Callahan's made plenty of fine albums-some of which boast higher highs than this one-but Apocalypse is such a satisfying and downright elegant listen because of its commitment to a narrative arc; as soon as it ends and you step back, the album takes the shape of a remarkably complete thought.

Sometimes, in the wrong mood, Tomboy can come across as eleven great songs chipping away at each other.

Sure, the record isn't very functional outside of its given context, but if you've tuned into this program before then it'll be nice to know that one of the most congenial of indie pop acts can still deliver on their good name and to their respective audience in equal measure.

Salon des Amateurs is undeniably an important album for Hauschka, both for its distillation of his rigorous methods and its energized perspective.

Street Halo shows his commitment to his music both by tweaking it and sticking to the formula. It still makes him capable of bridging the brutal and the delicate. Only experienced crisis negotiators can say that.

Wasting Light is as good as mainstream arena rock gets now, twenty years after the fact.

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.

Share the Joy represents growth for Vivian Girls, though they're not totally there yet.

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's never a matter simply of pop melodies buried beneath noise, but of beauty wrapped up in menace, references tied to deeper ones, history feeding back at itself.

Introspection of this kind can be a difficult thing to pull off convincingly, but Nostalgia never veers too far into sentimentality to let its edges be sanded down.

Ultimately, that is the problem with most of W.A.R., though. Monch is so busy adopting the typical backpacker agenda of putting himself at odds with the mainstream that he takes steps towards a new conformity instead of just destroying sh*t.

House of Balloons is an album suspended in contradiction--a collection of sex jams tired of sex, or a paean to coke addled irretrievably by the same. It lacks dynamism because it has to; the Weeknd know nothing else, just that in every solid groove lurks the metronomic pulse of something waiting to die.

Volume II: High and Inside picks up exactly where its revelatory predecessor left off, but this time welcoming a few more indie-world guest stars, having a few more stories to tell, and reveling in slightly more robust production.

You leave Nine Kinds of Light completely unaltered, neither enlightened nor offended, simply having experienced a series of first-person statements: Adebimpe in his doorless (and not terribly interesting) tower of self.

They're also carrying on in the tradition of independent rap artists from the fertile early 2000s, producing whatever they damn please and selling it for ten bucks. An uncompromising approach can lead to disaster, either financially or creatively, but COHESIVE is the paradigmatic fruit of such an approach.

No matter how good these songs are (and many of them are quite good), the finished product is underwhelming, and I can only hope that I don't have to wait another half-decade to hear where they go next.

On Rolling Papers, Wiz Khalifa's personality shines through: unobscured, stoned, brilliant.

All Eternals Deck, the band's first album for North Carolina superindie Merge, effectively picks up from where the apocalyptic finale of The Life of the World To Come (2009) left off.

After all, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart never promised reinvention, and Belong is another solid soundtrack to summer afternoons lounging on bedspreads, making collages, flashing back to one's own days as a teenage outcast-however far in the past they may be.

Angles manages litheness; First Impressions was all sludge. And despite the rumored ills surrounding the recording process, the resulting album paints the band as re-energized and optimistic, playful in a way their last record so detrimentally wasn't.

Basically, if you're a Suede fan looking for a way forward in 2011, then factorycraft is your personal lifeline, a snake-hipped mating dance with a guy who's got a mouth like a Hearts supporter, a mouth that exists purely to confess-jealously, restlessness, rashes, warts, and all. Happy scratching.

If there's any band that's completely earned the right to gracefully knock themselves off, it's R.E.M. It only took them fourteen years.

Vile has slyly written pop that enters one's head without leaving much of a permanent mark; instead of a distraction from one's deeper woes, it's chameleonic accompaniment.

Reptilians is a batch of competent dance-pop-not as groundbreaking as fans have hoped, not as obnoxious as non-fans may've assumed-overcompensating for all the patience they've tested and the goodwill they squandered on their looping baby-steps back to the Starfucker moniker.

While their debut showed a lot of promise, Beach Fossils still haven't really set themselves apart from every other band practicing the same pleasant murmurs of personality.

Too Beautiful to Work isn't focused enough to create an atmosphere that whole, and for all the virtue of its experimental tendencies, "Cold Canada" shows the record might have fared better if it wasn't so antsy.

Space is Only Noise is delivered with an impressive restraint, especially for a debut LP and from an artist of Jaar's age, its songs warm and dense whilst seeming full of negative space, gentle and humorous whilst threatening claustrophobia.