It’s an intermittently interesting and somewhat forward looking work-in-process, but at the moment Hebden sounds like an underground hip-hop producer with a few ideas but no MC.

As formulaic and boring a rock album as you’re likely to hear in 2005.

What’s particularly interesting about Demon Days is not that they have half of a good record--there are plenty of albums that can’t even manage that--it’s that it’s so clearly the first half.

The Woods is an incredibly intense rock record even by S-K’s lofty standards; it's a call to arms that will hopefully force complacent indie kids to demand more from their rock music.

He’s back in the groove here: relaxed, confident, weird in his own special way, smart, and ready to make great albums again.

Sure, there’s no “Watermelon” or “Communism”, but Be’s wit presents on a grander scale than a dependence on sprinkled, chucklable oneliners would allow.

Push Barman truly captures the trajectory of the band’s seven-year career in about two hours, and it does so in a way that does the band justice.

This band simply isn’t the same without a little darkness to balance the overwhelming light, and rarely do the songs pick up the slack.

Mezmerize works as a synopsis of the most effective weapons in the band’s arsenal.

These songs are all coherently-arranged, positive, played in major keys, very easy to listen to and enjoyable on their surface.

Two thirds of a great album.

What sticks out most about Spoon, five albums in, is how singular they sound, like a jut of brilliant rock standing unfazed by crashing tides of trends and hopeful hype.

Make Believe finds Cuomo donkey-punching the formaldehyde-soaked corpse of his former glory.

Hal is basically just a pleasant, fun album.

Kidnapped by Neptune is overly long and ambitious, even if it is a determined step towards something far more interesting.

The majority of Carousel just plain sounds the same. It might as well be the same pace, might as well be in the same key, might as well be the same vocal melody over and over; it's a carousel if there’s ever been one.

While it's a coalition of fantastic talents, Themselves submit to the expectations of a pussy glitch-pop crowd, and the Notwist mistakenly assume that hip-hop fans don't want songs with dynamism or structure.

Somehow, it all works remarkably well together. There are a number of songs that feel like guilty pleasures, and the Gram Parsons/Bob Dylan/Neil Young influences are worn on Adam’s sleeve, but lets face it: we’d all rather hear Ryan doing this than trying to bite ‘70s FM rock or Brit-pop shoegazer nonsense.

The album ups the ante on everything that made Up in Flames so astounding, and adds more pop structure to the chaotic bliss-outs, resulting in what is probably his biggest achievement to date.

The strategy is the same: start with a basic, inoffensive and unambitious melody, repeat it over and over again, toss on a few scatting horns (between three and five notes only, please, and let’s keep dissonance to a minimum) and whatever other trinkets are in the studio, and voila! An instantly forgettable pop breeze.

Take Finn’s vocals out of the equation and you have a fun and even innovative garage band steeped in the brand of classic rock to which indie has never properly paid its due. With Finn, they’re monotonous, even annoying.

The best songs on The Forgotten Arm reveal the extremes of love and despair under their smiling masks, but the sorrows of the album are tempered by what can only be Mann’s own joy.

Perhaps its primary feat is that the music manages to sound fresher than anything industrial-tinged has a right to sound.

The band have always been the holding of hands between kinda-Kyuss stoner rock and spazzy synth pop, but The Wedding is unique in that it is something conclusively Oneida but also conclusively marked of indie’s recent resurgence on the mainstream pop-cultural landscape.

The Ponys' arms are so full of the good old stuffs, they can't offer much that's new or really interesting, yet they're talented enough to make it difficult to care about that sort of thing.

[The] drums generally sound weaker and lazier than anything [he's] done before, [the] songs lack strong structure and hooks, [and his] topical matter’s a bit one-tracked.

When I say “melancholy masterpiece” I mean “beautiful, melodic progressive pop bombast with realistically contemplative lyrics," not “Damien Rice."

Unsurprisingly, the formula still works just fine, and in more than a couple spots, it’s revitalized and intensified to great effect.