I’ll be as straightforward in my assessment of his Trouble in Dreams as I can: this is his tenth solo album of the same old shit.

Salon des Amateurs is undeniably an important album for Hauschka, both for its distillation of his rigorous methods and its energized perspective.

It’s inoffensive, painfully so, with the smell of something run through focus groups from the get go, written and produced by committee to sell the greatest number of copies.

On A Healthy Distrust his delivery has noticeably improved.

When it's warm it offers a cool side, the underside of one's pillow, and when it's frosty it offers a coverlet of weight or the stable resting of a hand.

Mothertongue oscillates between the comfort/terror of singularities and excitement/terror of potentialities, but the possibilities this duality affords for Muhly’s future work are frankly exhilarating.

The style of songwriting is remarkably similar to that found on Teen Dream. Yet neither suffers much for it.

Why There Are Mountains is plain pleasing indie rock--how it used to be, how it’s ceased to be since, at least in spirit.

Holland seems confident placing herself inside a mythology much older than her years. It’s this fact, along with her penchant for lyrics about crazy dreams and old-fashioned moonshine, that make many of her songs, though originals, sound borrowed from another era.

It's not that Several Shades doesn't showcase Mascis's talents. It just denies us his flashiest ones.

The eleven tracks here are the most concise, effortless, and melodically conspicuous songs to come out of the band’s camp.

The line between cheese and accessibility can be thin, and whistling or handclaps or a hidden track or an overt songwriting method can all reek, but Friend and Foe has, just as ostensibly, no wasted space. The hinge is in the balance the band manages with every inkling of sound or production seeming both spontaneous and stultifying, both labored-over and cast off.

Masta Ace’s maturity informs his simplicity; experience strengthens the straightforward so that his words come methodically and sincerely.

The majority of Carousel just plain sounds the same. It might as well be the same pace, might as well be in the same key, might as well be the same vocal melody over and over; it's a carousel if there’s ever been one.

If this isn't the most mature mixtape K.R.I.T.'s produced yet, it may very well be his most honest, and coming from this guy, that's high praise indeed.

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

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.

A damned great indie rock record.

Special Moves illuminates the band's act for what it is.

It comes into the world jubilantly, then spends the next forty minutes kicking and screaming against your ideas of what you can landscape it against. It dies with a characteristically quick whimper. No cheap shots against Explosions in the Sky, I promise, but that’s not pretty. It is beautiful.

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

This turns out to be an interesting but ultimately disappointing experiment, and the reason for its failure is telling: unlike the posturing shitgaze set who lean on lo-fi as a superficial crutch, How to Dress Well never treated lo-fi as a simple affectation, and as a result he can't walk away from it so easily.

This variation in the songcraft amid absolute adherence to a predetermined aesthetic attests to the band’s ability to craft a well-paced, engaging arc, an album as much attuned to its coherency as it is to being a springboard for a few spectacular singles.

Parts & Labor have turned what might have been the crippling loss of an essential member into just another development in a long and respectable career.

Thus is the template that makes More Fish so relevant, rewarding, and unpredictably necessary: uniformly fantastic production (except Doom) and Ghost coasting just enough that he doesn’t utterly eclipse the people he’s trying to let shine.

You won’t hate this record; you won’t be any more capable of hating this record as you would a particularly aesthetically pleasing houseplant. But the record’s greatest achievement is that it’s happy with just not being hated.

The concept of a modern type of guilt is probably supposed to imply the effortlessly achievable comfort and depressed humility with which much of the album is sung. Perhaps ironically, the best way to enjoy Modern Guilt is with blinders on to this sort of temporal perspective.

Even by SFA’s lofty standards, the production on Love Kraft is little short of incredible.