GLASS BEACH plastic death (Run for Cover) — The Los Angeles band glass beach came up with their own metaphor for the music on their sophomore album and aptly used it as inspiration for the title of the whole affair. J McClendon, glass beach’s frontman, declared the new material to be akin to the gigantic mass of conglomerated plastic refuse drifting along like a bleak bobber in the Pacific Ocean. Although plastic death carries a gleam of menace as a title, music this vibrant and varied can only stir exuberance. The band operates in a state of constant reinvention, often making whim-like swerves right in the middle of a track. “slip under the door” offers light, tingly soul invaded by pockets of industrial furor, and “rare animal” seems to invent a rare new beast that could be dubbed fusion emo. On the album, glass beach is reminiscent of Clinic or the Notwist, other acts that put loose jazz molasses into inverted pop song structures and produce something that sounds impossible, but there it is, coming out of the speakers. It’s intricate work that regular yields imposing results, such as the mammoth “motion” or the spectacular freakout “the CIA.” The album might be named after refuse, but it’s a keeper. In addition to those already mentioned, comb for “coelacanth,” “whalefall,” “puppy,” and “commatose.”

PACKS Melt the Honey (Fire Talk) — Melt the Honey, the third full-length from the Canadian act that serves as the main creative outlet for Madeline Link, was recorded over the course a few weeks in at the Casa Pulpo studio, in Xalapa, Mexico. Appropriately, the album has the idle-though looseness as PACKS builds songs around esoteric topics such as the printing press investment that nearly bankrupted Mark Twain (“Paige Machine”), high-fructose corn syrup (“Hfcs”), and a stray cat that loiters around the studio (“Missy”). Outside of John Darnielle, of Mountain Goats fame, there’s maybe no one putting pen to sheet music pages that gets as much mileage out of deciding that any stray notion is worthy of a verse-chorus combo than Link. The other commonality with Darnielle is that Link is almost preternaturally gifted at coming up with striking hook for her tunes. Melt the Honey evokes Soccer Mommy or Snail Mail in the slumping, low-key charm of its material. Link also earns comparison to even more storied practitioners of the pop song form: “Her Garden” has an XTC tingle, and “Take Care” echoes the darker edges of the Beatles’ Abbey Road. It takes real craft to sound this devil-may-care. Get more Melt with “89 Days” “Honey,” “AmyW,” and “Time Loop.”

CHEMTRAILS The Joy of Sects (PNKSLM) — The Manchester mad scientists in Chemtrails open up their magnificent music lab to a new collaborator on The Joy of Sects, enlisting producer Margo Broom (The Fat White Family, Magick Mountain) after more of less overseeing earlier releases on their own. Without tempering the oddity whatsoever, Broom helps Chemtrails level up in sonic authority across the album’s eleven tracks. The band’s place as devoted successors to earlier iconoclasts has never been clearer. They rock with Cramps-like abandon on “Sycophant’s Paradise,” invert Dick Dale surf rock with “Join Our Death Cult,” and skitter right up to a proper Doolittle grind for “Mushroom Cloud Nine.” The group’s trademark sludgy psychedelia gets a newfound springy energy, which enhances their skill with riotous theatricality. That quality gets its most striking showcase on “Endless Stream of the Bizarre,” which sounds like it was beamed over from an alternative reality’s musical that was presided over by Tim Burton in his gloomy genius days. Give it to the conspiracy of garish and gallant grandiosity with “Bang Bang,” “Superhuman Superhighway,” and “(Post-Apocalypstick).”