to write off Bieber as a flash in the pan novelty.

Seventh Tree, Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory’s fourth album, was a bit of a detour from the glossy, ’80s pop sheen of their last couple of records, drawing from nature, and pagan worship than your typical electro-diva effort. Predictably, it also sold less than Goldfrapp’s previous work, so it should come as little surprise that their fifth album returns unabashedly to the roots of Goldfrapp’s [financial] success. I could say that Head First combines the up-tempo, synth-heavy electronic dance of Supernature and Black Cherry with some of the ambient, folkier sounds of their superb debut and Seventh Tree, but that sort of mixture is more often the exception rather than the rule. No, Head First rather brazenly throws everything to the wind and kneels to its glam-pop influences without an ounce of shame.

Volume Two is about as appropriate a title as one could hope for from Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward’s second collaborative effort. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it’s without a doubt true: where 2008′s Volume One was the first example of She & Him’s sun-kissed brand of ’60s girl-group pop and singer-songwriter folk pastiche, Volume Two is, uh, the second. Volume One consisted of thirteen tracks, three of those covers; Volume Two consists of thirteen songs as well, but ups the ante with only two covers. M. Ward makes only the occasional vocal contribution, preparing to work the production behind the scenes and let his vintage guitar do the talking, as he did on Volume One. Hell, even the album art is eerily similar, with that same slightly creepy faceless girl and a different color scheme. And Zooey is, well, still Zooey, never falling prey to the conceit of oversinging and using that lovely, country-inflected alto to melt Ben Gibbard’s heart. In short, it’s the same She & Him those who enjoyed Volume One fell in love with, and it’s the same She & Him that bored many to tears…

“Will you be the bed for me when they set the world on fire / just to see it burn?” frontman Zach Schwartz asks on “Solitary Gun,” the opening song off Rogue Wave’s deliciously bouncy new record Permalight. For a band that has been through some of the hells Rogue Wave have suffered over the past few years, including the death of a former bandmate and one member’s struggle with kidney failure, “Solitary Gun” is an unexpected shot in the arm, a booster of unbridled joy and money hooks that belie the song’s apocalyptic images. Indeed, “Solitary Gun” is a most unlikely anthem, one that sets the tone for the rest of Permalight as a bright, buoyant beacon of hope.

It’s clear right off the bat that Lil Wayne is not only deluding himself from everyday reality but also from what constitutes rock ‘n roll, at least in this day and age. From the hilariously ’80s, Guitar Hero-esque solo intro of opener “American Star” to the obscenely grating breakup anthem “The Price Is Wrong,” everything here points to Rebirth as a colossal fuckup of the highest order, a misjudgment of talent and ideas that any label exec not blinded by Tha Carter III’s huge sales should have vetoed within seconds. Listening to the entire twelve tracks, it’s impossible to see just how Wayne okayed this; then again, this is the same man who declared that, if he was President, he would “make prostitution legal in about five more states [and] put cocaine back in Coca-Cola,” among many other revolutionary changes.