Lo-Fang tries to do too much on his debut album, Blue Film. The project of classically trained multi-instrumentalist cum co-producer Matthew Hemerlein, Blue Film packs in every musical tendency and ability he has.

Moving from indie oddballs to pop pleasure-seekers should have been easy for Architecture in Helsinki, but the Australian ensemble are hampered by a desire to be taken seriously on their appallingly-titled fifth LP, NOW + 4EVA.

Animal Collective’s Dave Portner said his new solo effort, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, was inspired by horror films, like the name implies. The bad news is that if he meant Enter the Slasher Houseto sound scary, he pretty much failed.

Two albums deep with pop outfit Chairlift, Caroline Polachek has become one of pop’s go-to girls for upping a song’s seductive power. (See her work with Washed Out, Delorean, and Blood Orange.)

Out Among the Stars is a newly unearthed Johnny Cash album, recorded in 1981 and 1984 but for some reason shelved at the time.

Pop and indie rock continue to consume each other as the millennium progresses, and Casey Dienel has positioned White Hinterland uniquely between the two, slowly migrating away from her earlier jazz inclinations (although they certainly still permeate her melodic sensibility and ambitious songwriting).

Silent Treatment is the international debut full-length from Oslo five-piece Highasakite. It follows a couple of Norwegian releases and 2012’s excellent In and Out of Weeks EP, the latter of which includes the band’s majestic, soaring pop song “Indian Summer.”

The latest solo effort from Field Music’s David Brewis captures the melodic sophistication we’ve come to expect from his group efforts, but more focused and restrained. Old Fears is a glitchy, synth-infused album of blissful white-boy funk in a neat 35-minute package.

William Gibson-a founding father of the now-classic science-fiction subgenre called cyberpunk-has said that SF strain has become a “standard Pantone shade in pop culture.” (The question of cyberpunk’s fate had been posed to him in a fantastic Motherboard article by SF critic-and YACHT member-Claire Evans.)