GUIDED BY VOICES Welshpool Frillies (GBV Inc.) — Many bands standing before the monolith of a big-number anniversary would understandably take the occasion to press a grand statement to record, some collection of songs steeped in nostalgic and pummeled by introspection. Guided by Voices, it goes with word processing, are not many rock bands. Welshpool Frillies, the group’s seventy jillionth album (approximately) is agreeably in line with most of its many predecessors, dispensing chunky, left-of-center rock songs like a slot machine that pays off with every yank of the lever. Stalwart frontman Robert Pollard writes songs that are all grounded in the same general vibe and yet somehow find stirring variance within it, whether the glam rock tilt to “Romeo Surgeon” or the thin undercoat of psychedelia on “Why Won’t You Kiss Me,” which might represent the closest Guided by Voices will ever come to Beatlesque. “Meet the Star” is like arena rock if the thousands of seats were filled by Generation X slackers who proudly never grew up enough to stop scuffling their Chucks. The most dependable indie rock factory out there has added another sturdy muscle car to its loaded showroom. Let the following tracks be your guide: “Cruisers’ Cross,” “Animal Concentrate,” “Don’t Blow Your Dream Job,” the spiky “Seedling,” and “Radioactive Pigeons.”

CARLY RAE JEPSEN The Loveliest Time (604/Schoolboy/Interscope) — Just as the sun rises again after it sets, a Carly Rae Jepsen studio album is sure to be followed by a collection of splendidly realized leftovers. Previously, Jepsen made the genesis of those trailing releases clear as can by invoking flip sides in their titles. A different mindset is suggested by last year’s The Loneliest Time being answered by new full-length The Loveliest Time, and Jepsen has confirmed that she sees it as more of “companion project” even as its creation followed the same process of revisiting and revising songs that just missed the cut previously. Thematically, the album is about coming through romantic sadness to emerge a stronger, more hopeful version of one’s self, and the music provides appropriate backing to that story being told in the lyrics. Nicely spacey “After Last Night” opens with the lines “Gravity is not enough to keep me on your street/ Walking twenty feet above the ground/ I need you to hold my hand.” The helpless defiance of gravity is as good a metaphor as any to describe Jepsen’s easy command of pop invention. She can go big, incorporating funky currents on “Shy Boy” and crafting a full-to-bursting array of sounds and textures, and she can get intimate, as on the hushed yet intense “Kollage.” Whichever way Jepsen goes, her prolific talent glows. Bask further in the loveliness with “Anything to Be with You,” “Kamikaze,” “Shadow,” and “Put It to Rest.”