The album's best moments are when Drew's fundamental pop becomes unhinged and thrashes passionately about its aesthetic playground, planetoids seeming at odds in their mad swing through space but connected by some invisible force.

It's the songs that are swollen, and Rogue Wave will likely remain a moderately successful act whose new album is slept on because its floral solidity isn’t enough to hold up the heft of its length.

In the end Love Is Simple is less than the sum of its parts. Its balls-out rock is fun but hopelessly overloaded (like, how many vocal tracks do these songs really need?) while its softer sections sound like brief intermissions before the guitars pick up again, making them relatively limp.

Let’s Stay Friends is the most ambitious abuse of genre the band’s yet laid, like somehow when the indie revolution got gerrymandered Les Savy Fav came out on top.

Strawberry Jam might be art, but more interestingly, Strawberry Jam might be pop. Okay, avant-pop.

Thing is, though, that for every failure Graduation puts me through it has many a saving merit that only the nigh witless audacity of Kanye West could afford

With Playtime Is Over Wiley is finally living up to his reputation by achieving consistency without becoming mediocre; delivering a steady, honed set that's sharp enough to split flesh from bone.

The album is frontloaded with its best numbers, and they seem to descend in quality as the album progresses.

When the Deer Wore Blue feels like a safe record. As they play this record too close to the chest songs blend together, needless repetition pervades, and most of the record's latter half is undistinguished.

It's a safe album, almost exactly what you'd expect from Chao. The artist continues to be the best (perhaps only) provider out there of Clash-inspired polylingual punk rock, but for a musician who built his solo reputation on quirkiness and innovation, the disc feels a bit flat.

Liars is all about that Liars blueprint, and in that sense the album can get redundant.

Aesop Rock’s terrifically brooding new record.

Panic Prevention is no classic, but a wonderful testament to intuition, which boisterously, and rightfully, posits Jamie T in that rare class of pioneering artist, one who has created a piece of work to stand with any of the other notable records released so far this year.

Although there are a couple of failed tracks--like the tediously slow 'The Turn'--most of this stuff is groundbreaking.

Yes, the beats are big and the sound is mainstream and commercial; however, the band sound restrained and uncomfortable.

As a Caribou album, this is mediocre. Not bad, but it's not much of a Caribou album anyway.

Newcomers to Earlimart will surely be lured in by Mentor Tormentor's seductive and, yes, absolutely frickin' beautiful sound, while longtime fans, depending on their expectations, will either passively embrace the familiarity or pine for some new ideas.

Hey Hey is sharper than "D-Don’t," filled out and throbbing like soul should be, not burdened with the entropy of a smattered ramshackle collection all heart and no brains.

Ditherer is a far-flying leap above and beyond anything that Fog’s done before, but not a shocking leap because it’s still very clear that this is Fog.

The nearly impossible thematic scope attempted and deftly handled here is a tribute to Will Sheff's dexterity and range as a songwriter (if not a vocalist), and the band's chops for being able to keep pace.

This is undoubtedly the way the songs should be heard, and the set certainly doesn't feel cheap or rushed.

A Place to Bury Strangers is a record with excitement hardwired to its musical structure: the elements of these songs are so individually pleasing that, when the band shifts them against each other, the effect is a sense of constant cataclysmic upheaval. Each new variation is giddying.

The type of pretension that rears its fluffy manicured head on Finding Forever is one flatly insidious, lying in plush vibing harpsichord wait ("Intro"), in pattered bongo spoken word nobility ("Black Maybe"), and finally erupting in a 7½ minute crossharp-cooing, Crash-namedropping, butterfuck of pretension, exploding the boundaries of how fucking wack we ever, ever, ever thought Common could get.

Most of Cookies proceeds in similar fashion, with crunchy, showy riffs supporting clever hooks in the name of two-and-a-half minute pop nuggets that the late John Peel would have likely appreciated.

Every track on this record grows into some such perfectly orchestrated climax, surging as a function of the production alone and with nary a hook or clever turn of phrase or structural complication in sight.

What actually lies inside Prince’s twenty-somethingth album is more than disappointing; it’s thinly if grandly produced, tapped with a veneer so dumbly decades behind any sense of interesting or intriguing taste that one can’t help but sit back and swallow the benign whole, thinking all along, Who the fuck even makes music like this anymore?

The real credit, however, goes to the songwriting of the eponymous duo. This album was not "saved in the production," as it were. The Con is a document written in the half-frenzy of a clusterfuck.

As a stand alone work this is one of the most convincing collections that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have produced thus far.

The Broken String is a collection of mostly likeable songs, one dud, and one song-of-the-year-quality track.

The problem is that Vanderslice’s lyrical scope remains too broad to enable a cohesive or definitive conceptual statement, and his music too tightly defined and predictable to be considered a departure.

It’s hard to fault the album for a little flab when the band’s trying new things and mostly doing them well; hopefully they’ll realize that underproduction simply isn’t their style next time around.

Zeitgeist isn't a good record, but it is good work.

Even the best songs of Our Love To Admire can’t reach the boggling complexity and honesty of most anything from "Turn On The Bright Lights" (2002).

I think Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the album of this year and maybe of the next.

It's all very controlled, as any functional dance club record should be, and its quality extends past its single, as any decent-to-good dance club record should be.

The Else is good, surprisingly and simply so. It’s also frustratingly focused.

Goodbye's shoegaze fascination, organic glow, and subtle shifts belie its apparent initial simplicity.

Sirens is no "Heartbreaker" - though the stylistic grab-bag is reminiscent of Adams’s debut - but it is a damn good start.

It's an excellent debut, and hints at a potentially significant force in indie rock in the coming years.

The point being that this album isn’t “terrible,” just sort of dull and boring.

You wanna hear a mediocre hip hop album with a few decent songs? That’s the T.I. I’ve come to know and love.

So long as you approach Unkle Dysfunctional as little more than an excuse for Shaun Ryder to head back out on the road, I guess it works fine.

Tiger plays like a huge pastiche of past releases.

"My December" ends up, curiously enough, a pretty freaking fun summer album.

No matter how smartly sequenced these parts are in Desire’s segmented flow, they remain varying nascent coups without one distinct rallying cry to organize the din.

The Aliens' retro-future, interstellar, ex-Beta Band stylings force the listener backward in time and inward in space, resulting in a weird cosmic navel-gazing that is ultimately the reason this album is only slightly more than moderately successful, and cannot be described under any circumstances as “innovative,” “refreshing” or “a step forward.”

DeLaughter needs to be more personal; already having a dozen people yelling at you distances the ideas they express, but emptying those ideas of any meaning isn’t the answer.

The White Stripes, at the same moment they claim to have finally overcome your entanglements, have provided you the ammunition of a hit-or-miss album.

Though The Sun has plenty of accomplished performances by a capable and experienced band, it’s not very exciting stuff.

The lowdown: it sounds pretty much the same as "Bang Bang," but not as good. It's not that the record is "bad"--it isn't--but that it, like its title suggests, is less brash, less fuck-all incautious about its rocking.

While it never outshines the alt-country canon that precedes it, The Brag & Cuss is a welcome addition to the genre, an album that understands its influences and rarely oversteps the boundaries they’ve set.

Ultimately, Arthur & Yu’s singing (the moniker adopted from cutesy childhood nicknames) becomes the simple reason to bend over, submit, and love the album, even when whimsy threatens an otherwise wry batch of dirty lyrics.

As a summer stopgap for their new full-length this fall, Friends. works fine. The title track is quality, plus their fanbase eats this shit up.

Josh Homme wants Era Vulgaris to be your summer bonfire record. And with a restored aura of cockiness and predictably massive arsenal of riffage, he’s once again fulfilled his goal.

A surprising record and a mess of contradictions--an okay band making a great record, classic rock songcraft made contemporary through sheer force of will, a quiet and loud album simultaneously, dancing along the lo-fi/hi-fi binary, a fucking record about Appalachia made by dudes from Portland!--that thrillingly, thinly, radiantly congeals.

The songs, sometimes overtly formalist and stylistically unadventurous, are invigorated by the enthusiasm and character of their delivery.

Tromatic Reflexxions is a roaring success for both parties, blowing the fresh air of invention through an increasingly tribalist scene.

This one sees him expanding outward in any number of directions, and succeeding in nearly all of them.

There are hits on Good Girl Gone Bad, big clubfisted ones, but they're wedged in with facsimiles and reductions.

If there is one thing that might be wrong with this album -- besides an uneventful last third -- is that the album might be too tailor-made for music critics worn out by music fatigue, hype fatigue, and irony fatigue.

Mirrored is Battles at their most experimental and their most immediate, their most wanky and most focused.

It’s not like everybody’s playing a different song. Everybody’s playing the same song. It’s just that, for great boring swathes, that song sounds stubborn. It sounds like it doesn’t want to be played.

Plague Park is in many ways a darker, less inviting listen than his previous work.

While their particular brand of retro goth garage is obviously built on an extremely derivative foundation of 60s garage, the Cramps, and the Damned, they're infinitely more interesting in practice than the majority of beige-rock being pushed by the UK music press.

Sky Blue Sky’s only ambition is to capture the warm tones of the early '70s rock FM they grew up on and clearly love. The execution is flawless. One can’t help but ask, however, “What’s the point?”

If this album is less immediately impressive than its predecessor it’s because apart from tightening their arrangements the sound is still exactly what you expect.

[Producer] Gil Norton... [has] an enviable track record, but he’s not doing Maxïmo Park any favours with this soft soak finish.

An album of pasty songs, severe missteps and bizarre overreaches, but an album nevertheless shimmering occasionally with the inherent sometime-genius of its creator, Volta is one of those pretty-bad records that may stick around, may sound better in a few years.

It cements the Clientele as one of the best pop bands around today.

None of this is groundbreaking music, not even in comparison with their previous work.

The 24 songs... are characteristically and uniformly excellent.

By now, Sage Francis is emo; however populist you cut it, he’s treading familiar paths, rhyming in familiar cadence, arguing with the asshole authority of an artist much too comfortable with his niche.

In the context of their seemingly blinkered attempts at finding some source of inspiration they've produced an entertainingly atmospheric, melodic record to bracing and accessible effect.

The Reminder may not surprise, but it does force one to ignore the cloying marketed image and just love Feist for the talented individual that she is.

Unfortunately, too much of Snakes and Arrows is dominated by mid-tempo, lumbering behemoths.

Make no mistake, this is a slight record, but nonetheless one with more than a few enjoyable moments.

Favourite Worst Nightmare seems warped and contrived, bearing all the signs and watermarks of a band trying not to feel uncomfortable.

While undoubtedly charming in it’s naivety, it also feels slight and transitional, filled with a sense of thin momentary distraction.

Sadly, the only true victories on Dumb Luck are Tamborello's own title track and Oberst's "Breakfast in Bed."

The more Book of Bad Breaks plays, the more it clings and forces you to concede to its charms; it’s an admirable album, if not quite a great one.

Year Zero massively benefits from lowered expectations. Reznor channels his anger, focuses it and takes a much-needed breather from his tried-and-true formula of nihilism and the question of self-destruction, but at its core the album has very little to teach us or anything original to say.

Grinderman isn’t angry and it isn’t raw, just a careful concoction of licentiousness and braying disdain ultimately monotonous and unexciting after the first four cuts.

On Cassadaga Bright Eyes sounds like John Mayer.

It’s still style over substance in a lot of cases, but it manages to be so exciting while being so listenable that I think it demands repeated listens -- even if those are at cocktail parties.

She still has yet to manage a really killer album, but There's No Home finds Hunter well on her way.

If nothing else, Stars of the Lid have achieved Adam's goal of making music "to really relax to," abjectly defying intent listening, laying waste to the established vocabulary of music production and appreciation.

All in all, Jarvis a mixed bag. It feels like the sort of thing that Cocker would do just to expunge his notebooks before moving on.

They’re still far and away the best bet for impeccably produced, beach-ready power-pop, and way better than your shitty sounding power-pop band, so excuse them if they seem to harbor no interest in doing anything else.

The best thing, really, that can be said of Because of the Times is that it works the hardest trick: seeming deeply personal and inclusive, but still having an embrace elastic enough to be universally appealing.

This is an album you could easily hate -- especially if you like things like change and development.

A long collection of awful ideas and recycled ideas in the absence of an Idea.

Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters is an album with a sum worse than its parts.... Still, there’s a lot of promise here.

Myths of the Near Future is probably the most assured British debut since Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled.

The problem is that for all the slick operations and glorious machinations of the marketing and production, this band has run out of steam; soulless without being undead.