These songs won’t convert skeptics, but they’ll give the faithful a few bloody noses.

Certain moments, like the opening and closing tracks, reach a little further past doo-woppish hippie funk into Ravi Shankar super-hippie sitar and ambient electro, suggesting a potential for experimentation in the second year of the Stepkids' existence.

A very pleasurable, punk-inspired listen. This is no-nonsense, fast-flying garage rock.

Kimbra's voice is strong, her beats are catchy, and after listening to the full 55-minute album, you're not quite sure what just happened, but you know you kind of liked it.

For the most part, the album stands as one of the stronger reunion records in a year that’s been practically overrun with them.

With this second solid Ladyhawke winner, she proves you can make them sing.

Not every song/experiment sticks, but there's enough sheer courage and musical inventiveness to merit back-to-back listens (and alienate swaths of hip-hop purists).

It's less bedroom, more band-centered than his previous work, but the music still feels uncomplicated.

This duo continues to develop without forfeiting the high-energy antics that have earned them such a reputable DIY name.

In a sparse 34 minutes, A Shut-In's Prayer switches tracks, tempos and narrators often enough to feel relatively fresh from start to finish.

With few exceptions, these are a solid collection of dance-rock songs and rock-dance tracks-Zonoscope represents the evolution of a band that knows what it's doing.

Though Loyal is a nail-biter at its core, the journey Alexander takes you on with this album ends with calm.

The album is deceptively simple, but underneath the easy-listening vibe lies a fascinating medley of genres and musical references.

Liberation! may not achieve its loftiest goals, but Bauer does manage to launch his solo career with talent and class.

On It's A Corporate World, the band's debut LP, Zott and Epstein are ready to let you step a little further into their joyous sonic world.

Sometimes lying on the wood floor or recording an album of pretty retro-pop songs is all you can do, and sometimes it's enough.

The Postelles is remarkably polished and consistent for a debut. If you're looking for something fresh, you'd do well to look elsewhere.

While the production and moodiness of the record are strong, the emotion that made much of their previous records such a pleasure has been a bit sapped.

Although it meanders for periods, Caveman’s self-titled is a well-crafted collection of songs that feels assured of itself and captures a consistent temperament of joyful exploration.

The music achieves a throbbing equilibrium halfway through each track, which makes it easy to zone out. So maybe this is just great zone-out music.

At this crossroads between excitement, adventure and melancholy, Gold Motel resides.

The result is the raw and crunchy folk record Total Dust.

The band's latest album, Join Us, expresses the group's signature nerd pride with a combination of simplicity and fantasy fit for ex-losers, children and those weird kids in high school.

As a debut album, Eagulls proves that this band has tremendous potential.

It cannot be denied that this album can’t help but fall short of the previous two records’ effect, given the massive quantity of pioneering moves captured in those albums. Nonetheless, whether or not Fucked Up can see it, they’re still doing the music world some good.

A solid, ambling around, summer daytime soundtrack, rather than the numerous nighttime ruminators we’ve already been frequently offered this year.

Where the Beets lacks flair in its musicianship, the players make up for it in their singing.

While he might not be saying anything groundbreaking or mind-bending, Alcala's lyrics speak to his band's earnestly lovable and saccharine nature.

Throughout all 13 of these tracks, whether fuzzed-out and aggressive or scuffed-up and jaunty, the band is so laid-back and mellow that there's never a break in the mantra: Nothing Bad Can Ever Happen [sic].

If you're fording a desert highway at dawn, these songs will get you across. They're consuming and expansive, steady and constant.

Plan The Escape and No Crimes are largely uplifting, though the descending bass line and drum combo on Crimes sounds like Queens Of The Stone Age doing Go With The Flow Light; and pseudo-ripped Depeche Mode lyrics like, “All you ever wanted, all you ever need” make for the album’s most clichéd moment.

The emotive howls of their pub rock provide catchy blasts of energy that are more familiar than groundbreaking but who’s quality should not be discounted for failing to meet the hyperbole that preceded them.

Instinct is an electro-pop album, but it's got that New Order-style darkness that gives it a comforting weight; this is that kind of bummer music that will make you dance.

It's too cavernous and intangible to dance to but too wired for relaxation.

Despite some loopier diversions, DeGraw’s solo flight is more precise than GGD, and the appeal of his technicolor melodies rely on that cleaner simplicity.

Like the cosmos itself, Interstellar is a grower.

On record, there is an irresistible sprightliness in the songs that says these guys haven’t worried once about their near-tribute sound.

The past four albums have focused mainly on the singer/songwriter. On Tripper, Johnson turns that formula around and focuses everything outward-the lyrical themes, the more-involved instrumentation and the mood.

Love Is The Law sounds like what would happen if The Memories took Lou Reed’s “serious musician” face and splattered it with neon-glow paint after a particularly inspirational train ride.

This album has the potential to appeal to imaginative listeners with a wide range of tastes.

There's a studio slickness and a consistent attention to detail here-crisp hand claps, crystal-clear acoustic guitar strumming, clean drums-that most contemporary garage-rock bands have little interest in.

For all of its work with dance music, some of Canyons' strongest tracks rely more on sounding like a band rather than a production duo.

What the album seems to lack in originality, it makes up for in classic rock 'n' roll sensibility.

The guys are able to transform the tangible aspects of their journey into sounds that turn the listening experience into a traveling experience.

Brittle, spare yet maximalist in sound, Content Nausea is mostly successful, with a few key missteps.

It unravels itself while unraveling you at the same time. It’s happy-go-lucky on the surface, more mellowed out underneath.

To match the classier trappings, Bronson puts on a slightly more professional showing--gone are the botched lines, the charming flubs and the repetitive stalling of Chips--and, for the most part, he pulls it off with style and grace.

This new album of old ideas hits hardest at its softest, most melancholy moments.

The best thing to do on The People's Key isn't to connect with Oberst's lyrics. It's to connect with how connected Oberst is with what he's singing.

The evolution is slight but impressive, and worth taking note of.

Aside from pushy cuts like “95 ‘Til Infinity” and “Amethyst Rockstar,” there are moments when some of the songs on Summer Knights are so uniform that they end up feeling like one exhaustive freestyle with much ado about nothing. But whenever Joey’s delivery gets a little stagnant, he’ll quickly fill a track with a winning bit of introspection and his signature throwback ‘90s flow comes to rescue.

The Flower Lane is a testament to Mondanile's growth as an artist that translates a prolonged history of potential into a complete and well-crafted work.

[A] rock-inspired electro-alien world that Lindstrøm has carefully crafted.

LV's skill and savvy when it comes to crafting spotlight-gobbling beats presents the biggest drawback for the album in that it's disappointing that there's not one instrumental number on Sebenza.

As convoluted as it may seem at first, there is merit to the deranged genius of Ariel Pink.

Enough of the sticky, fuzzy guitar rush remains (“Middle Sea”), though often only sneaking in and out of songs. Overall, the band continues towards an unfussy clarity to the instrumentation.

This album isn't going to isolate fans of Okkervil's older material, but it is going to require an acceptance that change has arrived.

If you're not paying attention, it becomes tough to tell if you've been listening to one really long song or three separate ones.

The years spent pursuing other musical projects refreshed Bloc Party, and the unofficial reunion record finds the band making an intense comeback.

Bursting Visions can at times feel like a record that emphasizes quantity over quality. Then again, this also makes it easy for pretty much everyone to find at least one song they like.

The Moon Rang Like A Bell is both subtly understated and completely overstated.

Now that Barrett’s had a solid touring duo together for awhile, and they’ve got a couple albums under their studded leather belt, the duo (Len Clark on skins) has that feeling of an act at its third album phase: assured, strong, but teetering on a decision to leave its comfort zone or not.

The overall feeling of the record is dark, but tracks like "Hector" and "Blank Maps" offer a bit of light.

The album’s strongest moments come when Felice settles on his deep, lush baritone and considers using it in favor of poetic lyrics or complex instrumentation.

Twin Sister has a sound, a well-produced, dreamy, indie synth-pop, slightly funky sound, and In Heaven sees the band blend teaspoons of different genres into that mix.

The brooding album is one for self-reflection on those winter nights when you want to be alone with your thoughts. This is great in its own right, but for the next album, the group might want to let a little more light in as well.

Although Joke In The Hole is an enjoyable listen, it’s by no means an easy one.

Towards the end of the album, tracks tend to blend into each other. Jesus definitely continues to push what she's good at, but this doesn't make for much variety.

This is a solid debut for the highly anticipated band.

Even though After The Disco lacks some boldness and experimentation, the record most definitely has its strong moments and, like its predecessor, it’ll please fans from either party who will most likely feel content from the first listen.

Neatly countering the initial pedal-to-the-metal energy of "My Girl," "Sweet Dee" is a slow-burning sunset cruise that makes Tiger Talk's destination entirely worth the somewhat familiar journey.

While it is nice to see MNDR's vulnerable side on slower tracks like "Stay" and "Blue Jean Youth," she is at her best with tracks that keep you moving like "Faster Horses," "Fall In Love With The Enemy" and "U.B.C.L."

Earth Sound System is structured with actual musical tracks interspersed between organized chaotic electronica. The attempts at the two different approaches to this type of music come off as undecided and incoherent, yet there is merit in the tracks that actually offer stable grounds for musical exploration.

The album has an easy-going pace to it, opening up a little more with each graceful transition and quiet revelation.

Float through this album right when you wake up or right before you go to sleep. Either way, it’ll calm you down and make you think.

The album churns away on a mid-tempo path throughout, ethereal harmonies skimming past and back to Adebimpe’s yearning lead vocals being the main thread through it.

Having spent so much time racing from one experiment to the next, it’s fun to hear the band settle in and take stock in its own legacy.

Like many psych-heavy records today, the album doesn’t say much lyrically. The lack of deep lyrical content is an easy detail to overlook due to Pond’s complex execution of instrumentation.

Enterprising Sidewalks is a multi-layered listen.

Will The Guns Come Out is a collection of pleasantly rough and catchy minimalist-rock tunes.

It's a brand of nostalgia concocted from listless energy, a wandering jumble of drums, soothing, eyes-closed croons, sighs and elastic vocals that recall different influences at every turn.

After a year-long medical hiatus, the band returns with Outside, an album that shows the group putting much more effort into melody and song construction but holding onto the same energy and dark mood as before.

The meat of Still Living isn't its quirks or vibes-it's the songwriting itself, and since the album fills two LPs and almost an hour of play-time, it has a whole lot of that.

This isn't happy-go-lucky music; these are sounds reserved for darkly tainted dance floors, where smiles aren't a part of the dress code.

For all the cutesieness that can subsume this sub-genre, it’s refreshing to see a band that can play it with a little R’n’R swagger and not just as a set-up for condescending kvetching and pink-hued album covers.

The compilation moves like a mixtape and the tracks work better together than individually.

Despite its excesses and missteps, the album gives Big Boi room to be Big Boi.

The trio proves it has a fat bag of tricks: floaty fast rhymes (Get’n Drunk), high gravity boom bap (Troublesome) and haunting alien lullabies (Nobody). But the fact that it’s Earl Sweatshirt’s heavy-lidded guest verse in Cold World that’s still stuck in my head probably means MellowHigh still has a few kinks to work out.

They leave Soft Moon's second album on a multi-faceted, adventurous note, though one that remains dark and eerie.

The issue on here is that not enough tracks combine both of these two, cool, newfound elements--Kinsella’s vocal and lyrical growth and the expert jamming that surfaces throughout.

The EP's only weakness comes in the form of "City."

All three members take to the LP's nine tracks with post-punk minimalism and as tracks draw on and the elements begin to take on a cohesive shape, it appears that by attacking with less, Little Joy inevitably comes together as more.

Having developed feelers on both ends, the partnership's combined strengths via production chops and band practice really lend to the record's debut maturity.

The synths are so smooth sounding that after a few moments they begin to lull you but not into sleep. This is way too dark of a place for sleep; it seems more like hypnosis.

It doesn’t push boundaries in the same way that Feel It Break busted up notions of genres, but its smooth production stabilizes the lyrics’ emotional bombast.

The album, titled Grace/Confusion, offers the chillwave sound that Hawk is known for but with a fuller, crisper and more melodic take.

This is part of Arcade Dynamics' charm: The release is pop-friendly with few tracks making the three-minute mark, until the fuzz of ambient outro "Porch Projector" kicks in.