Alopecia exhibits impressive growth and an admirable attention to detail that places yet another unique stone along Yoni Wolf’s fascinating career arc.

Aside from its musical merits--like, it’s really beautiful--the City Wrecker EP is interesting in a typical kind of meta-Krug way.

Its tone is largely exuberant, even when its content seems dour; its ancillary themes seem surprisingly relatable and humanizing, even though its thesis stresses how uniquely untouchable and alone they are at the top.

This music can be difficult, but through its brooding emotional core and sophisticated, understated arrangements To Survive is also one of the most satisfying albums of 2008, melancholic and unloveable though it may often be.

Tender Buttons feels more urgent and alive than anything Broadcast has ever recorded.

Frankly, this is an odd listen.

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

The Baseball Project is one of those “why the hell hasn’t anybody thought of this before?” ideas that is carried out exceedingly well.

It is, itself, a joyful record, prickly and playful and sometimes downright bizarre, but never less than welcoming.

The Odd Couple from its superior predecessor (just: the writing is a bit weaker, the arrangements sleepier, the production effects a bit thicker) and so its most glaring flaw is that it simply lacks St. Elsewhere‘s invigorated tone, following the same blueprint with cheaper components, producing off-putting retreads whose only appeal lies in their similarity to more effective tracks on Gnarls’s former effort

What’s clear, however, is that Heartland is a huge leap for Pallett on every level. These are the most accomplished songs he has written, and he makes up for the ground he cedes--predominantly his willingness to present conventional, immediate song structures--by making everything else so uniquely his own.

The third Foals album doesn’t represent a huge leap forward from Total Life Forever’s formula so much as a refinement.

The Air Force has a lot of good songs on it.

Seriously, if there’s one thing on No Way Down that doesn’t at least momentarily hook you, even in the basest, more familiar way, where do your roots go and where do your loyalties lie, eh? Maybe in that sub-dermal nostalgia something about this EP truly resonates, well beyond its frugal runtime.

What this means in terms of structure and pace is that Tommy is leisurely, which to some people might suggest “boring” except that this is a very dynamic sort of leisure.

The album’s accompanying trappings do little to dull its impressiveness or the band’s command of its lineage.

It’s a good record, and doesn’t try to recreate The Decline, but it doesn’t manage to capture its energy, fear and grandeur.

The result is light as a feather, with laid back songs that would be perfect played live during some lazy afternoon outdoor festival, sprawled on the grass and drinking a cold beer.

To an extent, this album is too predictable.

Tiger plays like a huge pastiche of past releases.

These are good songs, catchy enough to claim a place in your head while grounded by enough passion to put them close to your heart. It’s just that the Long Winters have proven themselves capable of even better than that.

Whatever thematic consistency existed on Yoshimi or Soft Bulletin is completely absent here. Or just so vague and bloated that the sentiment’s useless.

"Murder," "skimask," and "gangsta," all appended with the word "shit," are the terms in which Gibbs characterizes his oeuvre. Str8 Killa is all of those things. It is also breathtaking in its execution.

If there’s one major complaint to be made, it’s that Compass is simply overlong. These fourteen songs are proof that there is far more longevity in Lidell’s work, even if at over fifty minutes too many moments seem frivolous or forgettable compared to the striking highs.

Like singer Zooey Deschanel, Volume One is endearing and unpretentious.

Dead Man’s Bones is about death, right, and about love, testing where one touches the other, flirting with sensations similar and enduring the inability to confront or frankly deal with that intimacy. Had this record a thicker dramatic arc or something less confining than a spreadsheet of rules, then maybe the songs wouldn’t so inevitably miss their obvious marks.

They capture and transform generic ideas about space and environment in ways beyond the grasp of most bands. Sadly, this approach limits their accessibility; even so, theirs is a world well worth, at least, a visit.

It is logically a bloated, uncomfortable, saturated throwback to no genre, time period, or movement in particular.