Producer Andy Butler is an amazing craftsman of disco-scapes, no doubt, but the "guest" spots of Hercules and Love Affair are what make it the great album that it is. The choice of Antony Hegarty (of "and the Johnsons" fame) as the album's primary vocalist only seems odd until you've heard the sincere soul he lays across these songs. If you're worried that he'll be as precious and fragile as he was on the Johnsons album, don't be. These songs of love and war and the places where the twain meet can sting like a slap to the face.

This record belongs in the same class as music from another time -- as Nitsuh Abebe puts it in his review for Pitchfork, "a time in which popular black artists made records filled not only with visionary, avant-garde sounds, but with a social expansiveness, a fire and ambition to say something important to and for a community" -- but that doesn't mean that this is music for or from another time. It's messy, contradictory, uplifting, inspired and inspirational, angry, placid, and possibly a masterpiece.

Vote Obama.

This album from Swedish band Pluxus was originally released in 2006, but when Kompakt co-founder Michael Mayer heard it, he knew that it needed to be heard more, and that Kompakt was just the label to make that happen. As pop music, this is odd and angular stuff, and as dance music it's too pop-oriented to move a dancefloor, but it's one of the most compulsively listenable albums I've heard this year.

It's filed under dubstep, but don't think "Burial," think "Orbital." Alan Myson has made a killer album here, using the conventional rhythms and even the familiar dark, minor-key moods of the genre for the basic backbone, but building gardens around them. He may not be leading the way to the future of dubstep, but I'm dying to find out what he does next.