Hard rock, pop top local roundup

Pristine pop and hot and bothered hard rock highlight the latest roundup of Vegas music releases:

THE BIG FRIENDLY CORPORATION, "... And So It Goes" (myspace.com/thebig friendlycorporation): Even when imagining the end, it tends to sound like a new beginning.

"Does this noose make me look fat?" singer/keyboardist/organist Melissa Marth asks on "Everybody Was Invited to the Party (But Me)," a whirring pop nugget that makes fatalism seem kinda inviting.

And that's the thing about Big Friendly: They sugarcoat even the most sardonic and sad-eyed of sentiments in bright, sunbaked melodies and sweet-voiced singing -- pretty much everybody in this quintet can carry a tune, and they do here, resulting in rich, layered harmonies.

But just when things threaten to get a little too saccharine, enter guitarist Jeff Ford, who lets loose with a duck-walking solo over thunderclap drums.

There's a cloud-covering of wistfulness that hovers about this record, a longing for the past, though the present seems to contain all the promise of youth for this bunch.

RED STATE SOUNDSYSTEM, "Ghosts in a Burning City" (myspace.com/jzellis): True to its title, the latest from Red State Soundsystem is both haunting and urbane, populated by fallen homecoming queens and the kind of dislocated characters who've come untethered from their very reason for being.

Singer/multi-instrumentalist Joshua Ellis gives voice to them all, alternating a late-night whisper with a wizened, affected rumble on an album that veers from dusky afterhours pop, "Scarecrow" could pass for a lost Afghan Whigs classic, to evocative, Boards of Canada-style collages of sound ("Secret King of Africa").

"I fall to pieces," Ellis sighs midway through the record, but here, he puts them together convincingly.

TAKING DAWN, "Time To Burn" (myspace.com/takingdawn): This is the sound of subtlety and restraint getting depantsed. A loud love letter to the huge, snot-slick Mutt Lange productions of the '80s, complete with massive, "Pyromania"-style gang vocal choruses, blazing guitar solos suggestive of steel-reinforced wrists and the occasional ear-pricking falsetto wail, "Burn" is a modern-day throwback to one of hard rock's most excessive eras. The band's debut is so oversexed, it practically humps your leg -- "I am not a man of superstition, but your body's my religion" frontman Christopher Babbitt announces at one point -- but ultimately, Taking Dawn is a pretty self-aware bunch, chuckling at chastity and their own outsized aura in the same hot breath.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.