Today I’m trying to get through some recent electropop CDs of one stripe or another, all of which entertain me.

Sally Shapiro: Remix Romance Vol. 1 and 2 (Paper Bag): Swedish dance pop singer Sally Shapiro has one album – Disco Romance –   and these two albums of remixes from it have piqued my curiosity. She has the breathy, girlish voice you recognize from countless one-hit wonders from the 1990s, but there’s enough in the song to give the producers something to work with. Tensnake swaddles her in 1980s Madonna, Holy Fuck adds some darkness and muscle, and the Junior Boys remake her in their sonically lonely image. Since Shapiro works to avoid the limelight and press – never played live, never has done interviews – she’s a completely plastic entity, offering no conceptual resistance to the contexts she’s placed in. Still, everything comes out slightly sweet or sweetly melancholy, so she’s not completely amorphous. I’m not sure one disc is better than the other, butI listen to volume one more because I like the Juan MacLean, Holy Fuck and the Junior Boys.

Crystal Castles: Crystal Castles (Last Gang): The songs by this Toronto synthpop duo don’t stretch out like the Shapiro remixes do; in fact, seven of 17 songs are under three minutes. That’s the punk in them showing, something that also crops up in the occasions when Alice Glass shouts a song’s lyrics like she’s two rooms away from the microphone. On those occasions, she is accompanied by the sound of combat during 1980s arcade videogames; in the more melodic moments (which dominate the album), her voice is processed within an inch of its robotic life and set to the sweet little riff the game played when your player started or died.

Kassin +2: Futurismo (Luaka Bop): This album is the third from the group, the previous two released as Moreno +2 and Domenico +2, the name change theoretically telling us who’s driving the car. In this case, the result is lush, contemporary samba and bossa nova that is periodically tested by ambient sound, stray guitar parts - and as the album progresses – surf guitar parts that eventually become surf songs. The retro drum machine and Moog parts accompanying the sugary “Ya Ya Ya” draw the clearest line to Tropicalia (after Moreno, who’s last name is Veloso and is Tropicalia pioneer Caetano Veloso’s son). The trio is joined on three songs by sympathetic souls John McIntire (Tortoise) and Sean O’Hagan (the High Llamas, Stereolab), and you can hear O’Hagan’s contributions to “Lakeline” in the Brian Wilson touches – the banjo and stacked harmonies.