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Kinoshita Riki is a master of the hook.

When “Mizu no Naka no Knife” opens up Love/Hate, those first four chords are a paragon of utter simplicity. Once Kinoshita has reeled listeners in with that riff, there’s no way to shake off the rest of the album.

Love/Hate is an embarrassment of riches, a collection of the best hook writing assembled on one disc. From start to finish, the album hurtles at a brisk pace, tossing one perfect pop song after another.

It’s tough to single out a particular brilliant moment on this album because there’s absolutely no filler — every track is consistently strong, and it pretty much boils down to personal taste.

(My favorites: “Mizu no Naka no Knife”, “Evil”, “Skirt” and “Sonnet”)

Art-School borrows a lot from the Weezer playbook, from the big, doubled-up guitar sound to Kinoshita’s off-key holler. And of course, the loud-soft dynamic so intrinsic in 90s-era alt-rock is in full force.

But the comparrisons end there — if anything, Kinoshita is a better writer than Rivers Cuomo.

The chemistry between the band members, however, is an equally forceful presence. Kinoshita, drummer Sakurai Yuuichi, guitarist Ooyama Jun and bassist Hinata Hideki perform with an uncommon rock-solid timing.

On “Apathy’s Last Night”, the band plays interlocking parts during the verses, only to come together rhythmically in chorus. “Butterfly Kiss” seethes with a passion that builds as the song progresses.

The most dramatic moment on Love/Hate happens during “Skirt”. The song whittles down to just acoustic guitar and bass, but little by little, more instruments enter in till the entire song explodes.

Not since Number Girl have four people produced such a precise, dynamic sound. Oddly enough, Hinata left Art-School to join Number Girl’s Mukai Shuutoku in Zazen Boys. Ooyama quit due to exhaustion.

It’s no exaggeration to call Love/Hate one of the best albums to be released in the last 12 months. (It’s going on my 2004 favorite list, even if it was released in December 2003.)

For one set of songs to be consistently excellent from the first note to the last is a rarity to be hearlded.

Kicell’s first full-length album was titled Yume, which means “dream” in Japanese. And it was an appropriate word to describe the brother duo’s ethereal music.

Kicell’s third album, Mado ni Chikyuu (“window to the earth”), could also have been titled Okiru, which means “to wake up”.

The lush but sparse sound Kicell crafted on its first two albums give way to more concerte songwriting.

It’s also the band’ strongest album to date.

In the past, Kicell would take a lot of different timbres but meticulously arrange the music so the texture would remain open. This time, the brothers are willing to lay it all out.

“Yume no Tegami” uses a real backbeat during its chorus. “Yawaraka na Oka” feels grandiose without actually having to get too cluttered or too loud. And while “Umi Neko to Teishokuya” may include harp, toy piano and strings, the song focuses on the brothers’ dual guitar work.

The songs on Mado ni Chikyuu are faster as well. Kicell loves to write in a slow or medium tempo, often at the expense of momentum.

“Tokage Hashiru”, “Enola Gay” and “Kagi no Kai” offer a boost to the album which previous works overlooked.

It’s on these faster tracks that the brothers hold back on texture — “Enola Gay” is the closest thing Kicell has to a genuine rock song, the errant flute and trombone notwithstanding.

The tighter arrangements, coupled with more varied songs, makes Mado ni Chikyuu Kicell’s most accessbile album.

The haziness of the band’s past work clears up on this album, but it never totally dissipates.

Eclecticism has always been an important component to Quruli’s sound, but it’s often gotten in the way of the band’s songwriting as it has helped it.

On Team Rock and Zukan, the band veered between four-on-the-floor beats and rocking guitars. Perhaps the most unwieldy exercise of eclecticism can be found on 2002’s The World Is Mine.

Although dark and experimental, the almost ambient album was ultimately inaccessible.

With Antenna, Quruli has gone the other extreme and focused entirely on songcraft — and it’s succeeded.

Antenna is the most coherent album Quruli has recorded yet. Instead of leaping from quirk to quirk, the band instead hammers out one solid guitar-driven song after another.

If anything, there’s a decidedly Celtic feel to most of the songs. “Race” cleverly manages to find a common ground between lilting Celtic rhtyhms and the pentatonic contours of Japanese melodies.

“Morning Paper” veers between drone-like chords and a rock backbeat.

Other times, the band goes for some blues-styled grit without quite indulging in the blues itself. “Home Town” is pretty rugged, while the marching rhythm of “Hana no Mizudeppou” feels distantly folky.

In fact, a lot of cultural cross-pollenation happens on Antenna — it’s never too clear whether you’re listening to something inherently Japanese or European or American.

“Bandwagon”, though, is pretty blatant about being a folk-rock song.

While Antenna may Quruli’s most clever album, it unfortunately lacks something its previous albums didn’t neglect — strong singles.

“Rock ‘n’ Roll” is pretty much the only real single on the album, although the alternate take of “How to Go” sounds far better than the single version released in 2003.

But don’t expect anything on Antenna to rival “Tokyo”, “Wandervogel” or “World’s End Supernova”.

Still, Antenna is Quruli’s strongest album to date. It may not be the catchiest, but it’s definitely the most focused.

Electronica doesn’t require much as far as raw materials are concerned. A hook, a beat, some rhythm — that’s about all that’s required.

For its 2000 album Futurama, Supercar kept that aesthetic in mind, keeping its songwriting barebones but arranging the hell out of the album to make it seem larger than it was.

It’s been four years and two more albums since that first foray into electronica, and now the proverbial pendulum is swinging back.

Before Supercar took an influence from the Chemical Brothers to heart, the Hokkaido-based band played guitar rock in the vein of Ride and Jesus and Mary Chain. On Answer, the band’s seventh studio album and third to use electronica, Supercar has gone back to writing rock music.

“Last Scene” is probably most indicative of this creative shift. The live drums, the piano and the ethereal guitars are decidedly scaled back compared to such earlier works as “Fairway” or “Aoharu Youth”.

It’s also one of the band’s most appealing singles.

The eight-minute “Siren” stretches for as long as it does, not because its driven by a house beat, but because the band actually jams a bit.

The overtly electronica influence isn’t totally gone. “BGM” is robotic but catchy. “Recreation” is driven by guitars, but the feel is totally minimalistic.

But where the band could have used drum machines and walls of synthesizers to achieve the strange effects of “Justice Black” and “Wonder Word”, it instead relies on live playing.

“Sunshine Fairyland” could have been done entirely on synthesizers, but the live bass, guitar and drums are more than serviceable.

Answer also contains actual songs as well — not just a series of motifs set on repeat. “Dischord” and “Harmony” may fall back on repetition, but “Freehand” and “The World Is Naked” contain some actual choruses and bridges.

This album is perhaps Supercar’s most successful balance between rock complexity and electronica simplicity. It’s not as epic as Futurama, but it’s certainly a lot more substantial than 2002’s Highvision.

If anything, it’s the perfect answer to the question of whether rock and electronica really can get along.

There’s a lot of symmetry happening on the eight tracks of Home, Vol. 5, part of a series released by Austin, Texas, label Post Parlo.

Andrew Kenny, formerly of the American Analog Set, and Ben Gibbard, from Death Cab for Cutie, divide the EP in half, four songs from each, with one singing a song of the other. They don’t sing together on any of the tracks.

Kenny and Gibbard could also be considered flip sides of the same vocal coin — both have distinct, soothing voices. Songwriting-wise, Gibbard writes more extrovertedly than Kenny.

The only thing threading Home together is the instrumentation — guitar and voice, maybe a drum kit here and there.

This disc could almost be considered something of the Battle Between the Golden-Voiced Indie Singer-Songwriters.

In one corner, Kenny scrapes his way over the fret board, barely rising above a whisper. In the other corner, Gibbard practically belts by comparrison, sticking to the usual chords.

In reality, they’re not opposites so much as refractions of the same aesthetic.

But if a winner had to be chosen, it goes to Kenny, as evidenced by Gibbard’s reading of Kenny’s “Choir Vandals”. The track stands out among Gibbard’s own songs, and Gibbard sounds great singing the song. When Kenny tackles Gibbard’s “Line of Best Fit”, he slows it down and makes it conform to his own pace.

Home, Vol. 5 is a nice diversion, and it would probably faltered under its own weight were it expanded to something bigger. It may feel somewhat incidental, but that’s the trick about EPs — they have to make their points quicker than full length albums.

Some things look better on paper.

On their own, Benjamin Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello produce some really good music.

Gibbard is the singer and main songwriter of Death Cab for Cutie, while Tamborello crafts alien electronic timbres under the moniker Dntel.

The idea of Gibbard singing music written — or programmed, as it were — by Tamborello is fascinating in its own right, but the actual results seem rather, well, quaint.

Maybe not on the level of Chris Cornell singing with the guys in Rage Against the Machine, but there’s some parallel.

That doesn’t stop the Postal Service, as Gibbard and Tamborello call themselves, from being at the very least pleasant.

The duo’s debut album, Give Up, reveals the odd couple nature of the group isn’t very far-fetched — Gibbard and his sensitive croon, Tamborello with his analog chirps and squeaks.

It doesn’t matter whether Gibbard is fronting the guitars of Death Cab for Cutie or a polka band, for that matter — he still comes across the observant everyman with heart on sleeve.

“Clark Gable”, in which the protagonist imagines romance as a movie script, shares a lot thematically with “Title and Registration” from Death Cab’s Transatlanticism.

On “Sleeping In”, Gibbard dreams of a world of certainty that’s far better than the uncertainty of a waking state. His picturesque verses paint a vivid world, but it’s a simple chorus — “Don’t wake me, I plan on sleeping in” — that captures his sentiment succinctly.

It’s not much different from what he usually does.

Rather, the Postal Service is Tamborello’s show. He’s done far more daring work, but when forced into the strictures of the standard rock song, he handles himself incredibly well.

Tamborello gets to show off his true form on “Natural Anthem”, but everything else — from the college radio-friendly “Such Great Heights” to the moody “This Place is a Prison” — pretty much shores up Gibbard.

And it’s still far more interesing than other bands pillaging from the glory days of the Yamaha DX-7.

As a first effort, Give Up is an appealing work, melodic and textured, sythethic but possessing heart. It’s the work of two artists from opposite spectrums exploring the patch of middle ground between them.

Let’s hope the next time out, they’re willing to see how they can fit together the parts that aren’t common.