Scissor Sisters

“MAGIC HOUR”

Casablanca Records

Only the Scissor Sisters could make this work.

The New York band’s fourth album, “Magic Hour,” is a delightful hodgepodge of dance styles and collaborators that seem unnervingly mismatched.

One minute, Jake Shears and the gang are working with neo-soul crooner John Legend. The next, Shears is rapping and hot up-and-coming rapper Azealia Banks is singing the hook. Yet, the Scissor Sisters make it all fit together by making a dance album that’s shockingly all about, well, fun!

“Baby Come Home,” the Legend collaboration, is a throwback to the Elton John-styled, ’70s-influenced dance numbers like “Take Your Mama” that made them stars in the first place.

“Inevitable,” a sleek soul number built with Pharrell, actually feels timeless, as Shears shows off his falsetto and Ana Matronic gets to belt out some big notes. For the first single, “Only the Horses,” they team up with hit-making producer Calvin Harris for a song that could easily sit next to Harris’ work with Rihanna or Ne-Yo, while keeping the band’s quirkiness intact.

After all, that quirkiness suits them well, in the playfully Prince-ish “Keep Your Shoes On” and in Matronic’s diva turn, “Let’s Have a Kiki.”

The experimentation pays off big with “Shady Love,” where Shears teams up with Banks for a thrilling slice of booty-shaking electro-pop that will stand as one of the year’s best singles.

With “Magic Hour,” the Scissor Sisters aim to build a good time and hit the mark time and time again.

The Walkmen

“HEAVEN”

Fat Possum Records

“While I Shovel Snow,” one of the best tracks on The Walkmen’s last album, 2010’s “Lisbon,” was its most understated, and it seems to have suggested the direction for “Heaven,” the New York/Philly quintet’s sixth full-length (not including their song-by-song cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Pussy Cats”).

The album does occasionally unleash the band’s unhinged rock ’n’ roll side, but the overall mood is restrained, nuanced, and spacious. This is a pretty album, in the way that albums from The National can be pretty. “I was the Duke of Earl, but it couldn’t last,” Hamilton Leithauser croons introspectively on album-opener “We Can’t Be Beat,” and there’s an element of doo-wop to what The Walkmen do there, and on “No One Ever Sleeps,” a track that also features Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold.

Fans of “The Rat,” the band’s signature anthem, may be disappointed, but “Heaven” offers plenty of rarefied pleasures.

Melody Gardot

“THE ABSENCE”

Verve Records

Last time out, on her 2008 album “My One and Only Thrill,” Philadelphia chanteuse Melody Gardot cast a subtle torch-singer spell, working with former Joni Mitchell producer Larry Klein. That album worked a gray-day Billie Holiday mood, and “The Absence,” a collaboration with Brazilian-born producer and guitarist Hector Pereira, maintains a gauzy, low-key vibe.

Instead of evoking a smoky Parisian melancholy, however, “The Absence” finds its source of sadness and longing through the yearning concept of saudade in the fado music of Portugal, where Gardot lived for a time, before moving on to Buenos Aires, as she was writing songs.

That, along with the sunnier rhythms of Brazilian bossa nova, which come to the fore in the lead single, “Mire,” and the bluesy “Goodbye,” in which she growls like Louis Armstrong, suffuses “The Absence” with a sophisticated, worldly melancholy, with which Gardot always seems entirely at home.

Travis Porter

“FROM DAY 1”

RCA Records

There’s beauty in diversity, sure, but there can be beauty in singlemindedness, too. Over the past few years the three men of the Atlanta hip-hop group Travis Porter — Quez, Ali and Strap — have become auteurs of the strip club, making buoyant, electrifying soundtrack music for late nights full of tossed-in-the-air dollar bills. What Too was to 1980s corner walkers, this group is to the modern-day pole dancer.

The apotheosis of the style was “Make It Rain,” originally released in 2010 and one of the great hip-hop anthems of recent years. A thumping, swerving, punchy number, it was salacious and comic in equal measure, a genuine triumph.

That song closes out “From Day 1,” the long-in-the-cooker major-label debut from this group, and it sets the tone as well. From “Pop a Rubber Band” to “Wobble” to songs with unprintable titles, these men know their milieu; they never met a stripper they didn’t want to rap about. This is an exuberantly raunchy album but also an intuitively musical one. Quez in particular has a mature gift for melody — he’s lighthearted in tone, adding a sense of fun to the proceedings. Ali can sound testy and saucy and Strap, with his rich accent, often sounds like he’s swallowing his words.

Songs like “Ballin’,” with their ostentatious swoops and turns in vocal delivery, recall rappers like Nelly and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Midwesterners who bent hip-hop into new shapes. Only a pair of songs near the end of the album, “Party Time” and “That Feeling,” appear to be reaching for a broader idea, trading strip-club throbbing for pop-ear breeze. But here, the rappers sound loose, almost uncomfortable. They want to go back to the club.

Grass Widow

“INTERNAL LOGIC”

HLR Records

The women in the San Francisco trio Grass Widow sing in clear and pretty harmonies over buzzing, nettlesome music — thin, staccato, slightly dissonant. It’s a group sound that’s counterintuitive all the time: reverbed and reassuring on the top, dry and interrogative on the bottom.

That’s a really good idea, but Grass Widow has stretched it about as far as it can go. Its limitations were apparent from the trio’s beginnings three years ago but seemed fresh or accidental. At this point, on “Internal Logic,” the band’s third full-length album, they amount to a kind of grim commitment. To what? To semiproficiency, to plainness, maybe even to the abrogation of pleasure.

Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. There’s been some growth. The vocal patterns among band members (the bassist Hannah Lew, the guitarist Raven Mahon and the drummer Lillian Maring) have become stronger and more careful, whether in unison, closer harmony or counterpoint. And the best of this album’s tightly composed songs — “Under the Atmosphere,” “Spock on Muni” — have moments of beauty in their choruses.

Conceptually, “Internal Logic” is all set. But something’s missing here, and it’s something to do with music alone: sound, feeling, groove, attack, dynamics. The brittle, attenuated feeling of this album becomes wearying, like a three-course meal of nothing but grapefruit.