He for sure knows enough that this sound lives and dies by its honesty, and that Childish Prodigy is just that, just an honest album, the best he could have made now, the best of its kind for a long long time. More please!

They are doing the same thing they always do, which entails gorgeous and gracefully surprising variations on a deeply resonant motif.

Dead Man’s Bones is about death, right, and about love, testing where one touches the other, flirting with sensations similar and enduring the inability to confront or frankly deal with that intimacy. Had this record a thicker dramatic arc or something less confining than a spreadsheet of rules, then maybe the songs wouldn’t so inevitably miss their obvious marks.

The garish cover of Ghostdini is apt: this is an elaborate and unfunny joke, not to mention--if it even bears mentioning at this point—profoundly hateful to women

Why There Are Mountains is plain pleasing indie rock--how it used to be, how it’s ceased to be since, at least in spirit.

While a Basement Jaxx album used to feel like a below-the-radar party for real heads, Scars could easily soundtrack a celebrity bash. That’s not the Jaxx’s fault, of course, though capitulation suits them.

It’s a counterfactual, of course, but I’ve got to think that Monsters of Folk circa 2005 would have come up with something a bit more substantive than this.

Despite having ties to shitgaze, this isn’t a record obsessed with that aesthetic, and this works to its advantage, since these songs clearly aspire to be bigger than that and have very real potential to be.

Here we’re given a respite from Bon Iver’s heavy crises while still loving on Bon Iver; here, Volcano Choir is inevitably weightless--a pretty happy band with a pretty happy album.

Eskimo Snow simply categorizes those words in a bit more careful, less adventurous fashion than Wolf and company have revealed before. While this latest release is quite literally the second side of the same coin (or recording session), it feels flatter.

While A Brief History of Love isn’t quite capable of recapturing the rush upon hearing “Bittersweet Symphony” or “This is Music” for the first time, the Big Pink’s reverence towards those songs and their era and everything they represented is extremely well executed. And greatly appreciated.

Deeply individualistic, dark and woebegotten, one can’t help but root for his continued presence seemingly regardless of his efforts.

For an album so brazenly loud it leaves little impression; as a record supposedly about statements, it makes very few intelligibly. Most inexcusably, it lacks imagination.

While Skitter on Take-Off is a great album, At the Cut is a brilliant one.

A little more effort at the end would have been appreciated, but so long as you’re content with paying full price for what’s essentially twenty-eight minutes of listenable music, Backspacer works as a fun little rock n’roll record.

Nobody who has ever had some semblance of an interest in this band should ignore Journal For Plague Lovers, which is simply far more awesome than anyone had a right to expect.

Time to Die doesn’t seem to strive for anything, so it settles into being a pleasant little pop record, boring and bereft of character.

Which isn’t to say that the rest of the album isn’t impressive at certain points, though the law of diminishing returns weighs heavily here.

Ashes is A Sunny Day’s stripes, their first truly great album of scope.

It's not that the record is so unclassifiable--shit is downright pleasant to listen to--as it exudes the confidence to acknowledge its influences and contemporaries with the same convivial grace that has marked Q-Tip's entire career.

While it at least confesses that there’s a reason for the band to state it’s on your side—an admission of bad things in the face of a strong insistence that art not harsh anyone’s mellow—the album acts as a sort of side step to those bad things rather than a head-on address. Music this consistently gorgeous deserves a little better.

Suffice it to say, Milky Ways covers more territory than a dance album of its ilk rightfully should, though it never really clings to that designation in the first place and struggles to fit into any sensible line of kin.

Thorpe and co. can still sound as if they play against rather than off one another. But Two Dancers, a huge improvement that comes only one year after their debut, is certainly the sounds of Wild Beasts becoming a band to keep tabs on.

Despite the 26 minutes wasted by these final tracks, as damning as that sounds, this is still a very good Yo La Tengo record.

The real nuggets of the album, however, lie in the moments when the inherent melancholy behind Hart’s doe-eyed mysticism comes out.

The Blueprint's vaunted resuscitation of sample-based boom-bap rap production is replaced here by big corny synth wipes, a sometimes-fascinating corollary to Jay’s corporate sense of purpose.

Vivian Girls have responded in a way I never saw coming. Everything Goes Wrong is, proudly and brilliantly, a long player.

This being their (sort of) third album, HEALTH have ostensibly defined their formula and they seem content with that, tweaking without straying from their core of grating guitars, ghostly vocals, and the occasional synth.