ALIEN BOY You Wanna Fade? (Get Better) — On their third album, You Wanna Fade?, Alien Boy sound as far from disappearing, gradually or otherwise, as a band can get. Hailing from Portland, Oregon, Alien Boy make a big, boisterous sound that owes a debt to a legion of power pop and emo antecedents. The band employs three guitarists — A.P. Fiedler, Caleb Misclevitz, and lead vocalist Sonia Weber — and doesn’t skimp of giving each of them plenty to do. Nor do they rely on this waterfall of six-string sounds to carry the day. The thick walls of guitar intermingle with dreamy pop and clanking, semi-industrial rhythms on “Cold Air,” for instance. “I Broke My World” is squalling, soaring, and sour (“Step by step I unraveled it/
Until there was nothing left”), and “You Want Me To” is buffed to a high gleam. If redundancy of style does sometimes threaten to creep in, the group is usually ready to slam down the clutch and find another gear. The drifty ballad “Morning” and the quietly rapturous title cut attest to that. Alien Boy constantly seems to be finding their way, in the best possible sense. On You Wanna Fade?, it almost seems like the keep happily surprising themselves. There’s a whole lotta shine here. Bring the album further into focus with the following tracks: “Changes,” “Another Brand New Me,” and “Everything Stays.”

ROBERT FORSTER Strawberries (Tapete) — Any songwriter who can claim shared authorship of the Go-Betweens’ catalogue has no need to burnish their legacy. As the Australian semi-legend pushes into his late sixties, though, he remains committed to his art. Recorded in Sweden with a crack backing band, Strawberries finds Forster engaging in lifelong craft with a soft-shoe ease. The genial skiffle of “Good to Cry” is a apt measure of the temperature. Always favoring sonic crispness and lyrical clarity, Forster embraces storytelling on this album. Without losing a personal touch, Forster offers these eight tracks as a short story collection that can be hummed along to. “Breakfast on the Train” is a tale of trysting that is reminiscent of the best work of his countryman Paul Kelly (“So they talked through the night/ The tightening screws felt so right/ The hotel was her idea/ It was expensive but it was near”), and “Foolish I Know” employs a Leonard Cohen-ish flair for stentorian drama in depicting the inner questioning of a man who’s gat as he finds himself smitten with a gent who isn’t. The centerpiece of the album is appropriately the title cut, a charming duet with his wife, Karin Bäumler. The lyrics seem to allude to continuing survival together in the wake of the cancer diagnosis Bäumler received a couple years back: “It took time to recover back from the edge of the knife/ There are many ways to discover the road back out of the night/ The road back out of the night.” In every way, Strawberries is about the art of advisably keeping on keeping on. Savor these delectable cuts: “Tell It Back to Me,” “All of the Time,” and “Diamonds.”