Despite all the quasi-soundtrack leanings, Pivot also possess that rare balance of immediacy and densely populated song-spans.

For all the positive aspects of Creaturesque--most importantly, it really is a consistently interesting and fun listen, which is rare for a record like this--there is one real weakness: Reitherman’s lyrics.

It is as "original" as this band is going to get, and for that we should be contented.

The album’s hyper awareness of its own mortar disrupts a bouncy pace that would otherwise fit Rhys’s suntanned pop to a tee.

There really aren't any bad or outright boring songs here, though Castlemusic's very best moments are largely front-loaded.

This is an album about getting shitfaced.

Overpowered is both impressive and incredibly fun, but fun in a way that "Ruby Blue" wasn't: you don't have to think here.

The band will surely never be able to banish the ghosts of their tenuous acclaim, but as far as sounding finally, thankfully revitalized by their obvious talent and ravenous taste in all shapes and colors of music, Sisterworld is the most refreshing thing I’ve come upon this year.

It’s perfectly reasonable to listen to Tape Chants at an ultra-low volume (a la Morton Feldman), but to absorb all of the color and contour of this veritable ocean of sound, I recommend playing it very loud.

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

Though I'd hardly go as far to call it their best album, which I guess makes U2 irrelevant by Bono's logic, its best songs can credibly stand alongside their classics, and how many bands can maintain this level of vitality 30 years into their career? I give.

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.

Pretty but not boring, eclectic but not overindulgent, Cyrk is the work of an artist still messing with all the possibilities in front of her.

Last Night Becomes This Morning is the exhausted, beaten down sound of the nineties lo-fi movement years after the party ended.

There’s something to be said for rewarding repeated listens, for golden nuggets in every song, never buried but never hollering.

The Future Will Come is still a mostly solid as just about any full-length release on DFA, and if some of the best ideas die too soon or don’t go far enough, at least they appear at all.

It’s a fine record -- one of his better in some time.

It’s a cohesive, well-produced, well-written set of songs that coheres as an album.

Despite all the ingenuity on Foley Room, it’s hard for me not to miss the days when Tobin belonged as much to jazz as he did to any electronic genre.

The Wonder Show of the World, his eleventh release in half as many years, is everything for which we hope in a new Bonnie "Prince" Billy release: creeping yet expansive alt-folk; an ever-strengthening voice; erotic imagery ("The smell of your box on my mustache") paired with thoughts on family, never uncomfortably; a stark, doodled cover; a doting collaboration.

It doesn’t pretend to hold a candle to the big-dogs and game-changing double albums that cacophonised your youth, nor does it want to.

While sonically it's different from anything else on Rich Forever, it's a product of the same insecurity machine that produces the rest of the tape's insistent cajoling.

The result is a mellow, atmospheric album that still manages to embody the delicious, self-absorbed, fuck-all bombast currently making mainstream rap so exciting.

C'mon doesn't break much new ground for Low in the way that their last two records did, and that's clearly not the goal here.

Circles (2003) was heartier fare, just as starry-eyed and unabashedly romantic but more focused and elegant. It’s a better record, to be sure, but that doesn’t make The Autumn Defense a bad one.

What they have done on its proper follow-up is neither lazy nor hollow, merely undefined, making no clear promises on future plans.

It’s a sad, wonderful tone he creates, but one too shy or just too gracious to stand up for itself.

It's not his best record by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one I'll reach for more casually and consistently than his recent stuff.