French artist M83 ( Anthony Gonzalez) draws inspiration for his new album, “Before the Dawn Heals Us” from shoegazer rock and dream pop, two briefly flourishing (mostly) British musical movements that created fierce washes of guitar feedback, in the first case, and drowsy soundscapes, in the second. By transposing these styles to synthesizers, M83 has given them a scifi sheen. The instruments may sound like 1980, but the overall effect places us closer to 2080.

Against this crystalline synthesizer backdrop, M83 creates a wintry version of the pastoral electronic sounds of bands like Mum and Boards of Canada. Voices float and disperse like breath on a cold day; sounds poke up here and there through the snow. It’s what wind blowing through the Fortress of Solitude might sound like.

In the age of ubiquitous iPods, we’re used to the incidental music of the street blending with that in our headphones. M83 takes this a step further: making incidental sounds a part of the original document. The song “I Guess I’m Floating” is a hushed, plinking piece layered over the muted cries of children playing; “Silent Night Shiver” unfolds over the drone of crickets – a sound that somehow suggests quiet better than silence itself.

This combination of blank canvases of synth and tiny suggestive sounds works on the brain like a Rorschach test: you can’t help but see shapes in the billows of music. It’s not enough to say that “Before the Dawn Heals Us” would make good soundtrack music; it’s music that demands a movie. A song with the pulpy title “Car Chase Terror!” all but supplies one, as a panicked and sleep-deprived mother and daughter try to escape the clutches of a murderous man.

It’s probably no coincidence that the album resembles other memorable soundtrack work. The song “Farewell/Goodbye” sounds like the haunting “Tears in Rain” from Vangelis’s “Blade Runner” soundtrack. Others recall the work of Air, Brian Reitzell, and Kevin Shields in “Lost in Translation” that helped to give Sophia Coppola’s Tokyo its hypermodern impersonality. The future may be bleak, but it sure sounds good.

***

For an altogether different take on the wintry weather, try Matt Pond PA’s “Winter Songs” EP, a slight collection (one original song, two instrumentals, and three covers) performed with a warmth and insouciance that recalls the lazy summer days of 2004 in which it was recorded.

The album opens with “Snow Day,” a lovely song of peace and childlike expectation. Pond’s cozy voice and the band’s chiming instrumentals give the feeling of sitting by a fire and watching the snow. A slightly sped-up cover of Neil Young’s “Winterlong” is closer to the Pixies version (maybe the most serene song they ever recorded) than the original, and warmed with a Hawaiian-sounding guitar bridge.

To round out the disc, Pond recovers Lindsay Buckingham’s pop gem “Holiday Road” from the “National Lampoon’s Vacation” soundtrack, and plays a delicate, echoey version of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over The Sea,” a song that features the distinctly unwintry lines: “but for now we are young / let us lay in the sun / and count every beautiful thing we can see.”

***

Listening to “Push the Button,” the new album from the Chemical Brothers, is like peering down the path not taken. As the pioneers of big beat, the dance-inspired sound that was supposed to transfer the energy of the rave to pop radio, the British duo enjoyed a brief flirtation with the American mainstream in the late 1990s. But since being spurned for the sexier, homegrown sound of hip-hop, the Chemical Brothers have retreated back to the dance underground.

“Push the Button” makes little effort to reconcile with pop. Most of the references – cowbells, whistles, four on the floor beats – come directly from the world of dance, and the slow-evolving songs are better suited to marathon DJ sets than the instant-gratification demands of commercial radio.

Unfortunately, too many of the songs aren’t gratifying – instantly or ever. “Marvo Ging” toys with a simple slide-steel guitar lick and a few notes on a xylophone for five and a half minutes, going nowhere fast. The album’s one attempt at straight-ahead hip-hop, “Left Right,” sounds uncomfortably like parody. Featuring Anwar Superstar, little brother to Mos Def, it wraps clumsy political verses around a chorus that sounds like an ersatz version of both Eminem’s “Mosh” and any number of G-Unit “soldier” songs: “all my soldiers march with me / left, right,” Anwar raps.

But then none of the vocalists fare very well. Whereas in hip-hop, vocalists give a song its identity, the Chemical Brothers seem to rob collaborators of theirs. Q-Tip lends a few halfhearted verses to “Galvanize,” the album’s opening track, before becoming a completely disembodied voice repeating a couple of words. “The Boxer” finds Tim Burgess of the Charlatans UK sounding, unrecognizably, like a soul singer.

In the end, “Push the Button” isn’t a joy but a comfort, like encountering an old flame who hasn’t turned out well. You’re disappointed, but reassured that you made the right choice.