While not a rapturously groundbreaking record, Cold of Ages is a rock-solid entry.

Quarter Turns Over a Living Line is neither an easy, nor comforting listening, and absorbing the entire album can occasionally leave the listener gasping for air. However, as a portrait of a dystopian 21st century musical landscape, there is little better than this brand of pure British blackness.

Subtlety is clearly not a strong suit here.

He puts together a good melody for each of these songs, as effortlessly as Ray Davies and in as nasally a voice.

Luckily, the songwriting on Minks' debut hits far more frequently than it misses. It's a solid establishment of a noteworthy sound--the proverbial "encouraging first album."

Beast Epic is a good album. In some senses, it’s satisfying. It just doesn’t get to the concreteness, to the creation that makes it something more.

As inconsistent as it is, Every Kind of Light, the first full-band Posies record of the century, curbs the pair’s excesses enough to reward repeat plays.

While Feorm Falorx may have some of the duo’s more simplistic songwriting, it’s well worth a spin for its textural delights alone.

It [“Walk Through Fire”] jives together with machine-like precision and fluid grace. The rest of the EP is pretty good, too.

Despite the less-successful entries, Saint Dymphna is commendable. There's substantially less chaos and abstractness and more pop quantization, but Gang Gang Dance are still overflowing with ideas.

There's a strength in what these four musicians are capable of together, and the best moments on Tidelands explore the boundaries of such an approach.

His songs flash by in vivid, disconnected mental images, floating on an underlying current of mood. What we see passes by. What we feel about it lingers, evocatively, just out of reach and often filtered through digital mechanisms. ... The album’s lyrics are about all kinds of things, but its sound is about being isolated and frightened with contact only through digital interface.

The end result is the 11 songs on Unlearn, which I'll save you the frustration of calling "eclectic" and opt for the even more euphemistic "well-informed."

This album is more grounded in sounds recognizably made by physical instruments. It’s also, in places, openly archaic in its devices and treatments.

Les Savy Fav has finally delivered an album worth shrugging about.

They’re no longer one of the torchbearers of a perceived trend, but they continue to grind out records of a style and overall quality that are still hard to come by (whether we need more of them is certainly up for debate).

These songs are smart and ingratiating, and slightly squeamish about the world of privileged, post-collegiate ennui they inhabit, and... that's what they are.

In brevity it betters the 1999 boxed set, in songwriting it plateaus.

Hairball doesn’t redefine its chosen genre, nor does it really refine it. It’s a straightforward album, one meant for windows-open listening on a sunny day.

Ultimately, this album probably won’t be the critical sleeper hit that its predecessor was-–it’s hard to find fault with the band’s playing, the choice of songs, and the overall premise, but Thing of The Past only nudges their art forward a bit from "To Find Me Gone."

It's cool that he's trying to change things up, but there's no substitute for a strong result.

Oldham's music, while drawing on familiar influences ' Neil Young and the Grateful Dead are immediately apparent ' is diverse enough that it feels far fresher than a by-the-numbers retread.

Nightshade's 10 songs unpack desire and affection and come up with the notion that disappointment is every bit worth savoring as joy because a romantic betrayal might acquaint you with real (not necessarily romantic) love. So while this record sounds pensive and lingers on experiences of loss, it's not depressing.

Out Hud’s new-found pop smarts leave you hoping that they’ll drop the instrumentals and devote a whole album to songs.

The players are so good that even their sketches make for engaging listening. And two songs on the EP are quite good.

There's plenty to like in this abbreviated outing, and hardly anything to raise the hackles.

Back to Reality's themes are pretty simple: having fun, getting laid and falling in love, all on the dance floor. It has just the right mix of crassness and manners, in a proportion that seems more than a bit quaint by today's standards.

For a songwriter who packs so much into his creations, it’s no surprise that Mercer makes it hard to get a full measure of 5 Dreams’ narrative gist, even after multiple listens. Approach these songs however you choose, and they’re sure to shift evasively, compelling you to follow.

Play It Strange covers plenty of ground and suggests that the folks in The Fresh & Onlys are far from out of compelling ideas, it also finds the band playing at a kind of strangeness that sounds suspiciously like work.

All told, Light Divide is a pretty thing, transporting and enveloping and full of glowing tones. Yet even as you’re listening to it, it slips away, and when you’re done, it’s like you’ve been asleep.

Teen Dream’s best material comes up front (“Zebra,” “Silver Soul,” “Norway” “Walk in the Park”) , and there’s a bit of a sag in the middle (“Lover of Mine,” “Better Times”), with songs that are pretty enough, but without any big payoffs.

It's got an energy that's usually associated with naiveté and learning instruments on the job. The trio knits their little hand-played loops together loosely, and in a certain light, there are places it unspools completely.

With Intoxicated Women we don’t get starlets and a known bad boy tussling in the spotlight. We get Harvey and his cast of players dusting off old scripts of prior perversions, delivering them to a world that fancies itself jaded, but is just as confused as ever.

The proceedings would be a lot less palatable if they didn’t often achieve a forceful, unhinged immediacy; amid the heavy themes and brash posturing, there’s still room for the band to elbow in some loud, rousing real life.

It’s nothing new and it’s nothing scary, but its renewed vigor is encouraging.

It has a denser, more cohesive sound, more defined rhythms and richer arrangements--and yet lacks some of the subterranean pull of its predecessor.

Even incoherent and excessively long, Frozen Niagara Falls shows that, like John Wiese with his recent--and more rewarding--masterpiece Deviate From Balance, Fernow is pulling apart the clichés of noise and looking at where it goes from here.

Even if it fails to meet impossibly high expectations, The Harrow & The Harvest offers a handful of keepers while moving Welch and Rawlings (hopefully) past their writers' block.

With the exception of the somewhat dull “Dormant Love,” I’m altogether satisfied.

The music doesn’t go far enough--it’s too restrained and mellow--but the point of view is crystal clear. This is alternative rock clinically perfected in a perpetual adolescence.

He doesn’t always push far enough; the album’s best when we feel the tightwire of this experience rather than when we suspect an agnostic at play. Religious language and transcendent experience (secular or sacred, if we divide them) come loaded with danger. The more Morby pushes into that space and the more he asks of the listener, the deeper the experience.

As far as conclusions about Popular Songs go, it’s fair to address the reader not as a consumer of the music, but as someone breezing through its clean, familiar architecture. You should check this place out. It’s pretty sweet, and I think you’ll like the light.

Basic, unassuming, and calling to mind a grip of classic material without going to great lengths to mimic it, Rush to Relax, the band’s third LP, adds almost nothing new to Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s repertoire.

It remains a little bit of all its influences, at times more like soul, at times almost straight country (particularly on “Here Is Where the Loving Is At”), but more often the proverbial blender mix.

Over the course of Spike Field’s 50 minutes, the songs’ prevalent mood can prove hypnotic if you’re receptive to its atmosphere. MBC is certainly adept at conjuring and sustaining a melancholy, nocturnal scene.

The 13 songs on What It Means to Be Left-Handed are all, in their own way, enjoyable. The ideas and collaborations on display are impressive, as is the stylistic range. But there's still a bit of cohesion missing there--something that makes What It Means to Be Left-Handed feel more like a collection of individually good ideas and less like a singular artistic statement.

Admittedly, this is a record with a specific style and set of concerns: if you don’t like your post-punk hyper-focused and with Van Morrison-levels of nods to mysticism, you may lose patience with it quickly. For those who appreciate the iconoclasm involved, however, there’s plenty to savor here.

Zeroes and Ones, like Eleventh Dream Day’s early work, has the direct, immediate quality of a live performance.

It’s a languorous, barely moving, fever dream of sustained organ tones and ritual chants, but it creates its own world if you let it.

Seek Warmer Climes is still more visceral than cerebral. It washes over you in a foul, cold, gritty spray, and you can hardly breathe when it’s coming straight at you.

The quality of the album isn't the issue, it's the qualities, the contradictions, the duplicity: it's what makes it as durable a listen as ever, but oddly empty when it comes to empathy.

While Dulli has mined the same vein of pop music for almost 25 years, he has nonetheless accomplished an awful lot with it.

Flat Worms doesn’t go anywhere strange or new. You can lose your way in the record’s middle section, where songs become easily exchangeable, one for another. That said, the first three and last two tracks on the record are noisy fun.

So it continues with Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, an album with no missteps...because every trick that Mogwai has used in the past is present in almost comically balanced fashion.

Rhyton is never quite that simple. Here it becomes a vehicle for pretty much all of Shuford’s obsessions, sometimes two or three on top of each other at once, and honestly, it works pretty well.

There's something lunky and crude that weighs down the chaos, even if it outwardly resembles arty contrariness. Motorik without motor skills, New Brigade actually sounds new.

It takes time to acclimate to the album's frenetic fog. In that sense, Centipede Hz is both a return to and rejection of form.

This album's problem is a very, very shoddy sequence.

Ultimately, Conquistador contains few surprises, but its stark beauty and understated textural depth prove that Carlson is still finding new and engaging ways of repeating himself.

The few moments of clarity don’t diminish Sleepwalk’s seductive anesthetic, which may be one of the album’s drawbacks.

"Jarvis"... is essentially a patchwork drawing from low and high points of his career - a quilt meant as a cover as well as an ornament.

There’s a sense of stagery in this album, as there is in all JSBX discs....

The spoken words mix wonderfully with excellent musical arrangements, but the original songs primarily suffer in comparison.

Their attempt to weld the cerebral and physical is not always smooth but part of the attraction is to sit in on a work in progress, to hear the musicians grasping at handholds and swinging for the next ledge, fearless in the vulnerability of thought and action.

Devotion goes down a little easier is both its strength and a feature that proves a bit disappointing in the end.

Working almost like a glorified mixtape, many of the tracks bleed together or start mid-scene with field recordings of corner action. It adds to the feeling that you’ve dropped in on something important.

Violent Hearts occasionally plods, as on "No One," "Other Girls," and the opener "Believe," (at least before its delightfully messy climax). But more often it quietly impresses, revealing new melodic and harmonic strands with each subsequent listen.

It's a densely constructed EP, and the more baroque and strange it gets, the more compelling it becomes.

Though the scale of these EPs isn't as wide as some of Muhly's other recent works, it feels every bit as immediate.

What's up with all this defeat? The answers, in no particular order: Because he's Neil Young.

Hval is unafraid to experiment and let the chips fall where they may. The results on Iris Silver Mist are variable but always intriguing.

Spirit Counsel doesn’t make for an easy listen, but largely because of its length. Moore’s compositional work and tonal explorations remain intriguing on repeated listens.

You can’t listen to Via without going through the wringer, but you also can’t listen to it without feeling stronger, surer and more defiant afterward.

Oversteps can trudge a bit--there’s a ponderousness to some of the cuts that’s borne of that most un-Autechreish of values, predictability. It takes a while for the exhilaration to kick in, but when it does, it’s worth the wait

Cut Off Your Hands' anthemic-ness--its lack of austerity and rigor--will put some people off. Yet there's something rather good in the way these songs bring together luxury and despair.

It seems borne more out of logical considerations than organic ones. It doesn’t mean the music is necessarily bad, but rather that it’s animated more out of a lifelessness than anything else. It’s undead music.

The charm of these songs won't last forever. They'll have their season in your heart or car stereo, their refrains will seep gently into your vocabulary, and at some point you'll stop needing them, but it's welcome company while it lasts.

As it stands, I enjoy it for what it is.

It’s hard to know what to make of such attention to individual moments in an album so devoted to the overall spectacle; it’s harder because those privileged moments are spread so sparsely throughout.

A bit melodramatic, but undeniably compelling, Scattergood’s work has already drawn comparisons to Tori Amos and Kate Bush.

Nothing terribly exciting here, but as it comes from a guy who made his bones as one of the most genuinely fucked-up-sounding people in music, it may be a welcome relief to hear him act like an adult.

This is not a bad album, and if it weren't carrying the Gang of Four name, you might find it casually enjoyable.

This is a significant step up for an already promising band. Speedy Ortiz may not be major yet, but they won’t be arcana for long.

A band that glides effortlessly when it might benefit from a bit of friction. A little ugliness might break up these pristine gate-reverbed vistas and make them seem not just stylish and cool but real.

An album that is easy to listen to, but hard to grasp, Everybody wraps its complexities in bright soap bubble diaphanies.

No one’s going to herald Waiting For Something To Happen as a great leap forward, but there’s a subtle refinement in approach happening for the attentive of ear.

Ultimately, The Iron Soul of Nothing feels considerably more like a NWW album than a Sunn 0))) album. But somehow that doesn't come at the expense of the source authors. Rather, it's a satisfying document of Stapleton's ongoing creativity as well as confirmation of the potential always nascent in the doom duo's earliest work.

For now, Extended Vacation is nice enough, at times seductively lovely, but it lands short of essential.

In A Wonder Working Stone, Roberts continues to tinker thoughtfully with the shared tradition of the Isles, always somewhat familiar but modern and discordant enough to render pause and consideration.

Overall, the album has an over technical, over clean vibe. All three musicians play very well, and they’ve obviously gotten more intuitive and engaged with one another. But it’s too much skill and too little viscera for my taste. Despite a continuous onslaught of face melting solos, Anthropocosmic Nest feels a little cold.

In the end, Hall Music is an enjoyable but paradoxical album, both an expansion and contraction of Svanängen's palette.

Intentionally or not though, the vibe here tends to conjure more of a '71 than '01 frame of references, working up a slightly discordant, cacophonous sound that brings to mind everything from the Kosmiche synth-klang of early Cluster to the Industrial scree of late Faust.

At its best, then, Vanity is Forever seems to be an album where the nostalgic references are intentional: New Wave as touchstone rather than simply gazing backward fondly.

Their debut conveys a unique sensibility that's endearing without being cloying or calculated.

On the Moog axis of pop, they’re skewing less towards Six Finger Satellite and more towards an asymmetrical version of the Rentals.

Modeselektor's willingness to collaborate and explore sounds while still sticking to their identifiable, fat, bass-heavy crunk techno style is worth applauding, and there's no reason to think that they won't continue to remain relevant.

For all the ups and downs, this collection fulfills Martin's goal of continuing the conversation.

Living on the Other Side sounds as good the first time through as it's going to, perfectly pleasant but slight.