March of the Zapotec is a serviceable, if less than memorable, expansion of Beirut’s already established sound via the Jiminez Band, a 19-piece band from Mexico. Realpeople Holland is fucking awful techno music that is desert-bereft, wholly disposable, and somehow makes Condon’s crooner’s dollop seem alien and unlistenable for the first time. If

Vocals seem to serve The Diver much better the more they're respected as atmospheric elements in addition to interesting texts, and the band make good on that necessary compromise throughout.

Pick out the antihero tracks and one or two missteps and you have every Beck album (no typo) crammed into one disc with more wit and charm and weird science and heartache than that dude’s cumulative catalogue.

ADULT. are an awesome band that have yet to make an awesome album. This one, however, is still pretty damn good.

Myths of the Near Future is probably the most assured British debut since Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled.

It is during this fifteen-minute stretch that the album transcends its familiar, blokey, mad-for-it Mancunian template and, though you've heard all these tricks before, achieves something charming, familiar, fucking good-and this is the level on which Delphic needs to operate more often if they're going to wring a lasting impression from this sound.

So Sagara sounds necessarily and unavoidably at odds with itself, a not wholly successful balancing act that lands its objects within sight and some distance from where its artist intended, but the effort is commendable and important.

So, yeah, Bury Me in My Rings is yearning indie pop, sometimes overwrought, sometimes appealing in its dorkiness.

The guitars are louder, the songs are a little more complex, and so the band walks a tightrope between power-pop and rawk.

None of the really experimental stuff is so egregious to mar the album; it’s just fairly disposable after one keen listen. On the other hand, the good, funky stuff isn’t quite as good or funky as it has been in the past.

Where the compilation loses itself is in its exhaustive nature. An update to the sound of older songs (albeit not much older) seems appropriate enough given how important production was to the scream and sheen of their self-titled album.

Perhaps its primary feat is that the music manages to sound fresher than anything industrial-tinged has a right to sound.

It’s not like everybody’s playing a different song. Everybody’s playing the same song. It’s just that, for great boring swathes, that song sounds stubborn. It sounds like it doesn’t want to be played.

All in all, Teenager stands as both a distillation of the band’s strengths and an impressive step forward, and perhaps more importantly, an irony-free, immensely relatable look at the heady emotional extremes of youth.

Yes, the beats are big and the sound is mainstream and commercial; however, the band sound restrained and uncomfortable.

Nite Jewel’s schtick may well revolve around crafting a distinctive and specific sound/mood and doing it well, but Good Evening‘s best moments arise when Gonzalez goes for just a little more range.

Together is paced excellently at a little over 44 minutes, feels like half of that, and not a single song warrants a skip.

This album simply sounds like their first with inferior production and less-memorable songs.

In the context of their seemingly blinkered attempts at finding some source of inspiration they've produced an entertainingly atmospheric, melodic record to bracing and accessible effect.

While rarely graceless and often impressive (“Two Humans,” worth noting, develops into something sexy before going for broke), everything on Fight Softly just seems too much. There’s a lot that’s pretty here--but there’s a lot.

Some of the more irregular numbers scream “demo” between their whisperings--think very early Arab Strap, midi beats in place of the crass Scottish semen puns--but overall it’s a solid little barometer, one or two cues offering insight into Casiotone’s current organic direction.

If this is your thing, you'll be happy (sad?) to hear that Eisold has done it again, and offers us yet another beautifully written and comprehensively detailed chapter in the endless book of self.

It was as if all of those constituent elements were combined in equal parts and to perfect balance and have since simply been maintained.

So in comes an album with zero individuality, zero originality, zero workaroundability...and it’s really good. How good this thing can get is sort of terrifying considering how bad this material might sound in the hands of other bands.

Though its pleasures may not be quite as direct as his work with Crayon Fields, and its tempos remain thoroughly slow, it remains a standout among a rapidly-increasing number of hardware and software-driven thrillseekers, more than ample evidence that O'Connor's work is worth taking notice of.

Even the best songs of Our Love To Admire can’t reach the boggling complexity and honesty of most anything from "Turn On The Bright Lights" (2002).

There’s something oddly sweet about how completely out of step Eels are with trends and genres, something nourishing about how secluded their music has become. Shame, then, that it must necessarily also be so exclusive.

At the very least, II manages consistency where so many collaborations sound like two minds in separate corners.