If you’re the kind of performer who likes to grab the spotlight, singer-guitarists Julie Chadwick and Chris Zerby are probably the last people you’d ever want to be in a band with. Both are natural-born frontpersons who seem the obvious stars of whatever outfit they’re in. So it’s a perverse but lucky twist of fate that they both wound up in Helicopter Helicopter.

Listen to the band’s new By Starlight (on Lunch) and you’d figure that Zerby is the leader, since he does most of the vocals, though Chadwick’s harmonies (and leads on two songs) are crucial to the vocal sound. See them on stage and you’d figure it’s Chadwick’s band, since she’s the more outgoing personality. It’s shades of the old Frank Black/Kim Deal equation, except that Zerby and Chadwick still get along with each other.

“I like the idea of doing a lot of the singing and letting Julie do the relating,” explains Zerby when the band (whose line-up also includes drummer Ned Gallacher and recently joined bassist Shawn Setaro) and I meet for beers at the Druid in Inman Square. “I like the idea of being in a band whose personality is strong — and who can go collect the money at the end of the night.” Long-time watchers of Chadwick will recall that she was even more outgoing in the American Measles, whom some of us will always remember as the band who wore Kiss make-up during their semifinal set at the WBCN Rock ’n’ Roll Rumble. “The main reason we did that was because I was scared out of my skull,” she now admits. “I used to be so nervous on stage that I acted up a little bit. I don’t think we’re as insecure as we used to be.”

Even with the two frontpeople, it’s obvious that everyone in Helicopter Helicopter was on the same wavelength: this is a band newly committed to the joys of the loud pop hook. But it took them three albums to get to this point. The first two had their moments, but the songs tended to get buried under grungy guitars. By Starlight, their first with producer Matthew Ellard, starts right off with a big pop hook and keeps them coming throughout. Zerby points out that the album still has more guitar solos than the previous two, but they’re short solos — with 10 songs in 28 minutes, there isn’t a lot of room for excess.

“Any grunge has been edited out,” Zerby laughs. “But we talked for months about the idea of cutting the fat out of our music, and we spent loads of time in pre-production picking the songs apart. For instance, we’re singing a lot more vocal harmonies instead of unisons. And there were cases where a part would get lopped out of a song and a new chorus put in. In terms of role models, I was thinking a lot about the first Cars album — not the exact sound, but that it’s good pop song after good pop song.” Adds Chadwick, “I wanted it to sound more like the Flaming Lips, but we would have needed another six months in the studio for that.”

Helicopter Helicopter’s career strategy involves spacing out their local gigs and touring their butts off in the interim. They’ve crossed the country twice and gone up and down the East Coast too many times to count. “We feel strongly about not overplaying in Boston, but we also feel strongly about playing a lot of gigs, so that forces us out of town,” Zerby notes. “You can do well in some cities because one kid in a cool record store started getting your record around. That happened to us in Omaha, Nebraska, which was about the last place we expected to sign autographs.”

Finally, one obvious question: did they call the album By Starlight as a ploy to get written up in this column? “No, but I can’t believe you guys stole it from us,” deadpans Gallacher. “The connection occurred to me about two weeks after we got the artwork back,” Zerby admits. “But hey, it worked,” Chadwick concludes.

Helicopter Helicopter celebrate the release of By Starlight next Friday, April 6, with a show at T.T. the Bear’s Place that will have opening sets by Star Ghost Dog, Kitty in the Tree, and High Ceilings.

TAKE AN EXPRESSIVE SINGER with amazing range, add an emotional tone that’s mainly a dark shade of blue, throw in a mostly electronic backdrop that changes shape at every turn, and you’ve got Annette Farrington’s Azure Wonder & Lust (CVB). Her voice was always a grabber during her years as the singer for Opium Den. And her solo debut does what a solo debut should do — it allows her to explore different musical ideas and to express herself more directly.

“There’s a whole lot of longing and aching going on,” Farrington notes in a humorous moment as we give the disc a preview spin. “When I was in Opium Den, we were trying to do something that nobody had ever heard before. I know that’s an impossibility in the music world, but that was how we thought. We brought all of our influences together, our passions and our wisdoms and our quiet truths. Any of the pop you heard in that band, or any song with a pop-type guitar riff, was basically me. Melody is really the cornerstone of my life — it’s something I hear all the time. Everything in life is a potential melody or rhythm as far as I’m concerned.”

Still, Azure Wonder & Lust is a pop album only by the broadest definition. The songs allow Farrington to sing (and speak, and chant) in a number of different voices, with passing resemblance to everyone from Kate Bush (on “Viva,” a rock-flavored track with leaps into the high registers) to Marlene Dietrich (on “I Might Not Be Here,” which has a torchy cabaret feel and a French — rather than German — accent). She also gets into an unaccompanied vocal piece, some electronic pop in the vein of Splashdown (whose keyboardist, Kasson Crooker, appears on two tracks), and a bit of ethnic music (notably on “Black Man’s Daughter,” about her Bahamanian ancestry). But most of the songs are held together by that longing feeling, whether it’s romantic or spiritual.

“I’ve done some cabaret singing in my lifetime,” she notes. “I’ll admit that I haven’t mastered the relationship song yet; part of me would like to write a whole album of those kind of songs, but there’s already people out there who do it very well. I think I’m an optimistic person, and I also felt that way in Opium Den, though I had a lot of baggage at the time. Then again, my optimism might be the same as someone else’s depression.”

Much of the disc’s instrumental work was done by producer/programmer Anthony Resta, but Farrington’s now putting together a band to play live — something she hasn’t done since Opium Den broke up three years ago. “That’s a big part of my expression, the dynamic that happens when you get a group of people together in a room. It’s not something I want to give up.”

DURING THE TEN YEARS she worked in Boston, Jenifer Jackson did just about everything to get noticed. She played in rock bands (the Dertonz and American Gladiators) and played solo, did loud pop and acoustic folk/blues, and shared a few handfuls of female-songwriter bills with the likes of Aimee Mann, Jen Trynin, and Tracy Bonham. Then she moved to New York five years ago in search of stardom and a record deal, neither of which was forthcoming. By the middle of last year she was on the verge of hanging it all up — and sure enough, that’s when good things started happening. She got signed to the notable indie label Parasol (home of Sarge and the Posies) and in January released Birds, which has landed a few songs in a new indie film (Debra Eisenstadt’s Daydream Believers, which recently screened at the Sundance festival) while getting some national attention on its own.

Maybe it’s just taken this long for Jackson to hit her stride. If she’s had a problem in the past, it’s that her musical style has been hard to pin down, and her voice often outshone her material. Not the case on Birds, which tries on a bunch of styles (Bacharach pop, Leonard Cohen noir pop, stripped-down folk, a bit of country, and hardly any rock) but maintains a mood of gorgeous melancholy throughout. Backed by vibes, acoustic guitar, and brushed drums, Jackson uses a deeper register and a more intimate tone than she has in the past. Sometimes the subject matter is made clear (“My Impossible Love”); more often she deals in images and atmospheres.

“That’s just my inner psyche coming out,” she explains from her home in New York. “I know that most people actually think of a scenario when they’re writing and deal with one particular thing, but my motivation is always a spontaneous, ‘Dear Diary’ kind of thing. Some of it is just my reflections, struggling with doing this for a living and the personal things as well.” One inspiration for her shift in musical style was her father, veteran jazz DJ Julian Jackson, with whom she recorded a disc last year. “It reminded me that I was singing jazz before I was in rock bands. My writing is still pop, but I’m trying to stretch it to different territory.”

Among Jackson’s trials and errors was recording an album with UK cult figure Wreckless Eric, whose reputation for eccentricity proved a little too accurate. “He lives in a farmhouse in France with no hot water, and a studio the size of a bathroom. Shanachie wanted to put it out, but Eric refused to let them have the masters. He’ll probably put it out as soon as I get famous. I’ve been feeling a wave of encouragement since working with Parasol, but before that I was getting used to hearing the same things from A&R people — namely, ‘We love what you’re doing, but we don’t know how to market it.’ And I thought that was supposed to be their job.”

She’s found that her acoustic direction has worked better in New York than it might here — “We’re doing a quiet thing now, and it’s easier in New York to find a place when people come in and listen.” That opinion was borne out when she hit Boston last month and got drowned out by the crowd at the Kendall Café; but things should be a little more genteel when she hits Johnny D’s in Somerville’s Davis Square tonight, March 29.