The band aims for epic heights but all too often goes with the assumption that grandness is necessitated solely by noise. That said, there are glimmers of great things to come all over this record.

The bass churns, chimes tinkle, and tribal drums patter rhythmically, drawing listeners into wide-eyed sonic journeys only Prince Rama could cook up.

Bobby is sleepy and hypnotic; elements that guarantee a hauntingly enjoyable listen.

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.

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.

With only eight tracks and a run-time just over half an hour, this debut is a light one but hits like a featherweight champ.

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.

Clash Battle Guilt Pride sees Polar Bear Club's likable mix of working-class suburban punk and arena rock getting glossier production.

Creole's comeback mixes genres, wit and personal history with an amicable charisma that could only be cultivated by the type of guy who wears a zoot suit and a fedora any time after 1943.

The result is a terrific, fun and most of all, genuine follow-up from one of the best surf pop bands of recent memory.

Thrice's latest, Major/Minor, is one of those elusive, much-needed types of LPs: urgent, aching and filled with heaviness-like pouring-liquid-steel-into-a-cast-iron-mug-and-chugging-it-straight heavy.

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

There's a lot of heaviness swimming around this album, and though some songs, like "In The Grace Of Your Love" and "Miss You," play it lower and slower than your average dance jam, this is still a lively record.

The Golden Age Of Apocalypse is all warm vibes and morning sex instead of Cosmogramma's seriously zonked and far-out space grooves-light and airy melodies carried out on bass with the tinkle of synth and keyboard, clear uptempo drumlines and a high soul-influenced singing voice doused in reverb.

This type of zip-filed nostalgia is not particularly rare or new, but what makes this meeting of the minds work better than other collaborative vanity projects is the way these two artists' sensibilities flow seamlessly into one another, erasing any sense of the cut-and-pasting that brought the album to life.

Hurricane Dub is the original album chopped and screwed and recorded at the bottom of the sea, all murky bass, Jones' deep voice and rasta-twangy guitar.

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

Despite its inconsistencies, La Liberacion undoubtedly mixes it up.

Rapping With Paul White is part Afrobeat and/or ambient instrumental hip-hop, part energetic and demented rap, and part scavenger hunt of all the painfully obscure samples that sprinkle through White's beats.

By not exerting himself, Hynes manages to craft an easy-to-listen, easy-to-enjoy album that will be spun as a change of pace.

Condon's songs have always been flooded with emotion that sound both deliriously pretty and endlessly sad or foreboding, and The Rip Tide is no exception.

The biggest caveat of this album is that the retro aesthetic mars Grossi's attempts at emotional connection--it tries to resonate, but by tapping into our memories of heartstrings and not our actual heartstrings, it falls short. But as production goes, it's a success.

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.

From Africa With Fury: Rise is a solid sampling of Afrobeat, and if Kuti's goal is to show that his father's influence was not wasted on him, he succeeds brilliantly.

It's always a pleasure when a concept album can stand on its own without the concept, and that's what NewVillager is--a bunch of fun, carefully crafted songs.

In between the tape hiss, the nature sounds, the subtle reverb, the sighs, it becomes clear that Bad Vibes has a soul.

While the record might have benefited from some more discrimination on the cutting room floor, it's still a focused, complete record and a pleasurable listen.

Maybe Vampire Weekend is African-inspired indie rock and Fool's Gold is indie rock-inspired Afro-pop, but it's hard to deny their similarities.