YEASAYER


“Fragrant World”


(Secretly Canadian)


Beyond human voices, natural sounds are scarce on Yeasayer’s third album, “Fragrant World.” Synthesizers and programmed beats define every song, using tones that flaunt their artificial attacks and ricocheting stereo placements. Even the vocals often arrive haloed in effects or surrounded by computer-tuned harmonies. It’s hermetically sealed pop, very deliberately keeping its distance from everyday physicality, and it suggests not an artificial paradise but a well-guarded isolation chamber.


On a first listen, the music sounds aloof and arty — and it is, full of conceptual wiles. But the next time around, pop hooks sink in; more often than not, “Fragrant World” is a snappy synth-pop album.


The songs are suffused with misgivings about humanity. Yeasayer has always had them. Back on its 2007 debut album, “All Hour Cymbals,” the band sang, “I can’t sleep when I think about the future I was born into,” though the music willed itself toward optimism. Not this time.


“Wish I could tell you that we’re all all right, but in truth we’re doomed,” the album concludes in “Glass of the Microscope,” a dire song about environmental pollution. The music places disembodied, altered voices within a sparse, throbbing track that sounds as if it had been bounced off a distant satellite.


Science is a recurring topic in the lyrics, in songs like the reggae-tinged “Henrietta,” with its seemingly hopeful chorus, “We can live on forever.” It’s not a love song; a verse refers to HeLas, a so-called immortal cell line used by researchers that was derived from the cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks.


Of course science also provided the computers and synthesizers that generate the sounds on “Fragrant World.” Ours is hardly the first era in which pop has considered the interaction of man and machine; there was a lot of that going around in the 1980s, when bands were fascinated by synthesizers far more primitive than what’s available now. Yeasayer at times risks joining the glut of bands recycling ’80s electropop, and surely knows it.


That must be why one of the most retro songs on the album, with an ’80s club beat, is called “Reagan’s Skeleton”; its lyrics sketch a horror movie plot about Ronald Reagan, zombies and the return of trickle-down economics. It’s probably no coincidence that the album appears in this election year.


Near the album’s end, one song fitfully breaks out of the electronic seclusion. It’s “Folk Hero Shtick,” a snide put-down of a rock star: “Prance around amphitheaters in your swelled head.”


The music starts in a synthetic, echoey blur. But identifiable tones soon emerge, with a distorted bass and, at one point, an oh-so-sincere ’60s sound — an electric 12-string guitar and a psychedelic glimmer of flute (or is it a Mellotron sample of flute?) — before the synthesizers start pumping again. It’s a measure of Yeasayer’s deep gamesmanship that, by then, the realistic, natural instruments sound like the intruders. JON PARELES


TAMIA


“Beautiful Surprise” (Plus 1)


As R&B continues to give itself over to hip-hop and, lately, to dance music, it’s left generations of singers in the lurch: where to go when aging, graceful or otherwise, isn’t much of an option?


At 37, Tamia is by no means old, but even in her younger years, she stood apart as a singer with purpose and fervor, and one with an appealingly flexible voice: booming on “Stranger in My House,” frail on “Officially Missing You.” Nevertheless, despite consistently strong albums, Tamia has been operating at the edge of the R&B mainstream for more than a decade, never settling close to the middle.


A decade ago that was a liability, maybe, but now it’s something of a relief. “Beautiful Surprise” is her first album of new material in six years, and it’s wisely out of step with her surroundings, even if not always successfully so. There are club tracks, largely produced by the Runners (like “Lose My Mind,” “Believe in Love”), that nod at the dance floor while never really stepping onto it. Of these, the title track, produced by Salaam Remi, hits hardest, juxtaposing restrained boom-bap against Tamia’s pretty fluttering.


Too often on this album she undermines herself and pulls back from her biggest notes, though not on “Still Love You,” a limp number that she trumps with power. It features vocal arrangement, writing and background vocals from the rising soul powerhouse Jazmine Sullivan, who undoubtedly set a high bar.


But these largely pro forma R&B songs turn out to be concessions — to genre, to age, to expectations. The true highlights of this album are the left turns. “Still” is a country update of her 2004 hit, recorded in Nashville under the guidance of the well-regarded songwriter Luke Laird. It trumps the original, with a mature, soothing arrangement that matches the song’s celebration of a love that goes on and on.


The same producer and session musicians also worked on Tamia’s elegant, though ultimately too restrained, cover of “Is It Over Yet,” which was a hit for Wynonna Judd in 1993.


The most striking song on this album is also the most modest. “Because of You” is a praise song through and through: not of a lover, but of a higher power. Tamia does her crispest, most straightforward singing here. Religious music has become a safe space for aging secular artists, who are no longer turned to for their take on young love. But this kind of exuberance has value too, especially for a singer savvy and gifted enough never to be boxed in. JON CARAMANICA


LIONEL LOUEKE


“Heritage” (Blue Note)