There's a bright side to Tennis moving beyond the measures of this LP: while tackling newer songmatter, delving into their return to land, maybe their songwriting habits will similarly shift gears with a degree of scrutiny that steps up to the plate and complements everything they brought to Cape Dory.

Half-baked and juvenile, sloppy but cheerful, fresh and joyful, the Beets may be plugging a gimmick, but at least they're doing something with themselves.

It is explorative, enchanting, wide-reaching, and so hopeful it ignites a tender pain all its own.

Albums like Kiss Each Other Clean and The Age of Adz are so giddy with compacting layers and counter layers into the already mapped-out confines of their pre-existing aesthetics that they come across like snowflakes: each one is beautiful and unique, except that the detail is too small to see and anyways there's about a billion of them shits and you have to shovel the walkway and hope public transit isn't delayed. It's distracting, basically, because nothing gets a chance to breath.

It's to British Sea Power's credit that Valhalla Dancehall seems far less concerned with mainstream sermonizing than their last full length, opting to indulge in the off-kilter charm that drew us to them in the first place

Kaputt is the sound of an artist released from his back catalogue and his own notions of how a song should be sung, or written. It is a mighty, mighty piece of work and really worth celebrating. In my mind, this is Destroyer's best album yet.

On Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics, Mondanile introduces his voice as an element into his solo music, and in turn takes one step forward and two steps back; though his songs are perfectly adequate, the reference points and production are easier than on any previous Ducktails release, and they suffer for it.

These songs are great expanses, sprawling and glorious.

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.

Deerhood vs. Evil is just simultaneously astounding and utterly familiar, correct, and right.

Special Moves illuminates the band's act for what it is.

The Wonder Show of the World, his eleventh release in half as many years, is everything for which we hope in a new Bonnie "Prince" Billy release: creeping yet expansive alt-folk; an ever-strengthening voice; erotic imagery ("The smell of your box on my mustache") paired with thoughts on family, never uncomfortably; a stark, doodled cover; a doting collaboration.

Sufjan's proficiency with larger-than-life arrangements has always been one of his strongest qualities as a musician, and across The Age of Adz he wields that proficiency, brazenly, like a kind of weapon.

As quiet strings and stupid whizzing noises pull the curtain on LP4, all I imagine is Ratatat going, "Alright, party's over, guys" and all I can think is "wait, is that what was happening for the past 43 minutes?"

Each time the album so overtly flips over, the same brief blushes of goosebumps, the same visceral highs, the same infectious, clapping percussion: I straight up have a crush on this album.

Infinite Love is a prickly, antiseptic listen. Surprising and interesting, to be sure, but hostile to expectations and ultimately as unsentimental about itself as it would be of any cultural artifact.

The record builds a whole new feeling of intimacy, and it's a ravishing enough record to, in its final breaths, break free of its own confines.

Sundown is still considerably boring when compared to the likes of the Kings' first three albums. It's also too long, the back end sacked with faceless mid-tempo songs devoid of hooks that can't compare to the mini-epics up front.

Instead of being doomed to tread a certain set of glossy, shoegaze-littered paths, and in that doom come off desperate to change, they search within their well-worn sound for a collection of songs with no aspirations to be anything more than the best at what they are. Now that's some progress.

While this album is far from The Hour of Bewilderbeast part two, it does represent a return to Gough's more stripped-down formula of simple, ramshackle pop songs built on electronic and symphonic detritus.

They may not yet have a strong enough aesthetic to make a great album, but they've made a unique, highly promising one that might soon create something which can bring Gonzalez's academics into the realm of something softer. In the way his best songs and covers were, and still could be.

It's a deeply felt, lively record that stands tall on its own merits, and further proof that Tucker's talent is bigger than that which can be expressed through one band's sound.

By showing a willingness to diversify their sound while cutting down on bloat, Phosphene Dream is easily the Black Angels most listenable record to date. It also suggests that they're keen on that most outmoded of concepts in the blog era: career longevity.

How To Dress Well is certainly not the only contemporary act to use nostalgia as the basis for an aesthetic, but Krell's ideas about the past and our relationship to it seem to be considerably more sophisticated than those of his peers.

Popp sounds as if he's having a ten-year-old argument with himself, and though he's certainly earned the right to make the point that this argument still holds currency, O is less than convincing.

Much more attention-getting has been Lil B's ambient mixtape Rain in England, an effort which doesn't seek so much to invert hip-hop as to merely slander it.

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.

Flockaveli is delivery-driven, then, in the best possible sense: it is a chorus of proficient, varied flows, avoiding the pitfalls of impotent swag music and pugnacious garishness.