The production (a return engagement from Tucker Martine) remains relatively economical throughout, leaving plenty of room for Thao's distinctive warble/weep to unfold its tales of passion spent and soured.

Regardless of whether or not the band lost whatever career momentum their debut generated, as a piece of music, Three Fact Fader fully delivers on the promise that was left hanging in the air for so long.

With a somewhat re-jiggered lineup, they pick up the thread of that release with the follow-up, Light a Candle.

Easily the singer's most stylistically wide-ranging album, it is also one of his brightest, poppiest, and most fun.

While it isn't quite as honed as "Standing in the Way of Control," on Music for Men the Gossip sound perfectly at home in their new digs, while remaining true to their essence.

While the band's subtlety and consistency threaten to work against them at times, XX is still a remarkable debut that rewards repeated listens and leaves listeners wanting more.

Heartbreak can tear a songwriter to shreds, but it serves the opposite purpose here, lending a sense of vulnerability to Fink's baritone and adding some much-needed drama to the band's music, which previously concerned itself with twee-styled progressions and summery melodies.

Fortunately, he hasn't matured out of his core strengths: his vitality, his expressiveness, and his knack for twisting the vagaries of everyday life for urban youth into material for songs.

Air remains a deceptively subtle band, but repeated listens to Love 2 reveal that Godin and Dunckel aren't just remaining true to their aesthetic here, but that even a smaller-scale album from the duo has plenty of wit and surprises to offer.

He's still writing finely observed vignettes that manage to intersect life as we live it with life as we wish we could live it, and as such, he has more in common with a short story writer than he does with the typical singer/songwriter.

Besides connecting the dots between the chugging side of Neil Young and the slightly warped alterna-pop of the Flaming Lips, Built to Spill continue releasing some of the most affecting, beguiling indie rock of the 2000s.

As David St. Hubbins said, "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever," and Saenz's locker-room humor wears thin quickly. Even cameos from Slipknot's Corey Taylor, Anthrax's Scott Ian, Nelson's Matt Nelson, the Donnas' Allison Robertson and Brett Anderson, and the Darkness' frontman Justin Hawkins can't keep the same dick joke interesting for 40 minutes straight.

Thanks to the production, the performances, and the songs, the Raveonettes have delivered on the renewed promise of "Lust Lust Lust" and made a very good, almost great, noise-pop album.

While Tokio Hotel may not have matured enough to hang with the big boys yet, they are most certainly the dark horses pacing up and down the Disney fringe.

Lou Barlow is still the poet laureate of hiss and heartbreak, and although the hiss is missing on Goodnight Unknown, that's the only defining quality he's lost with the passage of time.

Exploding Head is a fine step forward for A Place to Bury Strangers, and shows they're among the best bands bringing shoegaze into the 21st century.

The List is a renewal and a testament to life, and it belongs to her father as much as it belongs to her, a beautiful restatement of her father's passions, only now, they've become his daughter's treasures, as well.

The Sound the Speed the Light falls a few feet short of the level of excellence Mission of Burma have set for themselves in the past--though most contemporary bands would be overjoyed to make an album as interesting and compelling as this one.

The warmth it conveys is immense, and along with the happiness it provides, the album also shows that the Clientele continue to be one of the best pop bands around in the 2000s.

On This Is Us, the group sounds great for their age, and they sound like they're at their peak.

When they stretch out, they get intriguing, if mixed, results.

Childish Prodigy is split between drunken caterwauling and quiet hangover-recovery sessions, and both sides of the spectrum are fantastic.

After spending a little bit more time swaggering than wooing, he's back to crooning and it's amiable and appealing, if not overwhelming.

All of this is a far cry from Azure Ray's work, perhaps, but Ask the Night is often gorgeous in its simplicity.

It's filled with engagingly warm-sounding tunes mating melodic accessibility with a winning lyrical evanescence powered by the same kind of poetic dream logic that's cropped up in Califone's concepts before.

Sunset/Sunrise shows that with a bit of judiciously placed accompaniment and a more ambitious use of the studio, the duo can add depth and gravity to music that was fine stuff to begin with.

Dead Man's Bones isn't perfect, but it's often fascinating and nearly always charming--and Shields and Gosling wouldn't have it any other way.

Pearl and Eatherly don't escape their past entirely on Break It Up, but they're well on their way to waving goodbye to it.