In Ear Park sounds so much like Grizzly Bear that it’s difficult to recognize, at first, that it does occasionally retain the bedroom DIY aesthetic for which Department of Eagles are known, especially in the sense of its canned percussion, and at the album’s best it keeps the music attempting the scope and lushness of Grizzly Bear.

Another World desperately labors to keep fans satiated and ends up overburdened, somewhere nicely between all its scattered intentions.

All I hear is vague honesty in place of actual emotion or considered writing, and frail vocals smeared across the whitewashed wall doesn’t compensate for a severe dearth of substance.

As an amalgam of mind-warping melodies and high-minded concepts, Alegranza! is more than deserving of our praise. Then again, El Guincho could have avoided the album’s key missteps by cutting down on the obvious Afrobeat tropes and experimenting more with traditional song-oriented vocals.

This album sinks in, each listen dry rubbing the quiescent hums and lulls into the brain like a dream half remembered.

Here, as on their last effort, probably the most well fitted referent is Andrew Bird, but Forest flattens the jubilant hop of Pale Young Gentlemen into a cluster of songs much darker and more expansive.

A lock for most promising debut of '08.

It’s hard to parse the band’s ultimate intentions, but there’s no doubt that every note and lyric on this album are in fact intended, and, most importantly, sincere.

4 comes off like a minor work by a band of unfuckwithable talent. Which I guess is another way of saying the law of diminishing returns applies here, but you can only expect the band would ride a plateau before moving forward again.

Sequenced as the record is, with each personality dominating certain stretches of runtime, Paper Trail feels almost vaudevillian.

I believe in the Vivian Girls. In every gorgeous harmony that coats bitterness, in every ambition subjugated to truncated song structure and muffled production, in every bouncy beat beneath a baleful drawl somehow made of equally bouncy elements.

Feed The Animals isn’t much of anything at all. It’s just another clip show of all your favorite records.

The Hawk is Howling is an immensely satisfying, patient, and expertly crafted album that ranks among their best.

I have enough faith in this band to presume they’ll eventually see Only By the Night for what it is, as a fourth album hiccup that fails to play to their strengths.

Dave Sitek’s production is the magnetic north of this musical universe, and with it the band is never lost. They would be well to sound more so; to get lost, rather than cluck with pleasure at how well they know themselves.

High Places is an indie dance album about rhythm rather than dancing, that’s danceable without pandering.

Apart from these few times when the band touches on musical history, lyrically there’s still the same ridiculous preoccupations: rugged, Midwestern imagery; new age-y spirituality; rather obvious weather-related metaphors.

Where the compilation loses itself is in its exhaustive nature. An update to the sound of older songs (albeit not much older) seems appropriate enough given how important production was to the scream and sheen of their self-titled album.

There’s nothing outstandingly terrible about Seaside Rock, but that’s what ultimately makes it kind of boring.

Substantive lyrics aren’t part of Pip Brown’s forte but, then again, they’re totally unnecessary in the genre to which she peddles.

Earnestness is so damningly difficult to nail down, but Fink and his cohorts come as close as anything this year, displaying an aptness for cloying love songs minus the puppy dog eyes.

Despite all the quasi-soundtrack leanings, Pivot also possess that rare balance of immediacy and densely populated song-spans.

Awash in grumbling drones and dissonant harmonies, swollen with a tension that rarely finds release, Of Sirens Born is at once terrifying and sublime.

All of this provides a great recipe for exactly one good listen. That one listen is best the volume down though, as Death Magnetic might very well be the most distorted, punishing mastering job since the advent of the CD. After that, the charms of the album become significantly reduced.

They ["The Stage Names" and The Stand Ins]were released as distinct (though interrelated) albums, and this one is better.

This is the New Year. And there’s plenty of Bedhead in the New Year. Just not enough, unfortunately, in The New Year.

Caught In The Trees covers familiar ground, simultaneously bare and flourished, effortless and meticulous, but where Jurado’s lyrics have grown more abstract, still loaded with death, exhaustion, and horse metaphors but, in rarefied form, not really tied to any specific situation or memory, he’s correspondingly spread out his tools.

What is clear, though, is that this is a finely drawn, funny, animated, and gumdrop authentic record, never less than fascinating in its endless and disburdening involutions.