The past two Phantogram records have been fine, technically speaking. They’re fine indie records. But they’re original to the point that they’re bothersome. It feels like Phantogram tries too hard on them. I remember listening to Voices and being unable to recommend it here. I love weird music, but Phantogram just made me feel uncomfortable. Something was wrong.

With Three, I don’t have that feeling. The record is inventive without being polarizing. It’s familiar without ever being a retread. In short, it simply feels right.

“You Don’t Get Me High Anymore”, the album’s lead single, is a perfect example of this style. The duo’s energetic style translates perfectly to this rock-infused pop style. It’s got a great chorus, a great verse, and a fantastic flow.

The only complaint you could leverage against the record is that it feels stuffed with ideas. They don’t all work well, but so many of them do that it’s hard to hold the bad ideas against the band.

For those of us who have musical ADD, all these ideas make Three refreshingly interesting. Each song is different from then one that came before it. Eight tracks in, “Run Run Blood” is different from anything that came before (and still an excellent song, with a totally surprising verse).

For some people, though, I suspect it’ll be the quieter songs that are more potent. Tracks like “Barking Dog” are impeccably well written and emotive. “Answer” is a track that hits exactly where it hurts, with a piano line that wouldn’t be out of place in a soap opera. (That’s not an insult; music should make us feel this way.)

For Phantogram fans, Three won’t be what they expect. Some of them will acclimatize, and some will not. For the rest of us, I think Three might be their best record yet. Time will only tell. In the meantime, ignore the critics. This record is the most approachable Phantogram record. Three is easy to listen to, easy to love, and still different enough to surprise.

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“Undine” is a terrific way to jump into this record. At once, the track is reminiscent of all your favourite dream pop bands. (I’m strongly reminded of Beach House’s classic tracks.) But there’s something different about Fear of Men’s style. It feels as if the songs are all going somewhere. They have a sense of motion that the genre normally fails to grasp.

If the album has any issue, it’s the one that plagues dream pop most: many of the tracks sound the same. “Island,” which is the track right after “Undine,” sounds remarkably similar in tone despite being a clearly different track. In other words, it would be impossible to mistake the two as the same track, but it would be easy to confuse which is which.

Despite the genre’s limitations, Fear of Men are mining the genre for all its worth. And they’ve gotten good at it. What makes Fall Forever so good is that they’ve done exactly what dream pop’s name suggests: they’ve made pop music that’s so dreamy, you’ll swear you’ve fallen asleep.

What’s interesting about Fear of Men is that they don’t want to put the listener to sleep, though. Many dream pop bands are more than willing to sacrifice the listener for their art. With Fear of Men, the drum work is their saving grace. He’s unlike most other drummers in the genre, constantly moving — and moving quickly.

For me, Fall Forever is reminiscent of my two favourite dream pop records: The Local Natives’ Hummingbird and Beach House’s Bloom. I can’t give it a better accolade than that: it pushes the dream pop genre into another level by almost taking it into the indie rock vein, drifting away from dream pop. “Until You” and “Trauma” are great examples of this, where the band almost leaves dream pop entirely as a genre and becomes something else.

The easiest way to talk about Fear of Men is to send people to their album art. Each album cover for their records has a clear style, and they have a lot of similarities. Like their album art, the band has a clear sound and style. And they get more refined with each record.

Fear of Men has quietly become one of the best dream pop bands while all the mainstream publications got busy writing about Beach House’s Depression Cherry. If you’re a fan of the genre, I think you’re going to love the direction Fear of Men is going in.

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As a result, the album took much longer to complete than expected. Reported, Smith wrote over 100 songs for Is the Is Are in an attempt to reach some sort of perfection that would allow his audience to forgive him for his crimes.

This isn’t a simple feat: beyond the fact that that writing 100 songs is challenging, writing music like DIIV’s without the help of some sort of hallucinogenic wouldn’t be a walk in the park either. The reverb-laden and chorus-dripping guitar lines are to DIIV what the Edge’s unnamed guitar effects are to U2, but DIIV takes it a step closer to the edge of modern songwriting and experiments with the very form of alt-rock.

In essence, comparing DIIV with Pink Floyd would be wrong, because they sound nothing alike, but they share musical ambitions. While DIIV often writes tracks that feel destined for alt-rock radio, they have a very different approach to shoe-gazing than their peers. The vocals take a step back and become textural, like the rest of the record, making DIIV feel like an electronic band made entirely with “acoustic” instruments.

Songs like Dopamine reinforce DIIV as leaders in guitar sounds, but they also perfectly encapsulate what the record is about: recovering from a debilitating drug addiction and finding your identity in a new reality.

Tracks like Valentine and Yr Not Far are still very DIIV, in the sense that they’re largely built up with effect-driven guitars and bass lines that feel like they’re constantly moving forward.

It’s hard to say if this is a result of sobriety, but there’s a hint of darkness to this record that wasn’t part of DIIV’s sound before. It’s a sense of discontent that comes with success, but also with failure in spite of it. The record feels like a punishment for Smith’s behaviour as much as it does like a checklist of fans’ desires.

Is the Is Are is the sort of record that you know you’ll like within the first listen. It’s not for everybody. But DIIV knows that. With their sophomore album, instead of widening their palette, it feels like they’re doubling down on their sound in an effort to trademark it.

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Clearly influenced by their more dream-pop contemporaries, Fading Frontier is a step or two closer towards Beach House while still retaining the dynamics that made Deerhunter work before. But now, with the additional songwriting skills that come with both experimentation and experience, Deerhunter are putting those dynamics to better work.

From the opening track, it’s clear that Fading Frontier is a better record than what’s come before. It’s got more structure, better hooks, and more memorable melodies. This is a better Deerhunter in every way, and it’d be a shame if you missed it.

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At the same time, that familiarity is likely because she’s spawned so many imitators. People fell head over heels for Youth Novels when it was released, and she’s been raising the stakes with every album since, developing on how fully-realized Youth Novels was.

So the easiest way to describe her is saying that she sounds at once foreign and familiar, comfortable and difficult to grasp, predictable and also unknowable. In the world of pop music, these lines are thin and easy to cross. Lykke Li straddles them, taunts them, and draws new lines in the sand. She’s everything I wish Feist sounded like after The Reminder.

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In a lot of ways, Tender Buttons feels like an experiment in minimalism. While not out of place today, critics observed at the time that it felt like certain tracks were missing pieces. Now, we recognize this sound as a sort of minimalist shoe-gazing dream pop, but Tender Buttons feels like it was a psychedelic tour-de-force ten years ahead of its time.

The vocals on this record are in a particularly special place: thanks to minimalist production and a lack of other in-your-face instrumentation, the vocals really stand out. And their airy nature, but post-punk surroundings mean that this can fit in well next to Girlpool or Beach House.

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It offers great choruses on songs like You Are a Metaphor, but it’s hard to say the record will catch on — the word that keeps coming back to me while I listen is “niche”. You probably already know if this sort of indie synth pop appeals to you. With slow builds like The Long Goodbye interspersed throughout, this album is both enjoyable and predictable — the Capsules aren’t breaking any new ground, but they are capturing a certain sound with magnificent aplomb.

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Singer Jessica Weiss’s voice reminds me of Beach House’s Victoria Legrand, but I find Fear of Men is a little more listenable thanks to her. But what she sings about seems to refute the point: existentialism, anger, nihilism, the list goes on. Fear of Men would rather take names than sit quietly, and as their band name suggests, these fragments perhaps sound scarier than the band would intend. (Or maybe they want to terrify us and shock us into submission.)

Also unlike a lot of dream pop bands, Fear of Men gets straight to the point. There’s not a lot of aimless drifting on Early Fragments. Listen to Seer or Mosaic, the album’s first singles. The band develops each song, and takes their time to do it, but they don’t hesitate to get into the vocals. Some of the tracks are a little more radio-friendly than others — I’m partial to Born and Ritual Confession, which have multiple charms — but the whole album is great. Highly recommended for fans of the genre.

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It’s also their most likely to succeed, thanks to the way that it blends an obvious variety of influences. At once sounding like Beach House and Chvrches, it feels as if the duo spent the past two years ingesting nothing but Warp and 4AD albums. They come off as a breath of fresh air in a genre that seems cyclically doomed to start feeling stagnant and stale every twenty minutes.

The title track off this EP is what you’ll come for; it’s a total showstopper. That’s not to say the other stuff isn’t good — Ephemera has a fantastic chorus, and Sinking Stone is beautifully moody despite its cheery nature. Actually, Sinking Stone is nearly gospel-like in tone.

I’m a sucker for four-song EPs, which I think is nearly the perfect length for my often-brief attention span, and this is no exception. GEM’s Medusa is a lush, beautiful EP that holds tremendous promise for their future.

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