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Gossamer (Frenchkiss/Columbia/Sony)

(out of 4)

When Michael Angelakos, the 25-year-old singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist behind Passion Pit, was forced to cancel a run of U.S. tour dates last week with the stated intention of “improving my mental health,” the world was served notice that the fragile character who inhabits his songs is probably closer to the real thing than we’d thought.

Passion Pit’s kaleidoscopic pop whimsy has camouflaged an undercurrent of melancholy in almost everything Angelakos has issued since his Internet-borne signature hit, “Sleepyhead,” launched him on the way to unexpected stardom in 2008. Outwardly, Gossamer is a peppermint-coloured riot of buoyant laptop-pop melodies, sped-up samples and sunny youth-group choruses that, at their most falsetto and saccharine, sound like they’re being delivered by a kick-line of chubby-cheeked animated animal characters.

On the lyric sheet, it’s a very different story. The happy hardcore-esque rave gallop of “,” for instance, masks a desperate last plea to stay to a lover driven away by the protagonist’s mental instability (“My head’s come off now all my thoughts are stumbling”) and thirst for gin and pills. “On My Way” seems like a genuine proposal to Angelakos’s real-life fiancée, but its infectious sweetness is tempered by the occasional note of warning: “Just believe in me, Kristina / All these demons, I can beat them.” Album closer “Where We Belong,” for its part, is a suicide fantasy; it’s a beautiful little song, but it’s also rather troubling, even if you’re not aware that its author is currently seeking treatment for bipolar disorder.

Tolerance for dense musical hyperactivity, squeaky falsetto vocals and overall earnestness is required here; in the wrong mood, this is like being trapped in an elevator with an entire glee club. But unless you’re completely dead inside, Gossamer has a tune or two going for it that’ll make you smile, even if some of the choruses are so big and goopy they’d make Starship blush.

Top track: “.” New Order sped up to 45 r.p.m.

Ben Rayner

Jazz

Don Cherry

Don Cherry: Organic Music Society (Naxos/Caprice)

The history of the best of seriously far-out music might top the list with Organic Music Society, the 1972 double vinyl album made available on CD for the first time only recently. They key word here is “seriously.” Organic Music Society is jazz’s response to the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile.

Recorded in Sweden in the early ’70s by expatriate American cornetist/keyboardist Don Cherry, it’s more about sound than notes, experience that simply hearing and time captured rather than time passing. Toe-tapping stuff is hard to find.

Cherry sings, plays piano, pocket cornet, harmonium and percussion throughout. The onetime leader of New York’s free jazz wails on a conch shell in “Manusha Raga Kamboji.” String instruments drone as one tune melts into another. Structure is kept to a minimum while music minimalism itself is acknowledged in two pieces titled “Terry’s Tune,” both inspired by Terry Riley, the influential minimalist American composer.

Only two cuts — “Elixir” and “Relativity Suite” — were recorded in a traditional studio setting. The other 11 non-studio tracks were taped using portable equipment in temporary spaces taken over by Cherry, his wife Moki Karlsson, and a like-minded coterie of musicians including a good many of Sweden’s top players such as Bengt Berger and Tommy Koverhult along with emerging Brazilian singer/percussionist, Nana Vasconcelos.

Cherry solos brilliantly but seemingly at some distance from the microphone. His blistering multi-note trumpet filigrees stand out bright and shiny against the more distant repeated rhythmic pattern that itself sounds as if coming from a passing caravan carrying ancient and obscure instruments into — or out of? — the 20th century.

Jazz was splintering when Organic Music Society was recorded, rather like North American society itself. Unable to change his society, Cherry’s move to Sweden was meant to preserve his music’s future. Heard now some 40 years later it’s the sound of the past perfect.

Peter Goddard

Classical

SARAH-JANE BRADLEY & CHRISTIAN WILSON

English Music for Viola and Piano (Naxos)

Two very talented, younger British musicians tackle gorgeous, neglected music for a gorgeous, neglected instrument, the viola. Violists may be the most common butts of jokes in the musical world, but Sarah-Jane Bradley can silence the lot with just a few strokes of her silken bow. Paired with sensitive pianist Christian Wilson, Bradley elegantly lays out three great, meaty works and one sweet trifle from 20th century England. Here is music that gingerly walks the line between late-Romantic power and experiments in colour and light similar to what the Impressionists were doing in France. The duo’s mix of power and sweetness does wonders for the three big pieces, Edgar Bainton’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, from 1922, Theodore Holland’s 1938 Suite in D for Viola and Piano and, the star of this disc, the 1919 Sonata for Violin and Piano in F Major, subtitled “Colleen.” Bantock, who taught and conducted as well, brings a powerful sense of structure to music that is at one sweet and serious. The brilliant little extra is a 1960 encore piece by York Bowen. The viola never sounded better.

John Terauds