MUSIC: PLAYLIST; Petulance With A Helping of Sugar on Top

By KELEFA SANNEH

Marion Raven

Most listeners probably haven't been losing much sleep over the fate of M2M, the Norwegian bubblegum duo that scored a few minor American hits during the teen-pop boom. But one of the singers, Marion Ravn, is still working with the Swedish producer and songwriter Max Martin, who is the best friend a young pop star can have. (Suffice it to say that his résumé includes ''... Baby One More Time,'' ''Since U Been Gone'' and lots in between.) He's all over ''Here I Am'' (MSI), the debut album from Marion Raven, as she's now known. And the album is full of the sort of sugary, petulant songs you'd expect from her, and from him. One problem: it's not available in America. Intrepid listeners can, and should, pay for the import. The merely curious can visit marion-raven.com, which has audio clips and videos, including the gloriously miserable one for ''End of Me'' and the gloriously vindictive one for ''Break You.''

Music and Movement

Have you been searching for an obscure, outrageously wimpy album of Scottish indie-pop to call your own? Probably not, but ''This Is Music and Movement'' (Newtown), the debut album by the Glasgow group Music and Movement, certainly fits the bill. (Visit musicandmovement.co.uk to hear some songs.) The group, led by Finlay Macdonald and Lorna Lyon, who aren't shy about their obsession with the Velvet Underground and the Jesus and Mary Chain. Barely half an hour long, the CD is full of bleary but sweet songs that always seem to be about to fall apart.

Da Backwudz

So how does an emerging group stand out from the Southern hip-hop pack? Da Backwudz, an emerging duo from Decatur, Ga., did it by making a weird, woozy video. For ''I Don't Like the Look of It'' (Rowdy), Da Backwudz enlisted the team known as the Fat Cats to direct a video that looks like the song sounds, that looks, in other words, like some twisted version of ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.'' The chorus is a sample of the Oompa Loompas from the 1971 film version of the book. And so the video finds the rappers delivering their tough lyrics while exploring a world where everything's candy-colored, from the cars to the dancers' hair. Maybe this is also a sly form of musical one-upmanship: who needs ''Laffy Taffy'' or ''Candy Shop'' when you could be exploring Willy Wonka's world instead?

Lobi Traoré

Mr. Traoré is a Malian singer and guitarist, and the leader of the Lobi Traoré Group, which has a self-titled CD (Honest Jon/Astralwerks) out soon in America, and on it the band is loose but precise, conjuring one off-center groove after another. And while Mr. Traoré knows his way around a serpentine solo, he's even more impressive playing something more repetitive: in ''Koro Duga Mele Bila,'' where a guitar figure grounds and stabilizes the music with the same few notes. The lyrics are in Bambara, and for one frisky song, ''Deni Kelen Be Koko'' (''Lonely Girl by the Riverside''), the booklet provides one pithy sentence: ''Come on, girl, let's fool around.''

Isolée

Last year this German minimalist (his real name is Rajko Müller) released ''Wearemonster,'' his second enthralling album of propulsive electronic creations. Now comes the indispensable companion piece, ''Western Store'' (Playhouse), which collects tracks that appeared on vinyl singles between 1997 and 2003. Working with skeletal house or techno beats and mysterious hazy echoes, he creates dance music that's both severe and dreamy. While most of these meticulous tracks hint at a hidden exuberance, the last one does the opposite: it's an exuberant reworking of his best-known single, ''Beau Mot Plage,'' and brings out the jazzy groove that must have been hidden there all along.

Rihanna

How do you follow a summertime hit? With an ad campaign, of course. Rihanna, who broke through last year with the pop-dancehall hit ''Pon de Replay,'' is back, promoting something called the Nike Rockstar Workout. At nikewomen.com, you can watch the video for Rihanna's new single, ''SOS,'' which provides another answer to the same question. How do you follow a summertime hit? By singing an infectious R&B song over the beat from the new-wave hit ''Tainted Love,'' of course. Why not?