Playlist: Rasps, Boops, Snark And Sartre

Santogold

Adam Green works on his deadpan delivery.

Santogold, from Brooklyn, may be mocking scene pretensions, defending the creative impulse or both in her single, “L.E.S. Artistes,” with its drumstick-clicking beat, electro boops and dance-rock chorus. The video clip, at myspace.com/santogold, is even more brazen and inexplicable. As she strides down a city street, explosions and blatantly artificial carnage surround her. People are splashed with red paint and spew green liquid or blue smoke or plastic-pellet innards. Their faces are anguished, as if they were in a real war zone; the gimmicks are a live-action cartoon. “I can stand up mean,” she sings — or is it “me?” — “for the things that I believe.” What a viewer believes is up for grabs.

Constantines

Disgruntled, pugnacious and full of longing, Bry Webb sings hoarse refrains like “We’ve got hard feelings” or “Love can be a shower of stones” on the Constantines’ fourth album, “Kensington Heights” (Arts & Crafts), named after the Toronto neighborhood where the band practices. The thick distortion on the guitars comes through overdriven amps made by the same company that supplied Bachman-Turner Overdrive. But those guitars can mesh in patterns that can verge on math-rock, while Mr. Webb ponders time and purpose, whether he’s mulling his way through a ballad or close to shouting. For the Constantines thoughtfulness transforms brute force.

DJ Dolores

“J.P.S.,” from DJ Dolores’s third album, “1 Real” (Crammed/Ryko), rides the beat of a triangle, a perky accordion riff, a whistling synthesizer swoop and a bass line that’s mostly Brazilian forró with a tinge of Jamaican dancehall. “J.P.S.,” however, stands for Jean-Paul Sartre, and the lyrics casually sung by Silvério Pessoa mention phenomenology along with beachfront body-building. It’s just one of the album’s down-to-earth, philosophically ambitious songs. Helder Aragão, who goes by DJ Dolores, is a producer, programmer and songwriter from Recife; various singers deliver the tunes and words. He’s aware of survival struggles, defiance and dance music worldwide — that’s Hugh Cornwell from the Stranglers singing on “Danger Global Warming” — but his tracks stay lean and grounded, never far away from the rabeca (fiddle) and accordion of northeastern Brazil.

Adam Green

Songwriting is a callous craft. The structures of verse and chorus, hook and arrangement can be applied with equal ease to sincerity and snarkiness, affection and contempt. Adam Green deadpans through them all in the 20 songs on his album “Sixes & Sevens” (Matador). The music is the grown-up extension of his lo-fi songs for the Moldy Peaches, whose 2001 song “Anyone Else but You” was on the “Juno” soundtrack album that recently reached No. 1. “Sixes & Sevens” tries on plushly reassuring middle-of-the-road styles from string-laden 1950s pop to supper-club soul to Beach Boys pop to countrypolitan to fingerpicking soft-rock. In his relaxed baritone Mr. Green sings thoroughly incongruous lyrics: easy gross-outs, free associations and darker tidings. “Protection override/I’m gonna make you miserable,” he croons in “Twee Twee Dee,” which has the three Hanson brothers singing backup. Behind his composure Mr. Green is both clever and ruthless.

Fleet Foxes

Vocal harmonies mean a lot to Fleet Foxes, a five-member Seattle band that has just released an EP, “Sun Giant” (Bella Union/Sub Pop), and has an album due in June. The harmonies can suggest shape-note hymns, madrigals or (sparingly) Crosby, Stills & Nash, and their all-natural aspect suits songs that are enthralled by nature: landscapes, the cosmos, cycles of birth and death. The Fleet Foxes have a strong hippie streak. Their lyrics contemplate sorrows yet strive for benevolence: “Go with your arms held wide, happiness in your eyes,” Robin Pecknold sings in “English House,” with the high tenor voice he shares with Neil Young and Jim James of My Morning Jacket. In four songs the music unfurls from neo-Baroque Renaissance Faire intricacy to heartily strummed folk-rock. But the fifth and final one, “Innocent Son,” is Mr. Pecknold alone with an acoustic guitar, crooning a waltz about betrayal and death.

Hayes Carll

Hayes Carll’s voice is a scraped-up Texas rasp. The music on his third album, “Trouble in Mind” (Lost Highway), has cleaned up a little — it’s his move to a major label — yet still sounds like roadhouse Americana: plinking banjo in some songs, honky-tonk piano or rangy Rolling Stones guitars in others. And his songs are full of hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard-luck characters. But he’s no stumblebum in his songwriting. Behind the bleary delivery is someone who comes up with opening lines like “Arkansas, my head hurts/I’d love to stick around and maybe make it worse.” Although Mr. Carll is fond of self-destructive narrators, a few songs are kindly enough to be redone by slick Nashville types. But cautious country stars would never touch “She Left Me for Jesus,” a barroom shuffle carrying a jealous guy’s lament that “Last time we made love, she even called out his name.”

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