The first time I heard Trey Songz's syrupy falsetto croon, "Take this pillow right here, grab this/ And I know you're so excited, if you bite it, they won't hear," about a third of the way through "Neighbors Know My Name," I blushed and turned off the radio. Then I turned it back on, louder. This surprising, infectious track says a lot about social intercourse in 2010 — it's a slow, sultry R&B study of the deterioration of neighbor relations in an era of cost-cutting construction. When Songz boasts, "Way you screamin', scratchin', yellin'/ Bet the neighbors know my name/ They be stressin' while we sexin'," he's commenting on the thin walls separating one apartment from another; intimate acts from public performances; and love songs from self-love songs — we hear the singer's name three times but never learn his lover's. Chivalry? Rivalry? I don't know. But I bet my neighbors know his name.

The trick to making chamber-pop work is amping up the pop. Philly quintet Turning Violet Violet seems to know this. Their debut EP, Fierce Remains (CheapO), offsets the dreamy swoons of its viola with some peppy handclaps, a couple guitar hooks and some strong, lovely harmonizing. "Gang vocals," they call it. "You Have Fashioned" is a sneaky little asymmetrical power-pop tune; an unironic cowbell and a dah-duh-duh dah-dah chorus spring up between dense, head-scratching lyrics. "My brain's as big as your brain, but if you keep turning this vice you have fashioned, my will grows either way," sings Sarah Gulish, somehow blunt but sprightly. "My heart's as strong as your heart, but if you keep tramping, bruising and stamping, I won't tell footprints from veins." It's weird, but it sounds so sweet. Repeat listens are demanded and rewarded.

Fri., Aug. 6, 9 p.m., $10, with The Vanguard and Gemini Wolf, hosted by Meg and Rob, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 877-435-9849, johnnybrendas.com.

NOTE: La Roux's show at the Trocadero, originally scheduled for Thu., July 29, has been postponed until Tue., Nov. 29.

La Roux sure do lead a thrilling, treacherous life. Or so the titles of their singles would have you believe: The well-coiffed dance-pop duo debuted with "Quicksand" and assailed the U.K. charts with the ferocious "In for the Kill." Even if it's all metaphorical (yeah, they're pretty much just love songs), there's enough real menace and fierceness in their tracks for the violent conceits to hit home. Nowhere is that more true than on "Bulletproof," their finest achievement and the most urgent, insistent, utterly invincible sliver of synth-pop from the past decade of unabashed retro-wonkery. Call it an '80s-retread if you must; you can't shoot it down. Ben Langmaid's gritty keyboards pierce like tiny neon shards, and Elly Jackson's spitfire vocal delivery (she of the Tilda Swinton-esque androgyny and opinionated, dubiously reasoned public statements) offer nothing but glisteningly sharp edges. That is, until the song's gleaming chorus — the sort that's simply one line repeated four times, because that's all it needs to be. "This time I'll be bulletproof," Jackson wails, betraying the slightest hint of vulnerability. More likely, we're the ones who need protection.

The new Goodbye, Killer (Ashmont) is a wonderful specimen of acoustic pop — 10 tracks that flesh out rock 'n' roll skeletons with twangy guitar solos — but that's not all it is. Take the album's breathy, upbeat lead-off, "Bechamel": While your ears are drawing dotted lines to the Beatles, Paul Simon and Elliott Smith, your subconscious is tracing more sinister connections, between love and consumption. That late-blooming refrain is calling it love, but is it really? Does love go down like a force-fed aperitif, with an "aftertaste like aspartame"? Does it leave you with an unsatisfiable urge to devour and destroy? Pernice is adamant, demanding: "I want her bones and I want her flesh/ and it's all she'll give me I want the rest." The answer, of course, is yes: Love is like that for vampires and we're kinda all vampires. You're just not used to admitting it in a rock song.

Remixing YLT is not impossible. In the past, knob-twiddlers like Kevin Shields and Nobukazu Takemura took "Autumn Sweater" and "Danelectro 2" to new heights and wider expanses. The choice to remix "Here to Fall" from last year's Popular Songs is confounding; the sprawling, orchestral track, while certainly gorgeous in that turn-off-your-mind/float-downstream way, proves a challenge for De La Soul, RJD2 and Pete Rock. De La isolate the guitars, downplay the orchestrations, add a low-key hip-hop beat and trim a minute and a half. RJD2 finds a major-key sprightliness in an otherwise lugubrious track. Rock employs the heaviest hand, splicing and dicing Ira Kaplan's lyrics beneath his own appended improvisations. The three approaches are thought-provoking, but that's about it.

Somewhere amid their junk-store cassette rummaging and toy beatbox tinkering, Tom Van Buskirk and George Langford hit upon one of those simple, elemental, elegantly circular melodies — like "Hey Jude," or "Da Funk," or "Bolero" — which feels like it's been cycling eternally in the cosmos, just waiting for your ears. Thankfully on April's No Ms (Luaka Bop), they know enough not to mess around with it too much, allowing the melody, as played on xylophone and fuzz guitar (with a touch of flute counterpoint), to speak for itself, dropping it out only occasionally to let the beat (cheerfully swirling summery funk on the new album; a blunter hip-hop boom-bap on the Jamz n Jemz original) ride. And each time that giddy, triumphant tune hits again, it makes anyone within earshot feel just as unstoppable.

If the raw, knotty New Amerykah: Part One found Mama Erykah refracting the agitated/agitative polit-funk murk of There's A Riot-era Sly Stone, the less-crazy, more-lazy, just-as-hazy Part Two (Motown) glows with a grinning Stevie-esque wonder and warmth, riffing blithely in the key of Life, no transpositions needed. While her crack team of funkateers (?uestlove on handclaps) lays down a dutifully breezy replication of Sylvia Striplin's 1981 groover "You Can't Turn Me Away," Badu — who plays Tower Theater June 8 — floats freely between that song's sweetie-pie sincerity and the crass cash-lust of the 1996 Junior M.A.F.I.A. smash ("Get Money") that sampled it, tweaking the juxtaposition into a dumb/funny gold-digging satire, delivered in a half-bored robo-drawl, which feels about as thought-out as the mock studio chatter that bookends the track, but still ekes by with the unsnarkable charm of lines like "I'll cook like your mother." 

Like adolescence, the transition from emo-punk to power pop is nothing if not awkward. When SoJersey combo It's A King Thing made the move on its recent Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. — a joke only a linguist could love — it fumbled like Michael Cera in that movie. Songwriting is heart-on-the-sleeve with decreased bite, making the album's lows unbearably saccharine and sappy. Then again, at its best, King Thing ascends to absurd levels of Fountains of Wayne-style catchiness. Cue the jangly "Wine and Ponies." It's a breezy midtempo number punctuated by a choral "bop bop" clip and a tuneful guitar lead; simple, pointed and fun. The lyrics are less lovelorn letters than passing thoughts in the face of loss. "I'll be here in the morning/ And you won't ever hear me snoring." In this we see hints of moving on; perhaps it will continue on a broader scale when they get to album three.

Talk about boom boom pow. This week's Rolling Stone features Will.i.am blathering about the hidden avant-garde qualities of his group's world-conquering one-note-wonder: "Fool, it's the most complex s--t you could even fathom." I doubt you'd catch Brooklyn duo Sleigh Bells — one former hardcore punker, one erstwhile girl-group pop tart — claiming anything of the sort about their own equally giddy, bombastic racket, which is just as pea-brained, if a good deal more black-eyed. Beyond its bruising, preposterous levels of overdrive, "A/B Machines" actually has three notes (at least some of the time), though it has only one lyric: Alexis Krauss, on that next-level digital spit, explaining the locations of her machines. Actually, it's a bit stupefying to think that there could be any more than one (barely functioning) set of machines involved here. Must be complex.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Hot Chip plays the TLA on Sunday.

The Monitor, the sophomore album from Glen Rock, N.J.'s Titus Andronicus (playing The Barbary April 15), is the early favorite for most frantically intense of the decade, and Dirty Jerz and the Civil War are its muses. The seven-minutes-plus opening track kicks off with that Lincoln quote about living forever or dying by suicide, takes the piss on Springsteen's "Born to Run," riffs on Billy Bragg's "New England," exhorts us to "rally around the flag" to guitars as bagpipes, and closes with a quote from William Lloyd Garrison. In other words, "A More Perfect Union," a song which fancies New Jersey as the setting for its own little civil war, sets the bar impossibly high, and yet it's a bar the band hurdles repeatedly and defiantly over the course of 60 anthem-packed minutes on what very well could be the indie rock album of the year.

One of the surest clues to Vampire Weekend's staying power, to my mind, is that they really know how to end an album. Much as the elegantly restrained "Kids Don't Stand a Chance" wound down their debut on its most invitingly leisurely (and arguably most tuneful) moment, Contra's semi-titular closer wafts in like the gentlest of breezes, a seductively soothing respite after nine frolicsome tracks of restlessly inventive kitchen-sink pep. For the first time in half an hour, "I Think Ur A Contra" (which they should totally release as, like, the seventh single) feels in no hurry to get anywhere in particular, letting that initial cotton candy shimmer linger as a wispy tropical lilt emerges gradually through the haze.

VW's April 2 Electric Factory show is sold out. Chris Baio DJs that night at PYT, 1050 N. Hancock St., pytphilly.com.

It's hardly the most representative moment on JJ N° 3 — the downshifted sophomore outing (N° 1 was a single) from these often sophomorically inscrutable Swedes — but there's something hauntingly resonant about this cover (of a 2008 single by The Game) that makes it more than just a jokey album-opening WTF keeping us from the blissy electronic indie-pop that rounds out the disc. Continuing with their Lil Wayne fascination (exhibit A: the "Lollipop"-sampling N° 2 standout "Ecstasy"), JJ strips Weezy's auto-tuned chorus down to nothing but brooding piano and Elin Kastlander's laconic, reverbed dream of an alto, zeroing in on the bluesy pathos — and it's legitimately chilling. Of course, in the final seconds, they just had to throw in a tease of ATC's circa-2000 bubble-house hit "Around the World (La La La La La)" and trick us into thinking it was an impishly ironic bastard-pop gag all along. Spoilsports.

Miles Kurosky loves you but he's chosen darkness. Some titles from his first solo album: "She Was My Dresden," "Pink Lips, Black Lungs," "Dog in the Burning Building," "Housewives and their Knives." Of course, as he did with his old band, Beulah, Kurosky has masked all the hopelessness and heartlessness of The Desert of Shallow Effects (Shout! Factory) with lots of fun, jangly, melodious rock and roll. It's a little suspicious, but "The World Won't Last the Night" is the album's fight song, its rallying cry: "Cowards, we gotta unite. I think I found us a fight. Brothers, I'm not yellow anymore. I've overcome my fear of heights." Yes! We're going down, but swinging! Well, sort of. Next line: "Blood still makes me weak. It makes me see stars." So pretty, and pretty sad. Raise a toast to the lovers trapped in a fighters' world.

A zippity fuzz guitar riff worthy of Yo La Tengo's "Sugarcube." Various oohs and high-spirited aahs. Handclaps, drumrolls and a single central dilemma: "How much money can we spend?" To answer the question posed in this feisty cut's refrain: well, not much, apparently. Fraternal Nashville duo JEFF the Brotherhood is no-frills by design, a guitarist and drummer reveling in a huge economy of arrangement and fidelity. On this standout from last year's Heavy Days (Infinity Cat), it trickles down even to the words. The entire song is freakin' three phrases, on enthusiastic repeat. Something about "I'm gonna grind your bones to make my bread." Sounds violent, and we hope they're not resorting to such vagaries to get gas money on tour. But know this: Plenty of other rock bands could drop like a quinitillion dollars on high-end studio sessions. But they'd completely shit the bed on sounding this alive.

Mon., Feb. 22, 6 p.m., $5, with Screaming Females, Terrordome, 624 N. 48th St., myspace.com/terrordomepa.

In love, we're auteurs. We write the dialogue, we frame the shot, we inhabit our roles even when we know they're tragic. We get lost in the details, we stumble over our lines, we cut the scene as it was getting good. In her own cryptic way, Sara Quin says as much, and more, in "On Directing," from Tegan and Sara's sixth album, Sainthood (Vapor/Sire). Even the most adored songwriter cringes when she recalls her own awkward attempts to connect. "Go steady with me," Quin sings over her nervous guitar. "I know it turns you off when I — I get talking like a teen." She and twin sister Tegan — whose backing vocals add the perfect shade of desperation — turn 30 this year, but they're still heartbreakingly in touch with their inner adolescents. Underestimate them at your peril; it takes a pro to turn a verbal misstep into a hot hook. The trick is in embracing the stammer and owning the flaw. 

Tue., Feb. 16, 8 p.m., $35, with Holly Miranda and Steel Train, Tower Theater, 19 S. 69th St., 610-352-2887, livenation.com.

Wisely, Matador Records timed the release of its Austin scene-pillaging compilation Casual Victim Pile so it happens right before the hoopla surrounding the annual South by Southwest music conference gets insufferable. Podcast listeners, you know what I'm talking about — the more we hear insiderist blaggers yapping about "South by" in the coming weeks, the more we'll want to throttle 'em. Thankfully, the comp gives us plenty of cathartic defensive ammo, like this killer Screamers-esque jam by synth/garage punks Lost Controls, which closes the set. You hear two keyboards (a short, sharp synthesizer up front; the other warmer, fuzzier, a thick backdrop of organ) both pulsing and pushing like they're going to eventually break to the accelerated tempo. Singer Cody Leitholt wails nihilistically, his voice a bit Mark Mothersbaugh, a bit Jello Biafra, about a world where there's simply not enough auditory stimuli, which could be read as a sarcastic jab at the million-billion aspiring rockstars who descend on his city annually.

Fri., Dec. 11, 7 p.m., $8, with Tickley Feather, Toro y Moi and Power Animal, Kung Fu Necktie, 1250 N. Front St., 215-291-4919, kungfunecktie.com.

If "Satan Said Dance" taught us nothing else, it's that Alec Ounsworth doesn't work well unhinged. I may be the only person who honestly dug that overwhelmingly panned song, a six-minute freakout on his band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's sophomore outing Some Loud Thunder. The bastardized Krautrock of their debut fared much better with the listening public, and if the gods are merciful, so will Ounsworth's recent solo effort, Mo Beauty (Anti-). It has majestic brass bands arranged tastefully with jangly guitar, but scan to the penultimate cut, "Obscene Queen Bee #2," and all you'll find is four chords, a haunting Rhodes, a comforting pedal steel and sublime simplicity. Sure, Ounsworth's lyrics are still cryptic — he seems to be addressing a companion who's bankrupt, emotionally or otherwise — but there is a moment of directness. In clear tones, his trademark nasal warble as restrained as it's ever been, he sings: "In my defense, I have no sense for what the neighbors think of self-control." This may once have been true. But as readily as he cops to a fault, Ounsworth proves he can overcome it.

Tue., Dec. 8, 9 p.m., $10, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com.