Despite being quite well-realized and able to sustain a single mood for so long, the album sounds increasingly like a missed opportunity as it progresses, with the two songwriters' work almost never achieving a real sense of cohesion.

You can get long way into Underneath the Pine without gaining any clear impression of exactly what kind of record it is that you're listening to. But amorphous isn't the worst thing in the world to be.

Gloss Drop shows a band still well ahead of the curve in terms of how they perform music, and one that understands how an aesthetic can be stretched to its most experimental limit and retracted to a simple confection without a wide chasm between the two modes of expression.

Bachelorette is not as immediate or inviting as My Electric Family, but I'm hesitant to condemn it for this. It's simply a different listening experience, one which creates a different mood.

It's a solid, un-embarrassing, simple-minded record that will do nothing to My Morning Jacket's reputation as one of the greatest American rock bands every American can, and will, get behind. Here's to riskier futures.

Laced is more than a real step-up for Psychedelic Horseshit, it's the best album of its kind I've heard this year.

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

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.

It reaffirms the band as is, is a portrait of four musicians celebrating their existence rather than the question of self.

Air Museum lays to rest the shortlist of uncertainties I've pinned on Mountains in the past--mostly by not changing much.

Everything's Getting Older proving that, despite his wrinkles and back ache, Moffat's never going to shave his head/convert to Buddhism, and is still the scowling, contemptuous, but eloquent philanderer he was when he was tearing up the '90s--except now, he's a little more comfortable, and attacks using serene piano accompaniments.

This is Rhys wholly in his wheelhouse: offering up a handful of standalone highlights and clever deep cuts, hitting pleasure centers along the way, and quietly adding to a catalogue as deceptively substantial as anyone currently working the pop circuit with fifteen years behind and at least another fifteen ahead.

Even amongst his New Jersey-based peers and labelmates, Lynch's work remains disconnected from pop and from folk music while never being truly disengaged with it, and Terra serves as major evidence of his growing confidence as a composer and player.

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.

His constant assurances across Goblin that he doesn't really mean any of the hateful shit that he continues to say, including this disclaimer's attempt to dissuade listeners from actually doing anything Tyler raps about and the title track's assertion that because Goblin is a work of "fiction" Tyler himself shouldn't be blamed for anything bad that results, undermines any of the resonance Goblin might have otherwise had as a, well, purer document of depravity and, at his most extreme, a certain kind of madness.

He uses his guitar and ghost-like warble to render the ephemeral as concrete as cantaloupe.

With The Moonlight Butterfly, the Sea and Cake are in no danger any time soon of fasting in light of their diet of quality white bread, and it's not like anybody who is purchasing a "mini-album" from this band expects otherwise.

It is a cohesive suite of powerfully effective songs with one thing on its mind: "the inexorable march of Time."

Robin Pecknold's well-chronicled bout with writer's block and three years later, Helplessness Blues has arrived, and the good news is that it unquestionably sounds like a Fleet Foxes record-which is to say: warm and exquisitely pretty.

As with that last Aphex Twin full-length, The Only She Chapters plays to no one's expectations; gutted and reassembled, it will still unfurl like a disassociated string of insular oddities.

Hit After Hit doesn't achieve its titular goal completely and totally. It does come fairly close, though, and makes strong cases for the tunefulness of San Francisco's new garage music, Smith as a songwriter, and the appeal of something done straightforward if also done well.

Dancer Equired is short at thirty minutes, but it does the job of re-leasing Times New Viking's mad energy.

More critically, though, is that Eye Contact works very well as a stamp on this band's original turn with Saint Dymphna: now that we know that a lot of their contemporaries were also going to turn in this direction, it's nice to see a band that was once ahead of the curve still working so hard to keep their sound this fascinating.

With Our Heads is a lonely, long stretch of un-anchored time passing, the audible, honest-to-god equivalent of switching one's mind into Airplane Mode and eyeing the smooth, barely altered upper cloudscape for the duration of a flight.

The core of his sadness may still be a mystery to me, but his monument to it, in all its eccentricity, is by far the hardest thing to ignore that he's done yet.

Shaolin is simply tiresome, a heap of cliches with no animating force beneath its husk-like frame, not so much a follow-up to anything but our long-held anticipation for something better.

Though the thesis of this remix album restricts remixers to only one album, the remixers limit themselves further, and seem afraid to do too much more than reaffirm certain dance touchstones already done away with by Weber himself. They've missed the sanctity for the structure.

w h o k i l l is probably the most inviting album you'll hear this year.