Daft Punk
"Alive 2007"
(Virgin)

Wondering how I'd missed these guys, I replayed "Discovery," which I'd panned hard in 2001, and enjoyed the hooks recycled here more than I did at the time. But, sonically, I still couldn't take it. I believe the tour was awesome -- the videos prove it. But they also suggest why the band chooses not to DVD its world conquest -- too much scale, flesh and bodily effluvia would be lost. Better this big fat earworm, which translates crowd noises into music and establishes how much bigger the band's electronics got when put to the arena-rock test. Deconstructing and recontextualizing their tune stock "mais oui," these robot wannabes bathed the unwashed in the blood of the synthesizer, broadening and lowering sounds that in their original substantiations owe not just Detroit techno but Ramada Inn lounge. Humanistic after all.

Lupe Fiasco
"The Cool"
(Atlantic)

Because you can only get so much street from a skateboard, his morality emanates from too far above the asphalt this time except when he's renouncing his own sins of cool. And even so he's a major-label rapper positioned to put the "z" in "greasy," speak for a child soldier, and call himself boring before anybody else can. He makes UNKLE and Fall Out Boy sound fresher than Tricky Stewart. He's got that go go go go go go go go go go gadget flow.

Lil Wayne
"Da Drought 3"
(Purloined Datadisc)

"How come every joint be on point like a harpoon/How come every bar stand strong like a barstool/How come every line is so raw you gon' snort two?" All right, so he's exaggerating -- he wouldn't be the best rapper alive if he didn't. But from the off-time stammer that intros "Intro" -- one of my favorite moments on one of my favorite tracks on the double-CD I now possess in two-and-a-half slightly different versions -- rarely has pop excess been so ebullient, or do I mean pop ebullience been so excessive? When I says he loves to rhyme I don't mean he loves to spout verses -- I mean "earphone," "real on," "in gear homes," "beer foam," "queer on," "Lear home," "Pam Grier on," "cashmere on," "Eric Dampier dog," "Bill Laimbeer on." And if they don't exactly rhyme, the best rapper alive will squoosh around until they do -- that series proceeds from "grill on," "ceilin'," and "keep it real on." Does he make it up as he goes along, as is claimed? Could be, because his words have little to do with storytelling or any other species of coherence. They are among other things silly, which bodes ill for his reputation on the so-called street -- the Reality Police know that his guns, cocaine, pimping, murdering, etc. are the formal play of a beat jacker who at 24 has spent half his life as a professional musician. Someday he may feel the need to re-establish his bona fides. Right now he has too much money.

Various Artists
"Look Directly Into the Sun: China Pop 2007"
(Invisible China)

Here be a panoply of DIY styles as imitated or reimagined by 18 young Shanghai bands, about half of whom sing in English-as-a-second-language. I've been enjoying it off and on for pushing six months, and although not a single song sticks in my mind when I go away -- if there's a striking lyric here, it hasn't struck me -- most return quickly when I come back. More important, that joyful youth-revolt jolt keeps getting stronger. I doubt this means that in another decade all the new bands will be Chinese, although it might. If anything, it's as if these rock 'n' roll outliers who represent a quarter of the planetary population have belatedly discovered what our bands wore out decades ago -- a bish-bashing delight that portends eternal life and absolutely nothing at the same time. It will always be a kick to hear that delight again.

Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard/Ray Price
"Last of the Breed Vol. 1 & 2"
(Lost Highway)

There's only so much three prolific old coots can do with a double-CD of country standards, and they do most of it. Intimate with the literature, they pick winners you've never heard, and they're putting out, always a consideration with the prolific. Yet though the broad-beamed Price obviously needs two of the deftest singers left on the planet, it's his ruined echo chamber of a voice that injects a defining solemnity into the two religious songs, and everything else derives from that. Not much kidding around here -- they're feeling their varying ages. But they ain't dead yet.

Vampire Weekend
"Vampire Weekend"
(XL)

Young twentysomethings who write about what they know -- college. Liberal arts majors broad-minded enough to worry that "ion displacement won't work in the basement," they took their Columbia studies seriously, which is my idea of how to exploit privilege (though how much privilege is less self-evident than Ivy-hatas assume). Hence all the flags about appropriated exotica, class distinctions and cultural capital -- and the not unrelated correct accents, designer brands and vacation retreats. Their chief thematic concern is whether there's life after graduation, and rather than Afropop, from which they misprise a guitar sound but nothing of the groove it was conceived to serve, their music, as with most fresh recent bands good and bad, is quite Euro. Affecting a clarity and delight that pleases the many and confounds the some, their lyrically alluring, structurally hop-skip-and-jumping songs aren't deep. They're just thoughtful fun. And now let me give it up to an I Love Music post by Pitchfork's Scott Plagenhoef: "off- kilter, upbeat guitar pop, with -- in comparison to their peers -- something singular about both their music (e.g. not just the touches of African pop but the willingness to use space and let the songs breathe a bit) and their lyrics (detail-heavy, expressive; too bad they're images of wealth instead of poverty, otherwise they'd be critical manna)." Right on, my brother.

Wussy
"Left for Dead"
(Shake It)

I love this Cincinnati quartet for singers Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker, for songwriters Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker, and sometimes for guitarists Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker most of all. Where the pained Cleaver dominated their debut, here most tracks are fronted by the more rounded Walker. Not that she's at peace -- in songs that feel realistic even though their details seldom kiss and tell, she struggles for love given and received in a state of spiritual hyperawareness suffused with a Christianity that won't let her memory loose. Lovely melodies soften her perpetual uncertainty. But those guitars, gorgeous droning things boosted by keyboards everybody but the drummer takes a hand to, saw away at her unsatisfied mind.