Beach House's sound was fully formed at the time of their 2006 debut. They had slow, shadowy dream-pop down; at times they recalled Mazzy Star or Galaxie 500, but songs like "Apple Orchard" and "Master of None" had a dark and blurry resonance all their own. Artists that start out so assured and distinctive can run into trouble on second, third, and fourth records. Hardcore fans are there no matter what, but others may wonder: Do I need another album from this band? When I'm in the mood for what they bring, can't I just put on what I already have?

Teen Dream, Beach House's third album and first for Sub Pop, obliterates these concerns. This is both the most diverse and most listenable of their three full-lengths, and yet it never seems like a compromise. It feels like the product of careful, thoughtful growth, bringing in new influences-- bits of mid-1970s Fleetwood Mac, sparkling indie pop, even a few soul and gospel touches--- while maintaining the group's core sound. Teen Dream is a stirring reminder that good things can happen when you move out of your comfort zone.

The interplay between Victoria Legrand's voice and droning keyboards and Alex Scally's guitars is still the key element of the band's aesthetic. But here, each song has its own palette, which creates new possibilities. So the repetitive guitar figure, double-time kick drum, and crashing cymbals in the opening "Zebra" immediately suggest movement, signaling that this record will have a dramatic sweep unheard on the band's more pensive beginnings. And the whispery "ah-ah-ah" backing vocals that open "Norway" imply a new openness to the allure of pop pleasure, as that bit of ear candy finds a sharp contrast in the seasick-sounding slide that hovers over the verses. More somber ballads like "Better Times" and "Silver Soul" have the thick, churning gloom familiar from earlier records, but they acquire more force by being placed alongside tracks that allow for more light. Front to back, the arrangements and sequencing are superb.

Despite the brighter, more pop-informed sound and an album title that brings to mind the hazy nostalgia of youth, Teen Dream has a pretty sad heart. Because the music is so effective, the churn of emotions is there even when you don't know exactly what Legrand is singing about (this can happen easily with her unusual phrasing). But a closer listen reveals songs about uncertainty, doubt, and feeling beaten down by the world. "Walk in the Park" sounds romantic on paper, but this is a journey taken alone as a way to try and forget someone who is no longer around. The choppy verses, nudged along by the sort of cheap drum machine Beach House use expertly to suggest loneliness, explode sideways into a shimmering chorus that finds Legrand busting out a time-heals-all-wounds affirmation over a calliope organ. This chorus turn is a big moment that gets more affecting with more listens, lunging from resigned sorrow to an anxious plea, and it accomplishes this mood swing with a damn catchy melodic hook. A similar lift-off happens on "10 Mile Stereo", when the song shifts from its deliberate opening bars to its rushing and noisy main section that's as close as Beach House have come to true shoegaze. The gorgeous racket is affixed to a song about feeling dead inside after another failed relationship: "Limbs parallel/ We stood so long, we fell."

Though the Teen Dream lyrics are printed in the booklet, they lose their power on the page. "Real Love", from the album's less immediate but equally rewarding second half, has my favorite imagery from the record, and is also Legrand's best vocal performance. At first, it's just her and a piano, with chords that lean toward gospel. Hearing her voice in such a spare setting reinforces just how rich, earthy, and, dare I say it, soulful it really is. "I met you somewhere in a hell beneath the stairs," she sings, "There's someone in that room that frightens you when they go boom, boom, boom." There's pain in these lines, but her cracking, husky intonation amplifies it tenfold. It's easy to miss that Legrand's presence is forceful and deep rather than ethereal and angelic, but here these qualities stand out like never before, lending her darker laments extra weight.

As with Liars' Drum's Not Dead, the Teen Dream CD comes with a DVD containing videos for each of the record's songs, all by different directors. The clips range from 8mm found footage to colorful Flash collages to silly stories that clash with the music in a big way. To be honest, it's a little overwhelming to be dealing with 10 videos when you're getting to know an album, and I'm not sold on this sort of package at this point. The DVD, while it looks reasonably interesting, seems like something to spend time with later, after the record has had a chance to sink in. For now, I'm more inclined to close my eyes and imagine my own pictures for Teen Dream. The music has been inspiring some pretty vivid ones.

Delphic emerged from the BBC's recent poll of tastemakers as the nation's most hotly tipped new indie band, but in 2010, in the UK, this is not such a great accolade. It's a sign of the post-Britpop times that in the final tipsheet the band actually finished third, trailing behind a couple of arty female pop acts (think this year's version of Florence, or Little Boots). While 2009 was a golden year for U.S. indie, in the UK it was the moment the term "landfill indie" went mainstream, denoting the domestic glut of torpid, timid, generically retrogressive guitar bands. The post-Strokes tide that kept British indie afloat through the 00s, from Franz Ferdinand to the Libertines to the Arctic Monkeys, has finally gone out, leaving a clueless generation of charmless groups high and dry.

Delphic are being heralded as a way out of this dismal situation. They're wired and sequenced for the dancefloor, as opposed to plodding and strummed for the student moshpit; suited and booted rather than dowdy in denim; stylishly poised rather than scuffling and shambolic. On the face of it they represent a break from recent orthodoxy; in truth, it's hardly a novel approach. In recent months Snow Patrol returned averring that there'd always been a dance element to their music, while Editors attempted to update their reference points all the way from 1980 to 1982 with the addition of a few studiously vintage synthesizers.

In fact, if Editors had shown real commitment, persuaded their singer to take one for the team, and recruited the drummer's girlfriend on keyboards, they would doubtless sound an awful lot like Acolyte. To have reached the third paragraph of a Delphic review without mentioning New Order is practically a feat of self-discipline, but it can be avoided no longer. Delphic, let's be clear, are a rather brazen yet undistinguished attempt to reconstruct and exploit the trappings of Factory Manchester circa 1985.

The funny thing is, the odd crackling guitar line and synthpad chord change apart, they actually don't sound very much like New Order. All three Delphicians did national service in the landfill trenches, and at their worst, on tracks like the opening "Clarion Call" and "This Momentary" you can still hear the lumbering basslines and prosaic piano chords of some sub-Coldplay sketch, like old wallpaper under a cheap lick of paint. At their best, the spangled guitar and chattering sequencers are more likely to put you in mind of the fleeting beauty of "Perfume" by Madchester also-rans Paris Angels, or even late 80s rave-pop chancers the Beloved.

Though the band protest that Factory comparisons are unwanted but inevitable for any Manchester group attempting to marry rock dynamics with dance technology, that they are far too young to remember the Hacienda and are more influenced by German minimal techno, they desperately invite the comparison. Titles like "Halcyon", "Ephemera", and "Submission" are simply gagging to be expensively set in sepulchral type by Peter Saville. It's like they've audaciously claimed the rights to the Factory franchise, like one of those authors who's commissioned to write the new James Bond novel or Gone With the Wind sequel. And inescapably the comparison, once raised, does them no favors. Though both groups are fronted, on the face of it, by poor singers reciting vapid lyrics, you're left pondering once again the strange alchemy by which Barney Sumner was so often so lazily transcendent. And as any busker who's bashed out "Bizarre Love Triangle" will tell you, New Order's melodies-- which you'll search for in vain on Acolyte-- are indestructibly lovely.

To be fair, Acolyte is never less than stylish: dusted with powder, brushed and polished to a fine gleam, as shiny but generic as a new car. Producer Ewan Pearson has constructed a shimmering, relentless soundworld and a couple of tracks-- "Doubt" and "Counterpoint"-- attain an urgent, anxious euphoria. It's just that it feels so characterless and anonymous.

Maybe in the end, Delphic are as authentic an expression of modern-day Manchester as Joy Division were of the city in their own time. It was one of the more dubious claims of Tony Wilson, after all, that Factory remade the city in its own image, that the Hacienda, once built, was a premonition and inspiration for the 21st century city of steel and glass. The British urbanist Owen Hatherley has written of how modern Mancunian speculators these days actively trade on the legacy of Factory, of how old industrial warehouses had been transformed into "cramped speculative blocks marketed as 'luxury flats' or 'stunning developments' with an attenuated, vaguely Scandinavian aesthetic." He adopted the term "pseudomodernism" to describe this capitalist appropriation of modernism as spectacle or logo, divorced from any social or political ideal. It's a term that might serve just as well to describe Delphic, or indeed a great deal of British music today, vainly trading on the modernist impulse of their 80s forebears. "Pseumo Pop," then: it's no landfill indie, but for now it will have to do.