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Zeitgeist Smashing Pumpkins Reprise July 10

The Chemical Brothers

We Are the Night

Virgin

July 17

After a particularly long spell of gardening leave, dance music has returned, refreshed and quivering with energy. In Britain, we aren't really talking about punishing techno - more our pop-infused, rock-informed mutants (like New Rave and its breed leaders, Klaxons) and the litter of DJ/remixer auteurs (Simian Mobile Disco, step forward) currently mashing it up.

Into this springtime of body-jacking comes a record which seeks to remind the young neon pups that not so long ago, the night was the personal playground of a couple of shuffling guys in baggy, dun-colored clothes. After a couple of albums struggling to fly the flag for 1990s dance culture in an uncongenial climate, the Chemical Brothers' sixth album is rather good. Not only does it supply updates of their nostalgic signatures - misty-eyed euphoria, rockular dynamics, easygoing BPMs - it also measures up well against the new breed, deploying newfangled noises with casual confidence.

Those the Brokes The Magic Numbers Astralwerks July 17

Getting Klaxons in as guests was an astute move. In one fine tune, All Rights Reversed, batons are passed as Klaxons spiel their candy-colored occultism over a thumping Brotherly base. That's it, as far as star turns go. The remainder of the album's collaborators are either low-key, like Willy Mason (on so-so comedowner Battle Scars) or gonzoid, like rapper Fatlip from the Pharcyde. He urges listeners to shake it like a spawning salmon on The Salmon Dance, a skit-track that's just about more grin than grimace. Midlake have a hand in The Pills Won't Help You Now. The twist? It's a meditation set in a nursing home, not a caner's lament, a bit like the Verve's The Drugs Don't Work before it.

The Chemical Brothers We Are the Night Virgin July 17

The Klaxons love-in aside, the Chemicals play best on their own. The title track sees aliens land in helicopters. Saturate is pure Chemicals, like a warped Private Psychedelic Reel with harder dynamics. It's not perfect, but We Are the Night has promise.

Beauty & Crime Suzanne Vega Blue Note July 17

It remains to be seen, however, whether the forthcoming Underworld album heralds a return for the giants of yesterbeat or whether this dose of Chemicals is just a pleasant blip.

Those the Brokes

The Magic Numbers

Astralwerks

July 17

The Magic Numbers butter their bread with a preciousness that predates them: the sweet, optimistic, alert sound of 1980s indie pop, humming along on eighth-note bass lines and boy-girl harmonies.

They do it well, and it might be enough: They could be a post-new-wave eighth-note band and stop there. But Romeo Stodart, the band's main singer and songwriter, has more in him. For ballads - which make up half of the band's second album, Those the Brokes - he channels melodies, structures and arrangements from meticulous types like Burt Bacharach, Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler and Jimmy Webb.

But his sense of craft is woollier. At this band's ambling pace, when Stodart falls in love with an ooh-wah-ooh or a la-la-la, he sticks with it a little too long. But maybe repetition helps the Magic Numbers remain sincere; it's impressive how far this band can push its bright, modest sentimentality in 2007 without fetishizing it, making it hard and unpleasant.

Singing in Cat Stevens's light and pleasant range, bumping up into a falsetto here and there, Stodart uses plain bubble-gum language. He asks innocent questions: "How am I to tell her that it's over?" "Was I born to love alone?" "Running out of love - is it the wrong kind of love?"

He says "baby" seven times on this record, and each one feels startling; he hands you long vowels where most other white pop singers would affect a black, Southern or British posture for the word. (Like his sister, Michele Stodart, who plays bass, keyboards and guitar and sings in the band, he grew up in London, New York and Trinidad. The other two musicians, Angela and Sean Gannon, are also siblings.)

Track by track, Those the Brokes, released in the fall in Britain, isn't quite up to the band's self-titled first album. The vocal harmonies aren't as gorgeous, and there's one misstep: Undecided, sung by Angela Gannon, a Starbucks-soul song that might have passed on a Norah Jones record but not here.

Yet the group is carefully flirting with greater ambition. Two of the album's songs have string arrangements by Robert Kirby, who worked with Nick Drake in the early 1970s, and that extra layer of elegance, a potential danger for a modest band, is not misused.

Beauty & Crime

Suzanne Vega

Blue Note

July 17

In one of the characteristically canny songs on her new album, Beauty & Crime, Suzanne Vega depicts her city with anthropomorphic whimsy. "New York is a woman, she'll make you cry," she sings. "And to her you're just another guy."

It's a simple premise that quietly deepens and turns. The lyrics, having already brushed past the title of the album, go on to locate its underlying theme:

"Look down and see her ruined places

"Smoke and ash still rising to the sky

"She's happy that you're here, but when you disappear

"She won't know that you're gone to say goodbye"

In other words, Beauty & Crime is Vega's meditation on New York City and the emotional climate that coalesced around it during the weeks and months after Sept. 11. And with a poignant dedication to Tim Vega, the brother whose death she can't help but associate with that tragedy, it's also a suite in the key of farewell.

But thanks to a keen sense of proportion and concision - and the unmannered integrity of Vega's singing style - the album isn't ponderous. There are songs that riff on the ill-fated romance of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, the cosmic correlation of the authors Olivia Goldsmith and Edith Wharton, and the bygone character of West End Avenue. The producer, Jimmy Hogarth, charts an appealing musical middle ground, blending acoustic and electric guitars with strings, light electronics and background vocals.

Of course there are smoke and ash too, in varied forms. Vega is most artful and effective with songs that directly address her city's darkest recent days, like Angel's Doorway and Anniversary" which arrive at the album's close.

"Put away the draft of all your eulogies," Vega advises in the final track. "Clear the way for all your private memories." She seems to be singing as much to herself as anyone else, and the song brims with generosity as well as reassurance.

Zeitgeist

Smashing Pumpkins

Reprise

July 10

A couple of years ago, when Billy Corgan decided to reunite Smashing Pumpkins, which broke up in 2000, he announced his intentions with a full-page advertisement in his hometown newspaper the Chicago Tribune. "I want my band back," it read in part, "and my songs, and my dreams."

Not surprisingly, this comeback album exudes roughly the same degree of subtlety, from the title, Zeitgeist, to the cover illustration. (Designed by Shepard Fairey, it depicts the Statue of Liberty knee-deep in what looks like a rising tide.) And in case you missed the point, Corgan provides songs called For God and Country and Pomp and Circumstances, along with lyrics like these, from United States: "I want to fight, I want to fight /A revolution tonight."

So Zeitgeist appears to have a sense of urgency about something other than Corgan's dreams. The album is surprisingly effective in musical terms: drone-laden and distortion-jacked, it sounds about as tough as anything this band has produced. Jimmy Chamberlain, the only other original member on hand, thrashes impressively at his drums, and Corgan's nasal whine slices cleanly through the din.

The problem, on more than a few tracks, is what he's saying. In addition to some nonspecific political exhortations, he offers vagaries about personal relations, inner demons, and "the light" that everyone should be shining. Maybe someday Corgan will have to reconcile "It's lonely at the top" with "I don't want to be alone." For now he seems dauntless in his belief that self-absorption and social responsibility can coexist, and who knows? He might have his finger on the pulse after all.
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