There's a real, meticulous attempt at achieving the same playful, wandering state of mind of the pre-'80s experimental classics that inspire these songs, rather than pulling from any overwhelming examples.

The Dead Weather makes smegma rock. It’s a squirming, nauseating label no doubt, but so is Horehound, convinced that skuzzed-up guitars and swamp blues roots demand sleaze, humidity, and grime.

If surf-rock is, at least for the time being, dead - or something that only feels briefly alive in scattered moments - then Girls Names is the last whiff and remnant of its spirit, whispering under the door and darkly skulking in the corner shadows.

This time, the album’s a one-trick pony.

On Pl3dge, Killer Mike is often captivating, but his politics are just noise.

This album is a knowing genre-piece and incessantly listenable effort from one who some were beginning to suspect had become lost in a desert of his own vision.

The band manages throughout Onwards to the Wall to keep things just about as industrial as they can get. And without abandoning pop for metal by always maintaining a strict allegiance to simplicity.

On this, their debut, they’ve shown us they can pull downtrodden bents as good as anyone. But I’m being serious, serious rock band: on your next record I want to hear something more Pope-like.

Rather than the simple three-part-appeal that marked earlier albums (vocals, drums, and keys), the production here makes them sound like they are fronting a bona fide rock and roll band. This is a bad thing: this new complexity undermines their giddy, naïve appeal, and it drowns the vocals.

Because even though Silver is not quite the taut, energetic half-hour of power that the band's promising EP had me clamoring for, it still has some pleasant surprises up its sleeve. And most importantly, it offers sporadically brilliant flickers of what I loved about this band in the first place.

Much of Love and other planets is too accessible to be denounced, and too melodically strong to be ignored.

Ultimately, this is the most potent fuck-you that Themselves could give to the thoughtless body of rap that casts their shadow: undeniable greatness in the form of progress that doesn’t look back once it has torn free from its material limbs.

AlunaGeorge can still be both pop and provocative, they just haven't hit on a reason to be so quite yet.

Yamagata’s music creates a feeling of another time and place and conjures imagery of Rachael sitting in a dank, smoky, yet quaint piano bar playing her beautiful music to an intimate crowd of people.

Eating Us works as a pop record and tends to be only as good as its songs, as opposed to the monochromatic statement of purpose that was "Dandelion Gum." Luckily, these are some pretty good songs.

While I wish that Only in Dreams offered more adventurous songwriting or a more varied sound, it's still an achievement in its emotional tenacity.

This record speaks into the empty vastness of our endless music consumerism, and all it says is "me too."

Surfing Strange is a tight and coherent little album whose greatest strength lies in its youthful energy and sense of the ups and downs of the early twenties--the lows of uncertainty and malaise, and the highs of excitement and anticipation.

On Silent Shout, The Knife have shaken off their more tangential musical inclinations and produced an intensely cohesive album, a monochrome rainbow that has emerged from the unfocused torrential rainstorm of before.

Rose still has plenty of time and room to grow, and across Own Side Now she sounds at times in search of a singular voice yet also utterly confident in her band, her arrangements, and her songs.

Exotic is witty, literate, and charming.

Beware is exactly the album to be expected from Oldham, now, as he begins to investigate the limelight, as he trots out his friendships with gothic southern troubadours (Jim White), say, or free jazz northerners (Rob Mazurek and Nicole Mitchell), wondering whether to scamper back to the stern nobody-ness Drag City allows him or push on expanding his solipsistic world.

It’ll play huge at the Troubadour. It’s just that, as much orchestration clearly went into this record, it seems content to be merely “well done,” when the opening two tracks make it absolutely, exhilaratingly clear that there’s more than that at stake here.

OS's greatest feat is in its restraint. The urge to collapse into all-out roaring is there for the whole forty-three minutes, but Skodvin and Totman have made a sort of pact: you stay feathery on the piano, I won't go to Hades in the mix.

Genuinely affecting, and fun, pop music.

In a graceful return to form, Jan and Andi make it clear that they're as present as ever, ready to jump into the game like it hasn't been six years since we last met.

Crush is cold and hard and calculated. I mean, it's clear it's supposed to sound like that, but I have a hard time getting into it.

The first four or so tracks of Sees the Light hold their own in terms of melody and momentum....Unfortunately, Sees the Light devolves from there into full-on, committed homogeneity, songs blending into each other with little to set them apart