OneRepublic

“NATIVE”Interscope RecordsThere’s a thin line where ardent emotion meets maudlin simpering, and that’s exactly where Ryan Tedder, OneRepublic’s lead singer and main songwriter and producer, has built an impressive hitmaking career.

Tedder is the United States’ anthem guy: a thorough student of the midtempo Britpop arena-rock processional, emulating the music of U2, Peter Gabriel and Coldplay while substituting melodramatic endearments for their literary ambitions. He often writes for OneRepublic with the band’s cellist and bassist, Brent Kutzle, whose parts bring a chamber-music formality to the songs.

Tedder reaches for the hymnlike melody — usually with a dramatic upward leap somewhere to test and reward his reedy tenor voice — and the majestic crescendo, with booming drums and opulent keyboards. If cellphones aren’t being waved from the balconies by the end of the chorus, the song isn’t working.

Now, pop has turned to the four-on-the-floor beat of European-style dance music, and on “Native,” OneRepublic won’t be left behind. Goodbye syncopation, hello stomp and shimmer; in a song like “If I Lose Myself,” the band’s old Coldplay-style marches merge easily with the pulsating keyboards and kickdrum impact of trance.

The craftsmanship is painstaking and impressive.— Jon Pareles, The New York Times

Dido

“GIRL WHO GOT AWAY”RCA RecordsDon’t worry, Dido hasn’t cheered up too much. Advance reports that this British songwriter’s fourth album, “Girl Who Got Away,” would be a “big, fun electronic extravaganza” were misleading. Dido is still a forlorn, sensitive ballad singer, still wondering, as she does in “Blackbird,” “Why do I bring you love/ When all you give me back is pain?”

The electronics are there, however, and they lift the album’s better songs out of the sad-sack zone. “Girl Who Got Away” revisits the fusion of folk-pop melodies and club beats that sold more than 28 million copies worldwide of Dido’s first two albums, “No Angel” (1999) and “Life for Rent” (2003). Her third album, “Safe Trip Home” (2008), switched producers, largely renounced electronics and grew more melancholy; it found fewer listeners. “Girl Who Got Away” reunites Dido with Rollo Armstrong, her brother and the leader of the dark dance-pop group Faithless, as her main producer and songwriting partner.

Breakups, separations, loneliness and attempts at self-healing fill the album, buoyed by programmed beats. Greg Kurstin, who has produced Pink and Kelly Clarkson, sends electropop keyboards percolating through the bitter kiss-off “End of Night,” and he supplies the moody, descending bass line and trip-hop backbeat in “Happy New Year,” which has the singer missing an ex who may be absent or dead. “Go Dreaming,” which vows to rise above bullying, hints at Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”

Dido is no dance-pop belter; her sweet, small voice rarely escapes its underlying reserve, which can be soothing or merely dull. In the album’s title song, synthesizer chords puff gentle syncopations as Dido wishes she could be “the girl who got away” — less mousy and uptight, more passionate — but doesn’t expect much. “Sitting on the Roof of the World,” carried by folky guitar picking, reflects on sudden pop success and “not knowing how I got there or how to leave,” insisting that she’d rather just “fit in” to everyday life.— Jon Pareles, The New York Times

Phosphorescent

“Muchacho”Dead Oceans RecordsMatthew Houck, the self-directed highway mystic behind Phosphorescent, bookends his new album, “Muchacho,” with a slow, wakening melody sung by a mass of voices. The voices are all his — multitracked, mostly set in falsetto range — and with a series of elongated vowels they salute the gradual arrival of dawn. Both tracks, “Sun, Arise! (An Invocation, an Introduction)” and “Sun’s Arising (A Koan, an Exit)” serve a ritual and meditative purpose, but they also enfold the album in a shroud of grandiosity.

Don’t let that give you the wrong idea. Phosphorescent is a Brooklyn band that hasn’t forgotten its Southern pedigree, creating washy psychedelia with a foothold in country-rock. “Muchacho” does come with its share of artistic pretensions: Houck wrote these songs while hiding out in a beach hut on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, in the aftermath of a romantic unraveling. “I sang, ‘Roll away the stone,’” begins “Muchacho’s Tune,” the bittersweet, echoey centerpiece, and it isn’t the only instance on the album where Houck’s lyrics claim resurrection, along with martyrdom.

The scriptural cadence and mythic gravity of Houck’s lyrics, here and elsewhere, manage not to overburden his emotional payload. Over the past decade of releases as Phosphorescent, he has learned how to add layer upon layer of information without losing an essential lightness of touch. “A Charm/A Blade” is a good illustration of this principle: It has this album’s most rhetorical structure, which sound more festive than oppressive.

But that might be an underlying mission on this album, to find peace in turmoil.— Nate Chinen, The New York Times

Depeche Mode

“Delta Machine”Columbia RecordsStrangely, British synth-pop’s first — and, once, fussiest — hitmakers Depeche Mode has long had an obsession with Mississippi Delta music. As with previous albums, Dave Gahan musters a soulful falsetto and a gutsy baritone wail on “Delta Machine” to go with his deadpan monotone croon. Guitarist and primary composer Martin Gore likes his blues licks and gospel choirs, heard on dozy numbers such as “Slow” and “Goodbye.”

Where “Delta Machine” veers from the last several Depeche Mode records (too clean, too close to windswept, U2-like grandeur) is in its willingness to get dirty and creepy. After the rote bigness of the so-so “Heaven” and “Welcome to My World,” the rest is an oddball electronic dream.

“Should Be Higher” is nu-doom-disco at its most delicious, with Gahan’s tender lyrics toying with memories of his own onetime addictions (“Your arms are infected/ they’re holding the truth”). “My Little Universe” and “Soft Touch/Raw Nerve” toss around the timeworn sonic cliches of minimalist house, techno, and industrial-tronics and come out victorious.

And while Gore is still DM’s principal songwriter, Gahan gets several compositions into Machine’s mix, each murkier and eerier than anything he has penned previously. Nice show of progress after 33 years in the synth biz.— A.D. Amorosi, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Lil Wayne

“I Am Not a Human Being II”Young Money RecordsIn small doses, Lil Wayne’s new album, “I Am Not a Human Being II,” can be funny and even clever. But taken as a whole, it’s one big waste of the time and talent of Weezy and all his rapping and producing collaborators.

It takes the complicated world that Wayne often eloquently writes about in his “Tha Carter” albums and reduces it to brash sex talk and demeaning portrayals of women.

Good thing those rumors about him being in a coma and near death from too much cough syrup abuse turned out to be false because this would be one embarrassing final statement.— Glenn Gamboa, Newsday