It’s impossible not to hear Arcade Fire all over London-based Fanfarlo’s debut album Reservoir; at times, if you didn’t know any better, Fanfarlo might sound like the best Funeral era tribute band you’ve probably never heard of. And though the sound is never as full as Arcade Fire, Reservoir is more whimsical—a dance in the cool rain of a hot summer night, John Cusack in seemingly every movie he’s ever made style—and more personal, forever brimming with the threat of a washout but never quite making it; less catastrophic than …

Iceland’s Sigur Rós return to once again prove that you don’t have to understand what the hell you’re hearing to fall in love with it. Their new album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, is the band’s fifth full-length offering, and perhaps their most dynamic. The album opens with “Gobbledigook,” a tumbling tune that sounds an awful lot like Arcade Fire, and is followed by “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur” which both seem to foretell a more robust—almost glam-era Bowie—grandeur to come. As a whole, however, the album settles somewhere …