Their name and song titles ("Return to Oz") may slip past some gaydars, but pop groups don't get much queerer than the Scissor Sisters. That's in every sense of the word too. Not only are the New York glam quintet composed of four boys who like boys and their fag-hag friend, but also their pro-popper disco anthems and piano-bar ballads are drawn from such unlikely inspirations as Elton John and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, while vocalist Jake Shears's impressive falsetto would give even Barry Gibb castration anxiety. Clearly, the Sisters' anomalousness goes far beyond mere sexuality.

Still, they're bringing the gayest sensibility to mainstream music since Imperial Teen released Seasick in 1996. The group's self-titled debut – already a number-one hit in the U.K., where flamboyant pop fares well – is a dancing queen's dream come true with strobe light-ready hits about acid-tripping hustlers ("Filthy/Gorgeous") and getting Mom trashed at a gay club ("Take Your Mama"). The Sisters' subversive genius, however, is that they hitch these potentially demographic-specific themes to hooks so infectious that it's easy to imagine even hetero guys singing along to lyrics like "I'm a classy honey, kissy-huggy, lovey-dovey ghetto princess."

Such universal appeal may be wishful thinking, but when gay-for-pay t.A.T.u. has been MTV's only "queer" representation of late, it's hard not to hope for a Sisters crossover. Besides, Shears et al.'s disco shtick is so fun, earnest, and different from their peers' music that only a curmudgeon could resist songs like their rug-cutting electro cover of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb." Scissor Sisters, simply put, announce their namesake as a very necessary new presence in pop: they're here, they're queer, and if the Sisters find the fame they deserve, everybody better get used to it. Scissor Sisters perform Sat/24, Slim's, S.F. (415) 255-0333. (Jimmy Draper)

Bebel Gilberto
Bebel Gilberto (Ziriguiboom/Six Degrees)

It would have been very easy for Bebel Gilberto to become just another jaded offspring of a musically brilliant parent. After all, her father, João Gilberto, laid the groundwork for bossa nova, and when Bebel made her stage debut at Carnegie Hall at age nine, there seemed to be nowhere for her to go but down. Four years ago Gilberto's first album could have been written off as novelty, yet Tanto Tempo introduced Gilberto not as a casualty of nepotism but as the reinventor of bossa nova. The album's relatively simple 40 minutes deconstructed the form, created it anew, and in the process spawned countless electro-bossa imitators.

Gilberto's second CD opens with a stripped-down cover of Os Mutantes' English version of Caetano Veloso's "Baby," a clear nod to the gods of Brazilian psychedelia and tropicalia. The magically hypnotic "Aganju" showcases the most exciting aspect of Gilberto, her collaboration with Bahia's mad scientist of percussion, Carlinhos Brown. Other highlights include the moody dramatics of "Ceu Distante" and the gossamer swing of "Cada Beijo." Gilberto sheds the hooks and loops that made Tanto Tempo so popular, and the result is a pensive, reflective, and appropriately self-titled album. Gilberto's success stems from her ability to draw on her rich background rather than soap-box from it, and by doing so, she has truly arrived as an artist. Bebel Gilberto performs Sept. 3, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk. www.apeconcerts.com. (Mirissa Neff)

DMX Krew
Collapse of the Wave Function (Rephlex)

Some of the greatest '80s synth pop was recorded near the turn of the 21st century by DMX Krew. Before electro was feasted upon by Les Rhythmes Digitales-style fashionistas, and long before it was bequeathed a suffix that rhymes with trash, U.K.-based Ed DMX brought a songcraft to the style that few of his forebears and perhaps none of his followers match. DMX Krew albums such as Sound of the Street and Nu Romantix would be just as tuneful – but not as pleasurable and fun – if rendered with stringed instruments. The good-time girls, street boys, and 20-minute affairs of 1999's climactic We Are DMX add up to perfect pop.

Four-plus mostly silent years later, the new mini-album, Collapse of the Wave Function, reveals a more reflective but still single and singular DMX Krew. One glance at the song titles is all it takes to know that Ed DMX has ditched wry lyricism for instrumental meditation. The mood is less sexy, more Aphex-y, yet smaller-scale comic touches – the "Popcorn" kernels of "Metronome," the "Flight of the Bumbelee" panic of "Bad Sector II" – still surf the sine waves. The resulting tunes demonstrate the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics rather than sex and romance, though the former and the latter probably could, if not should, be applied to one another. DMX Krew perform Fri/23, Cafe du Nord, S.F. (415) 861-5016. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Metalux
Waiting for Armadillo (Load)

Nautical Almanac
Rooting for the Microbes (Load)

Metalux's Waiting for Armadillo and Nautical Almanac's Rooting for the Microbes are vastly different albums, each well deserving of its own review. So I hope you'll forgive me for shoving them together here based on certain extenuating circumstances and coincidences, chief among them: both smack "noise" expectations upside the head; there's some band-member cross-pollination; and, as you observant readers have already noticed, they're both out on Load.

Metalux's J. Gräf and M.V. Carbon so scintillatingly twisted and pulled all the right knobs at a recent show that I was worried their new CD wouldn't measure up to the live hot-wired action, but Armadillo has turned out to be a souvenir that keeps on giving. There are 12 tracks, each a maverick in old-/new-school DIY High with a master's in sonic engineering. On them, guitar, drums, vocals that often sound like Lolita channeled through a C.B. radio, and an assortment of electronics are manipulated to exacting levels. It's a tangled web of power cords and chemistry and ideas that in Metalux's ever developing grasp comes off as a great collision between the worlds of noise and rock.

Nautical Almanac's Microbes, on the other hand, vehemently adheres to its outsider-art guns. To quote the liner notes: "No computers or electricity were employed in the music making process." Left to their rampant acoustic devices, N.A. captains Twig Harper and Carly Ptak, along with a host of collaborators, create a harsh, strange strain of folk. The combination of shrieks, moans, chants, warning bells, crazy braying and boinging, graceful banjo and vibraphone passages, and who knows what else accomplishes the band's sound mission of "being comfortable with being uncomfortable." For those of us who know the "uncomfortable" feeling well, it's an encouraging small step back to basics. (M.P. Klier)