Taken for what it is, a straight up and down rock album, ABAAC is quite good.

Lookout doesn’t have the feel of a major step forward for the Silver Jews: sonically, it falls pretty comfortably between "Bright Flight" and "Tanglewood" and doesn’t have the sort of big events that marked those two records.

Tweedy's lyrics have recaptured much of their surreal, grammar-defying, sinister charm, and he has mercifully spared us the smug, privileged nihilism that Clayton so rightly lambasted in his review of Wilco (The Album).

Like all AC/DC records, this is a troubling one to love.

It's thus a relief to see something, anything, resembling a coherent full-length emerge from that group of musicians, and for it to be as good as Shapeshifting is. More than anything, though, this is a success for Young Galaxy, who prove themselves far more versatile and open than they ever did before, and, as such, are likely to win over a new whole new audience.

On A Healthy Distrust his delivery has noticeably improved.

A seriously solid and enjoyable album.

Half-baked and juvenile, sloppy but cheerful, fresh and joyful, the Beets may be plugging a gimmick, but at least they're doing something with themselves.

After a month of digesting Seek Magic thoroughly, oscillating wildly between manic enthusiasm and a kind of defiant distrust of this whole act’s shtick, I’ve committed myself to the stance about which I felt most comfortable from the beginning: this is a very good album, but there are certain things about it with which I take issue.

Pros: Farina is an excellent drummer and singer, and MacKaye hasn’t lost any of his righteous anger. Cons: with only two people you just can’t be viciously loud.

Even the forecast backlash from fans of the trance era can't dent Barking's relentless enthusiasm, and given the sufficient exposure and time, everyone should be able to party to it. It's just that for an Underworld album it sounds distinctly un-Underworld, and more like someone's asked Smith and Hyde to ghost-write a Now! compilation.

It holds together better [than 'Echoes'] as a complete document, it contains at least seven potential singles, and sounds like a crack band at the top of their game.

The ubiquity of the Weeknd has saturated their latest mixtape, and ultimately Echoes of Silence struggles under that ubiquity.

The lion’s share of these tracks throb with a purpose that was mostly absent from their last effort.

It all adds up to blatantly catchy, deceptively simple wannabe-clever, can’t-help-but-be-cheeky art-punk.

Waits is still an impassioned and awe-inspiring performer; here we can still hear, as invigorated as he was before I was born--or so I can guess.

Winds Take No Shape is a great album if you like soft, catchy eclectic pop/folk music with smoky serious beautiful vocals and lots of eighties-like effects.

There are a few moments on side B that could fool you you've picked up an old Orb album, but otherwise The Dissolve is very forward thinking. Picture a melting pot on par with Burt Bacharach's.

While it’s nowhere near Thriller or Purple Rain, it does manage a healthy attempt at a reinterpretation of both.

What Fortino and Harris have done here and across Foreign Body is construct a kind of suspended reality, where the consequences of day-to-day life fail to adhere to their distended sense of duration.

The Golden Archipelago falls somewhere in that tenuous space, never able to live up to the power of its initial impression. It’s more the kind of thing that should be fully absorbed over the course of a few attentive, complete listens, then allowed to dissipate into the realm of a beautiful idea.

Although a little inconsistent in its layout, The Law of Large Numbers packs that same precise bite that brought the Delgados to public knowledge, scaled down/expanded to suit its creator, who before writing songs was a physicist.

This being their (sort of) third album, HEALTH have ostensibly defined their formula and they seem content with that, tweaking without straying from their core of grating guitars, ghostly vocals, and the occasional synth.

Even amongst his New Jersey-based peers and labelmates, Lynch's work remains disconnected from pop and from folk music while never being truly disengaged with it, and Terra serves as major evidence of his growing confidence as a composer and player.

Lerner’s honesty lasts forty-three minutes, and supplies the predictable yet scrumptious party-time melodies that chase away clouds like a sidekick.

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

If there’s a weakness to Makers, it’s the occasional unmemorable tune in the album’s middle section.

Felix’s uses the second-person address and the confusion it--as well as conventional instrumentation played in freer forms within more confined song structures--creates to produce an engaging, if harder to parse, take on something similar.