Making "perfect pop" in 2003 is an inherently nostalgic project. Six-chord songs that snag on your heart lead inexorably backward, to the Beatles and the Beach Boys and long-expired fantasies of fun, fun, fun. But Fountains of Wayne's Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger want more from their pop than retro kicks. So they deploy nostalgia as an element in a dialectic: The misery of contemporary life is the realist thesis, pop joy the escapist antithesis. The synthesis is a record that rocks with a particularly modern sadness, as if to point out that rocking is not enough.

The characters on Welcome Interstate Managers, the New Jersey band's third and best album, belong to the miserable middle-class masses: cubicle workers struggling to find meaning in a cycle of mindless work and mindless leisure. The record's 100-proof melodies, milkshake-thick harmonies, and shiny production testify to the grandeur of their longings.

"Bright Future in Sales," sung by a heavy-drinking account rep, is set to the kind of raunchy guitar rock the guy would listen to in his Isuzu, pumping his fist to the beat. "Hey Julie" is nominally a love song to the girlfriend who gets the singer through the "hours on the phone making pointless calls," but we learn much more about her crummy job and asshole boss than about Julie herself.

This might sound snarky – hipsters with guitars laughing at suburban losers. But the slow songs are so lovely and the fast songs so catchy that the losers take on a kind of nobility. For Fountains of Wayne, the quiet desperation and futile daydreams of ordinary life demand music that's alternately thrilling and heartbreaking. There's nothing snarky about that. Fountains of Wayne play Fri/25, Fillmore, S.F. (415) 421-TIXS. (Gabriel Roth)

Dengue Fever
Dengue Fever (Web of Mimicry)

Though the group is L.A. based, a number of San Franciscans have been bitten by the Dengue Fever bug; according to more than one flaming, delirious friend, their New Year's Eve show at the Make-Out Room was the best way to ring in 2003. On paper the group's sound – garage rock, psychedelia, and spaghetti western atmospherics presided over by a pop diva who sings in the Khmer tongue – seems like an especially messy recipe for kitsch's brew. But ex-Dieselhed guitarist Zac Holtzman and his fellow musicians know how to individually showcase and skillfully fuse disparate elements. Best of all, Dengue Fever has a vocalist, Chhom Nimol, who could give her English-singing rock counterparts a few flawless lessons in high drama.

Corollaries for songs like "New Year's Eve" are hard to come by, but one might be Ennio Morricone's operatic surf rock theme for The Garden of Delights, in which an army of horns and a chorus of female Furies vie for euphoria. Throughout Dengue Fever, David Ralicke's saxophone adds an element of majesty that suits Nimol's regal voice – you could say the sax is her suitor (that is, when Holtzman's guitar isn't). Translated lyrics on the group's Web site reveal simple love poems that have personal and mythical facets. In more than one case, Nimol is perched on the threshold of adulthood, beating back "thick-skinned" and bearded brutes with one hand while reaching out for an elusive, sensitive mystery man with the other. Of course, it's her voice that truly reaches, and the effect is hypnotic.

Some songs here are cover versions taken from the recently issued Cambodian Rocks compilation of late-'60s and early-'70s obscurities, and the sole instrumental pays homage to Ethiopiques figurehead Mulatu Astatqé. But Dengue Fever's highlight, "22 Nights," was composed by the band. At its start, a slow-soaring flute solo creates a sense of wide-open space, then Nimol – who seems to survey the vast terrain from an elevated, spotlighted perch – begins the lament of a forgotten lover. Her keening voice and Ralicke's sax soon engage in a call and response that reaches epic scale, slowly fading away as specters invade the atmosphere. How do you say "Brava!" in Khmer? (Johnny Ray Huston)

µ-Ziq
Bilious Paths (Planet Mu/UK)

Mark my words, this is the year rave – in its pre-MTV, pre-car commercial state – comes back from the grave. On Bilious Paths – the fifth album by µ-Ziq, otherwise known as Michael Paradinas – the merry prankster of techno throws ambient house, ragga jungle, old-school hardcore, and acid techno together, distilling the genres into a series of microsamples and synth lines that act as nostalgic cues of an era past.

µ-Ziq is working with experimental techno and IDM's conventions, or lack thereof – his music more closely resembles the rabid pastiche of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher than the big dance-floor beats of the Prodigy or Moby. Nonetheless, his songs hardly suffer from a lack of emotion. The funk on Bilious Paths is always imminent, if not obvious. On "On/Off," shards of R&B freak talk are embedded in a poinging, stop-start techno ambient number full of squelching drums and alien harmonics. "Grape Nut Beats (Pt. 2)" is µ-Ziq's slinking take on two-step garage and breaks – its rough beats and bass slink along for a few seconds, threatening to settle into an easy groove, before being scissors-kicked by oddly time-stretched dancehall chat and a cavalcade of pitched-down amen breaks and machine jabs. If you are seeking some ballsy, peak-time, let's-get-happy 4/4 business, look elsewhere. Original acid house music was a dark, sweaty beast, and µ-Ziq preserves some of its ghastlier tones on tracks like "Siege of Antioch" and "Grape Nut Beats (Pt.1)."

Bilious Paths is far from straightforward dance music. µ-Ziq, ever the breakbeat loop provocateur, also chops up nearly every track with pops and gurgles, pips and squeaks, and plenty of frenetic drum 'n' bass breaks. But by the final three tracks, µ-Ziq has settled into a considerably more ambient pace, which makes the experience of listening to the entire disc not unlike walking through different rooms at a warehouse rave. µ-Ziq plays Fri/25, Bottom of the Hill, S.F. (415) 621-4455. (Vivian Host)

Allison Moorer
Show (Universal South)

"There was very little time in my life when I was taller than she was," Allison Moorer says of big sis and special guest Shelby Lynne during Show. "And here I am again – not taller than her." On her first live recording, the 'bama-born singer-songwriter nonetheless towers over her sibling, not to mention nearly all of her other contempo country peers. Composed of highlights from a two-night stint last January at Nashville's 12th and Porter, the hour-long disc culls material from Moorer's three largely overlooked albums, including last year's Miss Understood, and finds her holding her own against a slew of high-profile guests, including Lynne, Kid Rock, R.S. Field, and Lonesome Bob.