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.

Ultimately, this set proves that the debut was no fluke, and this genre-bending meld of street traditions both East and West is capable of appealing to anyone with blood instead of sawdust in her/his veins.

Headlights' third album, Wildlife, is at once their most immediate album and also their most reserved-sounding and emotionally powerful.

Somewhere Gone is a different animal from Cervenka's acoustic music of the late '80s and early '90s, at once simpler, riskier, and more confident, and it captures one of the great wild talents of her generation in strong and impressive form, still unafraid to take her talent in new directions after more than a quarter-century of blazing trails.

Johnston's craft as a vocalist can rise to the level of Falkner's well-crafted soundscapes, he's going to sound out of place on his own albums if he keeps making records like Is and Always Was.

Carlile still prefers sobriety to levity but it never feels affected; it's music that gets under your skin and cuts to the bone.

While the more upbeat tracks on Threadbare are competent and downright catchy, they're ultimately engulfed by the fog from which they were born.

The resulting Run Rabbit Run dutifully re-creates its creator's hypnotic, quirky, and oddly sweet song cycle, and peppers it with enough dissonant bow slides and odd harmonics to please the avant-garde crowd while keeping the twee melodies intact for the casual indie pop fan.

With its captivating set of beer-stained rockers and heartfelt ballads, 1372 Overton Park offers a triumphant example of gritty, sweaty, all-American music.

She remains musically mercurial and virtually unclassifiable, even if she is at her most accessible on Devil's Halo.

Compositions range from the lengthy to just fragments, and while it feels at points more like a collection of sessions than necessarily a complete stand-alone album conceived as such, the end results are still well worth hearing.

Classic and maybe even a little awesome, Sonic Boom makes that "hottest band in the world" tag much easier to swallow.