Nobody is concerned with reinterpreting the songs or surprising a listener, they just want to enjoy re-creating sounds and tunes they've loved, an attitude that's rarely alienating although it's never quite infectious, either.

Ultimately, Walking Shadows is a mature, sophisticated album that can stand head to head with the best orchestral jazz albums of any decade.

Weird Work ends up living up to its name: it's not as precious as Boeldt's previous albums, but it's not as envelope-pushing as its inspirations, and it's also some of his most accomplished, yet least immediate music.

Expect the expected with plenty of xylophones, campfire guitars, and Dawson's breathy cuteness mixing with Aesop's serious severity, but expect to be thrown as well, mostly by ideas of community and how strangers can leave lifelong impressions.

Ultimately, with More Than Just a Dream, Fitz & the Tantrums have made an even more infectious, club-ready album than Pickin' Up the Pieces, while still retaining all of the band's organic soulfulness.

While Maines' singing is the glue that holds everything together, the set's overly polished production and the scattershot curation of the material makes it feel like more like just a haphazard collection of songs than a cohesive album.

The camaraderie of the Pistol Annies cuts deep--they're a gang, encouraging the other two not to talk about Tina, praising sobriety, realizing life goes on even when love leaves--and that gives Annie Up a bruised, beautiful richness.

Time winds up a bit muddled, swinging from moments of genuine sweetness toward sharp saccharine, but even with all its flaws it's nice to hear Stewart engaged again, both as a writer and a singer.

It's more of an adept fusing of very distinct styles into something interesting and almost factory fresh, if not quite to the level of the bands they are drawing inspiration from.

The off-topic and amazing "Hamster Wheel" is here, and when that's added to all the other highlights, the album is well above worthwhile, as scattershot and frustrating as it is.

After three successful releases, this album sees Fink take stock of his life after years of touring and come to the realization that he, along with his friends and family, have long since grown up and left his much revered youth behind.

In some ways Silence Yourself doesn't provide the full Savages experience, but it offers more than enough to make it a powerful debut that suggests they'll become an even more distinctive force to be reckoned with over time.

Ultimately, if Hands was Little Boots' booty-shaking call to the dancefloor, then Nocturnes is the afterglow, post-party soundtrack for the ride home.

By turns raw and reflective, Monomania is about shaking things up; it's not as grand or cohesive as Microcastle or Halcyon Digest, but with repeated listens, its quick shifts in sound and mood feel more like different sides of the same coin than a split personality.

Cronin's second album is a step forward from his debut and shows off a guy with enough talent to step out from behind Segall's shadow and make it on his own.

For those of you already caught in the band's spider web of eternal summer, this album delivers the goods.

So cheerful is Golden that it seems a little churlish to complain that the songs here aren't grabbers: they're slow burns, designed to sink into the subconscious through repeated plays on radio, in-store sound systems, waiting rooms, and bumper music.

At times, Synesthesia falls short of the brainy synth rock bliss Hands aim for, and while their songs are almost unfailingly bright and fizzy, they're not always especially distinctive. Still, even the least memorable tracks will make lots of listeners bob their heads whether they want to or not.

Potter's vision and compositions on The Sirens never lose sight of his goal: portraying the eternal essence of humanity in the mythos of his subject; his poetic lyricism as a soloist, and his empathy as a bandleader are consummate.

The album works both musically and conceptually, offering up a collection of high-energy songs with a narrative that fans will be eager to dive into.

It makes for a big and a bit cumbersome listen, but K-Os is best when he's true to his moniker, offering the listener an unpredictable and unclassifiable blitzkrieg of ideas that range from clever to brilliant.

[Elephant Stone's] sound is alluring enough to warrant return visits to the album, repeated listens that reveal the album to be built on solidly sculpted songs where the riffs and melodies intertwine into something quietly enchanting.

C-Lance, Rob the Viking, and Aspect handle the production on this busy, word-filled, and winning effort.

The quality of the record is still on par with the first part, so anyone who enjoyed the previous record will certainly find more to love here.

Transit break the emo-pop formula and head in a pleasant, pleasurable, indie-centric direction for their second album on Rise.

Marius Bubat and Georg Conrad, assisted by an assorted cast who visited their Cologne, Germany studio--including vocalists Ada and Edi Winarni, and a handful of instrumentalists--have made one of the Kompakt label's more entertaining and less serious albums.

Their furious lyrics and chunky guitar lines are standard moshing and stage-diving material, but fans will be satisfied nonetheless.

What's really impressive, though, isn't that the band can do spacious or aggressive or psychedelic, it's that they can somehow find a way to cram it all into one album and make it work without feeling muddled or diminished in any way.