Everyone wants to have their hard rock candy and to eat it too. Album five ushers in that gimme-gimme, want-it-all attitude that seems embedded in the he-screeched-she-yelped White Stripes' full-length Get Behind Me Satan and the Foo Fighters' double-CD, In Your Honor. And both find their power in the difficulties of reconciling the rift between riff and melody, soft and hard, love and loss.

For the Foos, that translates into a release that's half samey-sounding, highly commercial rock, and half slightly less samey-sounding, but still highly commercial quieter ballads, neatly divided like a middle school dance between the boys' and girls' sides of the cafeteria. The first disc of In Your Honor emanates a vaguely GI Joe, warlike whiff. From the heraldic cover art to the martial connotations of the title track, disc one seems to get off on the unrelenting sameness of its sound, a controlled blitzkrieg surrounding symphonic, over-the-top rock that's capable of lending some knee-jerk excitement, if not actually emotional power, to "Army of One" military recruiting ads. It's as if Dave Grohl and company – unable to cede their hard-rock crag to Victory Records comers, etc. – are channeling a fascination with Isis, My Bloody Valentine, and '80s hair bands into something palatable to mainstream radio programmers, creating the aural equivalent of the sexy, sadistic, and ultimately empty love-is-a-battlefield kicks of Mr. and Mrs. Smith – with nary a scrap of humor. How can Grohl even attempt tired phrases like "No one's getting out of here alive" – compressing all nuance from his vocals to the point of dismissable flatness and shouting back at Evanescence et al with a kind of Soul Asylumish, '90s-era romanticism ("DOA") – without expecting thousand-yard stares or outright yawns?

The softer, acoustic guitar-dominated disc two nearly redeems In Your Honor with some glimpses of the human stake behind the rock machines: Will Grohl ever be able to live down Nirvana's legacy ("Friend of a Friend") – and will he ever bring himself to release an entire album of this music without fearing he'll be tagged a sensitive singer-songwriter wuss? After finishing the quiet side (which includes guests John Paul Jones, Norah Jones, and Josh Homme), Grohl has said, they went back and reworked the rock disc because "there was no way we could let the acoustic stuff kick the rock stuff's ass." Too little tinkering too late.

In the war of the sexes, during a sexualized war of Abu Ghraib-style S-M, the White Stripes fare better, milking the down-home strip-mall mysticism of Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn album covers for their current image (with Jack White in Marty Robbins-style Old West drag) and demonstrating admirable follow-through on the he-she, love-lack, white-black, country-blues paradigm. The ambiguity of the title points both ways, like Meg and Jack in the album art: Do we turn our back on Satan – or desire the devil's backup? The White Stripes like it both ways, knitting together Meg-vocalized childlike sing-song with Jack's stringy, piercing Robert Plantisms: snakes, scripture, apples, red dresses – they're old polarities, but they still work for the Whites. Here Satan is, more often than not, a woman, turning a white blossom blue ("Blue Orchid") and imbuing a doorbell with uncertain, threatening power ("My Doorbell") – a Rita Hayward-styled she-devil who just might resemble Jack's new wife, model Karen Elson ("White Moon," "Take, Take, Take"). Animated by a ruthless catchiness and sliding by on a right-on combination of beat and melody in the form of the duo's latest familiar – a marimba – songs like "Forever for Her (Is Over for Me)" embody the pull of the horned, horny one. Going to hell rarely sounds this fun. (Kimberly Chun)

Origin
Echoes of Decimation (Earache)

The cover of this record appears to have been designed by hostile hippies: There's a grumpy face superimposed on a picture of the cosmos. Maybe it's not possible to make frightening metal covers anymore, since so many bands have tried to get brutal, we've become desensitized, and they all look like a little boy's idea of what scary is.

But even though the cover art is silly, the music continues to be great. Origin are such a good band – they're excellent musicians who play at speeds that are hard to comprehend, and with the precision of a brain surgeon. The opening track, "Reciprocal," is filled with riffs that sound like the guitar sound effects Wayne and Garth make when fading to another scene.

It's hard to say what these guys are singing about, although I did catch the word "Satan" a few times. That's fine, and typical of death metal. "Cloning the Stillborn" starts with the sound of a baby's heart, which stops after a few beats, and before you have a chance to recover from this horrible loss of life, in come Origin with screaming guitars, machine-gun drums, and growling vocals proclaiming their desire to clone stillborn babies. That's a pointless thing to do – unless newborn babies have a divine spark inside them that can be extracted and eaten to travel through time to ride dinosaurs. The song "Amoeba" probably has nothing to do with large independent record stores – it's probably about a teenage runaway who loves train sets, misses his mom, and hates his dad. Go home, Amoeba – your family misses you. The only thing missing from this record is a really slow and infinitely heavy break. That's one of the best elements of death metal and one of the only dynamics taken advantage of in the genre. "Echoes of Decimation" has a break that is slow but not slow enough – it should be as slow as the tortoise who eventually beat the hare. (Nate Denver)

Dressy Bessy
Electrified (Transdreamer)

If you name your band after a Playskool doll and contribute songs to The Powerpuff Girls TV show, chances are cute doesn't strike you as a particularly loathsome four-letter word. Or, at least for the sake of Dressy Bessy's members, let's hope not: Since 1997 the Denver retro-pop quartet has sounded so gosh-darned adorable that it's made even the direst of situations seem downright cheerful. "If I'm sad," vocalist-guitarist Tammy Ealom once said, "I turn it into something that makes me feel better." Which explains why albums like 2002's Sound Go Round (Kindercore) found her giddily delivering lines about cheating boyfriends and other romantic woes as if she were singing about unicorns and litters of kittens. Cute, in other words, has always been an understatement when describing Dressy Bessy.

But that's not always the case on the band's latest album, Electrified, on which Ealom's delivery and subject matter are more evenly matched than ever. Sure, she still exudes genuine joy when belting out infectious "la-la-la"s, but on songs like "Who'd Stop the Rain?" and the relationship reality check "Stop Foolin'," she also conveys sadness, frustration, anger, and resignation – a virtual smorgasbord of emotions compared to the incessant cheerleader-style enthusiasm of previous albums. Likewise, the music takes unexpected turns: There's plenty of peppy, infinitely hummable indie pop to go around, but the band subtly infuses garage-rock riffs and even a little country for a sound that, for the first time, isn't too cute for its own good. Dressy Bessy performs June 22, Bottom of the Hill, SF. (415) 621-4455. (Jimmy Draper)