In the end, Fuckbook is a disappointing Yo La Tengo album, but the band’s made it clear that it doesn’t want it to be that, instead just a pretty good Condo Fucks record.

Enemy Mine is altogether more defined in its varying forms, food groups falling out a cornucopia rather than coming together like the stew that bubbled in the "Beast Moans" cauldron.

He’s filled his abdicated spot with greater authority than ever before, patched up the walls punched in from Ghostface’s temper tantrums and assured us that villian-rap’s appeal will remain evergreen as long as it infused with this genius, this wild idiocy, these manic flights of syllabic invention.

The Floodlight Collective exudes something astonishing and rare, particularly for a record on the fringes of indie rock, scoping into abstraction. It is, more than anything else, sincere.

It’s like listening to a strong feeling that yearns to be vented, but instead is left inside its confining limits, echoing on itself.

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.

With one bright, surprising exception, the songs here either make a terrible impression or they make none at all.

Beware is exactly the album to be expected from Oldham, now, as he begins to investigate the limelight, as he trots out his friendships with gothic southern troubadours (Jim White), say, or free jazz northerners (Rob Mazurek and Nicole Mitchell), wondering whether to scamper back to the stern nobody-ness Drag City allows him or push on expanding his solipsistic world.

The second album has the more obvious and combustible singles. But there’s nothing on the second album that comes close to the 1-2-3 punch of 'California Goth,' 'Wavves,' and 'Lover.'

It’s all so cold and empty and irritating.

It is a step forward for an artist with a wealth of potential and a tremendously moving voice. Should he cease his overzealous grab for stylistic and thematic conventions--or perhaps if he simply learns to cover more ground--there’s a good chance Handsome Furs will reach a level of maturity and sophistication at which their current offering merely hints.

Not the first single (“Rockin’ That Shit”) or the second (“My Love”) but hopefully the third, the title track of Love vs. Money is the sole moment where The-Dream’s artistry is actualized through, how else, an epiphany of self-loathing and regret.

Clocking in with around thirty five minutes of largely instrumental music, one’s tempted to cast Thank You Very Quickly as a one-off, but both the band’s communicable enthusiasm and obvious technical skill pull it off.

It’ll play huge at the Troubadour. It’s just that, as much orchestration clearly went into this record, it seems content to be merely “well done,” when the opening two tracks make it absolutely, exhilaratingly clear that there’s more than that at stake here.

Nowhere is this idea of acceptance clearer than on An Imaginary Country. In a sense the album evokes nothing so much as Hecker himself, diligently and intuitively molding his sounds through synthesizer, guitar and laptop, and as a result may be the most symbiotic album of the year.

It sounds more coherent than episodic, placeless, and with a definite emphasis on the rock aspects that, on "Recording a Tape," were used sparingly.

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.

Despite some engaging song-craft, however, the album overall feels lacking in real substance and its fixations leave me blase.

Keeley & Zaire’s Ridin High has absolutely nothing to offer its listener or hip-hop at large except for a fat pile of old rap comfort food and, tucked evenly away from the beginning and end of the record’s runtime, two absolute fucking bangers in 'Addicts for Real' and 'We Made It.'

I’d reject the idea that this album is laid-back in favor of saying it’s too light-hearted.

Though I'd hardly go as far to call it their best album, which I guess makes U2 irrelevant by Bono's logic, its best songs can credibly stand alongside their classics, and how many bands can maintain this level of vitality 30 years into their career? I give.

Considering the extent to which they seem to follow whatever musical desires grip them at the time, rather than following an overarching path, it's not much of a disappointment to suggest they haven't quite graced the heights of their best work here

One of the most immediate records of the year so far, Here We Go Magic materialize as if they’ve always been here. Which, it turns out, may be right where they deserve to be.

Well, here’s a disappointment so mild I can barely taste it. I think I’m disappointed, maybe, but I’m not sure how much or wherefore.

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

But far from ruffled or startling, Hold Time simply fills the quota Ward’s assigned himself and, (im)properly slaked, poofs off, contrails the last reminder that, yes, Jason Lytle’s still alive.

In the end, we needn’t concern ourselves too much with the machinations of some emotionally arrested Peter Pan of pop. Moz will always have the last word, anyways, which makes the barb from the album’s closer all the more appropriate: “This might make you throw up in your bed, I’m OK by myself!”