In the songs on Caveman’s debut album, “Coco Beware,” there’s always something flickering and hovering within the mix. It’s a corona of reverb or distortion, or perhaps a sustained keyboard chord or a looped noise, or an unwavering one-chord strum. It’s different from the aggressive, barbed-wire distortion of shoegaze rock, murkier and more vaporous: present but not overwhelming, neither hostile nor welcoming, just a fact of the soundscape, a blur at the horizons. (As a matter of mechanics, the blurring has a lot to do with the capabilities of Caveman’s guitars, which are all handmade by one of the band’s two guitarists, Jimmy Carbonetti, at his Cobra Guitars on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.)  The deliberate soft focus lends depth and an air of mystery to what might have been cool-headed, straightforward indie-rock; there are echoes of the Feelies, the Strokes and, somewhere in the distance, the Beach Boys. Matthew Iwanusa sings lead vocals in a high tenor that stays clear but undemonstrative, calmly delivering terse, elusive lyrics: “Forward motion/’Cause I would like to be one/Decide on me/You’ll try you’ll see.”  Within the fog are clear-cut four-minute songs that set up firm drumbeats and guitar-picking hooks on their way into verse-chorus-verse. One, “December 28th,” is just a two-chord, light-reggae ditty — suitable for, say, Jack Johnson — that lilts, “Our love is here to stay/ooh-woo-woo-hooh,” complete with vocal harmonies. Without hiding the song’s catchiness the production sends clouds of sustained sound drifting past the beat and vocals, all nonchalantly spacey.  But just under the surface anxiety seethes. “My Time” and “Old Friend” grapple with jealous suspicions, while in “Easy Water” the band sings, “I don’t know where I am going/It seems like someone has lost their mind” over a forest of percussion and minor chords strummed into nervous swells of tremolo. In “Thankful” the harmonized, enigmatic refrain — “Thankful are my friends with remorse, ah ah ah ah” — becomes a climactic crescendo, with jittery guitars piling up until the voices disappear. The blur isn’t any kind of cushion; it’s everything the serene, neatly patterned songs can no longer hold back. JON PARELES  The pleasure of Los Campesinos! is the pleasure of hearing Gareth Campesinos! talk — ramble, really — about miserable things. Like Conor Oberst in the prime of his early-2000s Bright Eyes purge, Gareth is a welcome raconteur whose tone may sound skittish, but who’s actually confidently snide. He has a laserlike focus — not so much on the women who’ve wronged him, but on the many ways he’s taken that wronging to heart.  Or at least one of the ways: Gareth describes heartbreak as the splaying out of his innards not once, or twice, but on three separate songs on “Hello Sadness,” the fourth and, believe it or not, most restrained Los Campesinos! album. On “Hate for the Island” he likens his pain to a fox tearing apart trash bags: “Those entrails are how I’ll feel when you decide to leave me,” he talk-sings.  On its first three albums this seven-member Welsh band — they all use Campesinos! for a surname — has been winningly nervous and chaotic, an apt pairing for Gareth, who has taken his self-lacerating confessionals to frenzied extremes. Often the music had a catastrophic air, like several worlds ending at once, but here it’s almost uniformly polite, tightly structured, tame. Still, the band is better when not holding back, like on the fantastically stomping choral hook of “By Your Hand,” or the polyphonically dense “Songs About Your Girlfriend,” the most acidic song here. “If you want a list of all of her favorite bits,” Gareth taunts, “The next time I am free/Quite comprehensively/I will scrawl them all down for you as an apology.”  All those words compete for room uncomfortably sometimes, like on “Life Is a Long Time,” and the more gnomic Gareth gets, as on parts of the warmly pastoral “Every Defeat a Divorce (Three Lions),” the less compelling he becomes. But when he gets to the point — “If you were tomorrow, I’d be today/And this is the end” on “Baby I Got the Death Rattle” — it’s like someone shouting fire in a crowded room, then narrating the carnage. (Los Campesinos! play the Bowery Ballroom on Wednesday and the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Thursday.) JON CARAMANICA  Ersatz G. B. (Cherry Red)  The dominant voice by Mark E. Smith on the Fall’s 29th album, “Ersatz G. B.,” or at least the funniest, and the one that creates the moments you will remember, is a hard, monstrous, guttural yell, like something coming from a very angry baby lodged inside an old man. He uses it best on “Greenway,” a song named after a current guitarist in the band, Pete Greenway, whose aggressive sound unspools, supercharged, all over the record, and who for some reason is not credited on the CD insert as a member of the band. The name, grotesquely shouted, becomes the refrain: “Greeen-waaay!”  “Greenway” uses a riff that sounds like 1990s metal, with a little funk in the drums. The credits indicate that it is based closely on a song called “Gameboy” by the Greek rock band Anorimoi from its album “Kings of Feta,” released in 2005. (This must be what Mr. Smith was thinking about last year when he told an interviewer that the record, then under way, sounded like “Greek heavy metal.”) In “Greenway,” which does not seem to be about Mr. Greenway at all, he tells a story about “channel-hopping through Danish rock TV” and finding a video that looks like one he was in. While performing this song at gigs last year, Mr. Smith made negative references to the band These New Puritans. He might be talking about their video for “Attack Music,” which has a similarity to the Fall’s video for “Bury Pts. 2+4”; both use dark lighting and slow motion.  I’ll stop now. Trying to make wholeness of purpose out of Fall records is a waste of time. As usual, most songs are built on one or two hard vamps with a passionately abstract intuitive mess on top, wrought by Mr. Smith’s irritable and inventive words, making familiar jargon seem like foreign language, and his sonic interruptions as a producer. (In “Age of Chang” he uses what sounds like a cassette recorder to present a tinny version of the band playing the song, before the band itself, in better fidelity, comes in on top of it.) The mess can be tense and charmed, or just dull. “Ersatz G. B.” is too often dull.  The band and Mr. Smith are doing much the same as ever. (Mr. Greenway and the whomping, just-the-basics drummer Keiron Melling, are the M.V.P.’s.) But if you compare this record to the Fall’s last two, “Imperial Wax Solvent” (2008) was more mysterious, better articulated and funnier; “Your Future Our Clutter” (2010) was harder rocking and thematically more coherent.  Mr. Smith’s attention seems to wander, unless he has a narrative, as he does on “Nate Will Not Return,” which has something to do with the character played by Chace Crawford on “Gossip Girl.” (Television is one of the only solid landmarks or referents in the words; another is Captain Beefheart, whose lyrics from “Trout Mask Replica” seem to have influenced a few phrases.) This is a recondite, quickly palling record. I find myself able to recommend no song in full. Only a few gnomic interjections, which include: “Do not underrate what I say!” And “How can we recover?” And “Greeen-waaay!” BEN RATLIFF
âCoco Bewareâ by Caveman, âHello Sadnessâ by Los Campesinos! and âErsatz G. B.â by the Fall are among the albums recently released.