Taylor and Goddard's pop impulses and the dance music they've always been exploring have finally cohered, yielding a collection of songs with the potential to be as efficient on a dance floor as it is in a bedroom.

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

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

Despite the 26 minutes wasted by these final tracks, as damning as that sounds, this is still a very good Yo La Tengo record.

You can get long way into Underneath the Pine without gaining any clear impression of exactly what kind of record it is that you're listening to. But amorphous isn't the worst thing in the world to be.

In the Future is a great second act, a consolidation of strengths, better songwriting and more ideas.

Personal Record doesn’t always have the focus and sense of place that made Last Summer great, but it’s pop music on a grander scale, both in sound and theme.

If the forced lyrical growth is a little stunted, it’s more than made up for by the band’s newfound sonic ambitions.

This EP sounds, in many ways, like a showcase of new equipment and technology, proof that White just might be one of the best pop producers working right now. However, the songs might be too cerebral, lacking the brevity, structural simplicity, and dare I say petulance that made "Lust For Life" so easy to fall so hard for.

It’s the music here, not the sharp-toothed lyricism, which sets the record so far apart from the rest of the field.

I’d suggest that it’s a grower, but that doesn’t seem apt, as there’s very little depth to let grow here. What it is, however, is a winner, an album that seems loathable at first but tenaciously refuses to quit grinning.

It’s a humble record, yet one with the timeless appeal to become a classic in league with the work of Waxahathee’s influences.

Ejimiwe’s nervous energy makes Some Say I So I Say Light exhilarating, whether it’s a lucid dream or a sleep-deprived reality, and fills it with moments that you might mistake for codas.

Nowhere is this idea of acceptance clearer than on An Imaginary Country. In a sense the album evokes nothing so much as Hecker himself, diligently and intuitively molding his sounds through synthesizer, guitar and laptop, and as a result may be the most symbiotic album of the year.

As it stands, 'To Clean' and 'Rain On' deserve their place late on your sweetheart mixtapes, and they’ll be charming in their small doses, but they’re much too rare here, nestled between puzzling decisions and bedroom leftovers.

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.

Our Blood, like most great singer-songwriter efforts, is open to interpretation, but it's the record's malleable sense of emotion that lends it its peculiar gravity.

It’s simply R.E.M. finally making a concerted effort to sound like themselves, and realizing that’s not such a horrible idea.

There are songs on Nouns that seemingly defy you to listen, and not because they’re loud or crass or due-heavy on true-dat market-maneuvers and what I guess we can now safely call “aural assault”; and not because of the bad vocals, bunkered mix job, or the hundred and one other things that would make your parents, my professors or Celine Dion hate this album.

It's in the zealous craftsmanship of doing just about everything right and causing that aggregate rightness to harmonize in vibrant song about trying to be better that the truth becomes evident: this band is for real.

Real Estate is a remarkable debut, and I really look forward to more from this band in the future, please, which will undoubtedly be soon in some form or another.

Fernow's more melodic output on Bermuda Drain is somehow even more punishing, a new development in the ongoing creation of what he calls "negative energy."

Hood’s contributions dominate To-Do; of the thirteen songs, bassist Shonna Tucker gets two, and even after his jaw dropping win streak on 2008’s excellent Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, Mike Cooley is only allotted three. But he still comes off as the crafty Southern gentleman with all of the best one-liners.

Convivial is the closest Ripatti has inched toward making something that would fit in with the more outrageous and flamboyantly mainstream house productions that dominate charts and hip clubs these days, and at the same time still very heady, engaging music.

When these songs sound like El Perro del Mar fronting the saddest, slowest disco band in the world, they work out best, but too much of this “mini-album” doesn’t quite get there.

This EP is thus a fine, if also slight, document that showcases the duo's serious potential-and hints, perhaps, at how it could be used to produce a more ambitious set of songs as he approaches his next album--more than it fulfills the promises of Pallett the almost solo performer/arranger.

In making these songs more personal and more intimate, they’ve managed to make them more poignant, and even if the quality of the overall album doesn’t match the brilliance of the four or five phenomenal songs here, nothing is so cantankerous as to really offend.

Each moment is devoted to the continuing shifts in dynamics and song, and Aloha sounds sharper than ever before.