The Blow and Haim Release New Albums "Days Are Gone" (Columbia) Like grinning babies, like stringy taffy, like pink sunsets - it's hard to disagree with Haim. The Los Angeles sister trio - Este, Danielle and Alana Haim - is gloriously synthetic, ruthlessly triggering familiar pleasure centers developed three decades ago. There's the slightly sinister bubblyness of early Madonna, the erotic power of Pat Benatar, the breathlessness of Sheena Easton or Laura Branigan. Haim lashes all of these together with force and glee, a rapturous throwback. "Days Are Gone" is as convincing as any major-label rock album this year, especially its first half, which is slick, confident and winningly breezy. The majority of this album is produced by the band with Ariel Rechtshaid, who knows how to make small, precise bands sound huge. All over this album, the drums hit with spacey reverb, Alana's keyboards shimmer and linger, and Este's bass throbs and gurgles. The drummer, Dash Hutton, provides just enough structure. Danielle, the frontwoman, sometimes sings with a carnal huskiness, with an almost bluesy undertone. But despite the darkness, she's an uplifting singer, using pace and cadence as weapons of cheer. All three sisters sing - sometimes solo, sometimes in sugared harmony - mostly about relationships that get abandoned. Sometimes the women of Haim do the throwing away - "I'm sorry I did what I did/ But it came naturally" on "The Wire," about accepting responsibility for the end of a relationship with a shrug - and sometimes they're the thrown. But style trumps words in almost every case here, making for songs that are potent when they're not particularly meaningful. Thanks to its overwhelming and triumphant exuberance and the care with which it embraces its palette of influences, Haim has made itself impossible to hate. Kanine You could call the Blow a duo, or even a band, but it subverts bandness. At the root it's an idea: plinky synth-pop that hides its own smarts, with articulately undramatic lyrics about sexuality and relationship dynamics with both women and men. As of "The Blow," its first new record in seven years, the band - or whatever - is Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne, the installation and conceptual artist. Ms. Dyne works on the light and stagecraft of their live settings and, as expressed recently in a carefully worded news release, much of their recorded sound. "Anything that gave the songs dimension (arrangement, engineering, synth programming, sample perfecting, half of the composing) was done by her," it reads. Most of us - including Brian Eno - would call that a producer, but, you know. What you notice here is Ms. Maricich's alto voice, plain but game; her occasionally mumbled, second-guessing lyrics about kissing and flirting; fresh ideas about how to design a song, including idiosyncratic dynamics and sampled sounds from mouths and instruments; and, most of all, far more sophisticated harmonies and melody lines than before. Cheap and bloodless electronic pop is too easy to imitate and score points with these days. Someone's been studying how to transcend that problem; this album is always both intelligent and sentimental. That release mentions "our record collection," describing it as "stacked with art rock heroes, new wave romantics, R&B thumpers, and radio pop." A thread through those subcategories might be Green Gartside (and his long-running project Scritti Politti) - another gifted songwriter who looks at relationships in the abstract, another electro-pop band that never exceeded two people, and possibly a presiding spirit to this record.