E-Mail This Article to a Friend DOWNLOAD No unifying theme whatsoever BY CARLY CARIOLI

MADONNA | "HUNG UP" | WARNER BROS.

Telecommunications handsets have advanced drastically over the past 20 years. Love-song metaphors about them? Not so much. If a suitor left Deborah Harry "Hangin’ on the Telephone" in late 2005, she’d be able to pass the time on her Rokr by downloading Madonna’s Abba-sampling disco-pop single, and probably by text-messaging Mrs. Ritchie for dance-floor producer du jour Jacque Lu Cont’s AIM alias.

CAT POWER | "THE GREATEST" | MATADOR

Desperately seeking her own Dusty in Memphis, the dusky sulkstress hired out Ardent Studios, White Stripes/Loretta Lynn engineer Stuart Sikes, and members of the legendary Hi Records house band. But the result, at least on this Matador-leaked title track, doesn’t sound dramatically different from her sultry, rumpled catalogue.

DUOTONE | "SERVE THAT PU$$Y (BOSTON BOUNCE REMIX)" | BEAT RESEARCH

Raunchy club music from Baltimore, Detroit, and Miami tends to be populated with imperatives to sexual assault — "Pop That Pussy," "Grind on Dat Booty" — but DJ C and DJ Flack, the lab techs at the experimental party-music lab Beat Research, flip the script by offering kinder, gentler sleaze: "You better learn how to lick that pussy tonight." Meanwhile, a custom-built, hopscotching riddim dubbed Boston beat allows them to stretch and squish the vocals — screwed down, then chipmunked up — without varying the bpm.