➤ electronic/dance
Montreal party maestro Tiga has engineered a lengthy dance career most notable for novelty covers and smirking self-aggrandizement. But while Non Stop (PIAS/Different) — his first commercially released DJ mix in nearly a decade — includes jokes (best being the deliciously seedy Matthew Dear collaboration “Plush”), it’s also serious business. It’s a master class in how to weave hard-edged techno, acid-laced bleep house, fractured electro-soul, etc., into a playful sweatfest of the highest order. —K. Ross Hoffman
➤ pop
Warrior (RCA) may not be a game-changing revelation on the order of Ke$ha’s debut, but it’s a stinging corrective to the relative personality void of 2012’s chartscape — going Nicki Minaj, for instance, one better by combining snarky girl-rap and tack-tastic pop-house on essentially every track, rather than segregating them across a bifurcated album. Nobody else is injecting radio-ready pop-glop with anything like Ke$ha’s signature swagger (a delirious blend of gutter-minded excess and glittery sweetness) and hook-a-second maximalism. —K. Ross Hoffman
➤ roots/blues/boogie
With a sound built on cigar-box guitar, slap bass and washboard, no trio is more fun in performance than New Jersey’s April Mae and the June Bugs. The recent Boogie! (aprilmaeandthejunebugs.com) does justice to the live show with the three taking familiar roots genres and twisting them around Mae’s elbow-gloved, thimble-capped fingers. On “Blue Moon Risen,” Dave “Catfish” Fecca trades that cigar-box guitar for mandolin, but with Mae wailing and scratching rhythm on the washboard, it is as much Yank Rachell as Bill Monroe. The one tune with boogie in the title is a modern bait and switch more Kurt Weill than Pete Johnson. —Mary Armstrong
➤ rock/world
When Brave Combo was firming up its sound, Bubba Hernandez’s bass and vocals were key. Hernandez left the group some years back, but the energy and eclecticism on his new CD, Big Pounding Heart (Moon Zero Bird), will certainly please fans from his Brave days. Hernandez wrote all the songs and as that title hints, it’s never too late to be crazy in love (“Love Sick”) or lust (“Testosterone”). From tropical to salsa to cumbia, the CD winds up sweet and slow with “At the End of My Road.” —Mary Armstrong
