While Tones is tighter, smaller, and more to-the-point than its predecessor, I’m not fully convinced that it’s as good as Field Music.

New Magnetic Wonder’s high points are in its more quirky and musically ambitious moments.

Okereke now sings instead of barking, and, well, oops on him.

An incredibly pretty album with depth and scope.

Phantom Punch is a good album, but not a great one, and certainly not the Career Record that Duper Sessions almost was.

There’s a lot to be impressed with here, but it’s the emotional intimacy that the songs establish even at their most grandiose that makes the album great.

Despite its more fractured stylistic elements -- shoegaze smashing headlong into folk pop -- Writer’s Block emerges as one of the most complete and satisfying records of this year.

Sheâ??s funky, confident and fun, and thatâ??s just on the first song.

Some Loud Thunder is a mixed bag of spectacular material and hodge-podge studio doodles.

Yes, there could be more new ground broken in this material, but this does not necessarily equate to artistic diffidence.

This Youth Group record is a diluted version of already watered-down music; not only is it not as good as their first album, I’m not sure it’s as good as Keane’s first album.

A fantastically pedicured amalgam of every side and thing Busdriver thinks he can effectively be.

If Chris Adams descended into his cozy lair to try his hand at glitch and rid his fingers of Hood’s snoozy bleating, he found a safe median, driving his ideas years behind the curve, distinguishing himself from his previous band by tinier and tinier increments as the tracklist exhausts.

Half of me thinks the group was aiming for a bit of something hypnotized and dreamy, that they worship Spacemen 3 and the patience that entails. But then the other half thinks Cryptograms is something gritty and furious, maybe something religious, but still something of a turtlehead waiting to poke through.

Visitations is cold.

This doesn’t seem so much a pop internalization of Deerhoof’s unique talent as it is a kind of album-costume where they adorn the talents of other bands.

If anything, that’s the trick here: each time the listener pegs it with one of Albarn’s past sounds, the track subverts and confounds the expectation.

For every elastic, tuneful, vacuum-packed “Phantom Limb” or “Australia” -- pop craftsmanship of the highest order, redolent of Chutes’ front-to-back triumph, crystalline, flawless and packed so thick with thoughts and words and hooks that they unravel marvelously indefinitely -- there’s an obvious b-side.

Hissing Fauna might be Barnes’ finest work yet, an opus built entirely of sugar.

The line between cheese and accessibility can be thin, and whistling or handclaps or a hidden track or an overt songwriting method can all reek, but Friend and Foe has, just as ostensibly, no wasted space. The hinge is in the balance the band manages with every inkling of sound or production seeming both spontaneous and stultifying, both labored-over and cast off.

It has its flaws, and it certainly isn’t some great reinvention of krautrock, but Transparent Things is an incredibly likeable album.

Through its overarching range, it ably balances silence with noise, restraint with reckless abandon.

While production values throughout the record consistently exceed those on Long Live, the real step forward is where it counts: with the songs themselves.

This is an album made for car trips by a band best suited for noisy bars; you’re going to want to play it loud.

Crow’s ego and identity have been largely removed from Living Well’s equation, and in its place are a number of undeviating, short, one-word-title indie rock songs that don’t require an explanation or setup.

This album maintains youth and vigor through dirty language and clean production, but eventually settles for something very middle-of-the-road.

Circles (2003) was heartier fare, just as starry-eyed and unabashedly romantic but more focused and elegant. It’s a better record, to be sure, but that doesn’t make The Autumn Defense a bad one.

Hip Hop Is Dead’s fruitless and one-dimensional rhetoric is sure to depress the Nas fan more than any of his didactics.