Without hearing it in alongside the images that accompany it, it’s hard to pass judgment on Cave and Ellis’s music.

Rhino’s new Big Star box set Keep an Eye on the Sky seems like it was put together as much to please Big Star fans as it was to introduce newcomers to the band.

The combination of synth, loop techniques and no-joke instrumentalists playing wild and unconventional rhythms is totally over-the-top, but that’s exactly what makes this album so dazzling.

However central Sylvian’s bleak commentary, the weight and suggestiveness of this record gives it a sense of unpredictability, possibility, almost an openness beyond itself. It’s absolutely superb.

“The Drunken Boat” one of the best tracks he’s done to date. The rest of the album isn’t as daring or unique. Joyner mostly follows the "Hotel Lives" template and reaps the same rewards.

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.

It seems trivial for album length to be the crux of what makes Signal Morning work, but with one’s attention less spread out, less diluted, Hart’s musical strategy becomes that much more powerful. It’s the old showbiz adage: always leave ‘em wanting more.

There’s nothing particular catchy. No song stands out.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing to the band besides the concept. Far from ramshackle, exploratory fun, the songs are paint-by-numbers melodramatic nonsense with a few interesting genre gestures.

Mister Pop doesn’t quite measure up even to the first few Clean records from their third return (Modern Rock is an overlooked gem); it feels a bit haphazard at times, the instrumentals don’t need to be there, and Robert Scott’s song isn’t as potent as usual.

So while In Prism at least sounds like a Polvo record, it’s not until the second half, starting with the eight-minute opus “Lucia,” where it actually begins to feel like a Polvo record.

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.

Despite these small clunkers, there are many moments on A Strange Arrangement that show careful attention to soul’s craft and demonstrate a full immersion in the genre and its subtleties.

It is at once too ambitious (in the recording process and change of milieu) and not ambitious enough (in its failure to push Bergsman’s music to unexpected and truly experimental places).

The music on the album is rarely as urgent as the image that adorns it, and never as explosive as the heavy artillery that is found on its back, but the disc has a more subtle appeal than both.

I’ve not listened to any other album from 2009 quite so much, or quite so closely, a reflection not only of the exacting single-mindedness of O’Rourke’s vision, but also of The Visitor‘s loveliness.

What we do get is delay-drenched college rock, circa 1983.

The Snake displays many of its predecessor’s strengths--good songs, that emotion-laden voice, the amorphous blend of pop and jazz--without trying to be an action replay

Even if Speech Therapy, for all its dour resignation, seems a rather surprising Mercury Prize winner, the gentle, pretty sounds behind the quivering sadness of Debelle’s voice remain true throughout.

For better or worse, his mucho-affected glam vocals are as cartoonish as ever and significantly higher in the mix. But, for punks, edgy power-pop seems as though it’s one of the few long-term routes that isn’t a dead-end.

If metal evokes power, and punk evokes weakness, this record is a dive down a well of powerlessness, sinking deeper than they’ve gone before. It goes down swinging blades.

Chasny has souped up his production values, and they’ve never been sharper than they are on Luminous Night, checking everything Chasny has ever done well with unprecedented clarity.

The attraction that already existed between Xasthur’s music and Mount Eerie’s exerted a strong enough force on Elverum that it became incorporated into him.

It is something of a missing link, and therefore a reminder of the often uncomfortably close proximity, between indie baroque’s earnestness and the pyrotechnic baroque of a lead singer who keeps a “passion coach” in his entourage.

An album like Alien in a Garbage Dump is interesting for its first spin, when the listener has the resources to make something of it. Past that, you’ll need to make an almost ritual commitment to teasing out the clashes that push the music forward.

I ultimately found Solo Electric Bass 1 as dull as it must have been difficult to play.

The thing is, this isn’t a bad album. But it is so full of mediocre songs--as are most of the albums since the end of GBV--that one has to ask why he just didn’t save up all the great ones and make one really excellent album.

The combination of bile and hook, of wiry, mistrustful intelligence meshed in danceable synth pop works throughout the album, the contradictions bristling without overwhelming the tunes.

At just four songs, each hovering around the 10-minute mark, Destination Tokyo feels more like a peek than a coming-out party.

Love and Curses is a rock ‘n’ roll record with neither pretense nor manicure, a clean glimpse into rock’s exposed essence.

Nothing is entirely serious. It’s all in fun--and it is fun, fortunately.

Lights certainly has its charms--cribbed Afropop, bits like A Rainbow in Curved Air, and a general poppy through-line--but those charms wear thin when placed up against an entire album’s worth of monotonous, mobius strip dance beats.

You could miss whole philosophies by following the guitar line too closely…and forgo featherbeds of tuneful pleasures by worrying too much about the words. And yet, ride the line just right, and meaning floods translucently simple songs, lighting them up from inside and transforming them.

This time, she and Wells seems intent on demonstrating that members of even the shaggiest rock outfits have a pop side, too. If you’ve been waiting to see someone try to splice together Carol King and Karen Dalton--and more or less pull it off--this is your record.

The record finds the band operating in a similar space as the War on Drugs or Real Estate: a fuller sound with a little more polish that still feels homegrown. But in this case, the layers of production do more to maintain a distance than swallow you whole.

They’ve clearly been listening, and taking notes. But between the blatantly derivative style of basically every song and the inherently specious nature of their source material, it’s hard to really take anything they’re saying or playing seriously.

I’m Going Away is striking for its group sound; the Furnaces play with more air around them, more flexibility and interaction.

Riceboy Sleeps is more like a film, shot exquisitely in various breathtaking spaces, where the plot never moves forward because nothing ever goes wrong.

The Knot turns the cliche about sophomore slumps on its head by being much stronger than If Children.

Lights’ debut was a strange, beautiful thing, and one of my favorite debuts of last year. Rites is bigger, sharper and in all ways better. Lights just got a good deal brighter.

Repetitive, psyche-battering noise obscures things--most of the songs sound like there was a jackhammer nearby during recording--yet, after a couple of times through, it’s easy enough to discern pop hooks.

All of the songs here are strong enough to be bolstered (rather than swamped) by their rococo touches and period piece flourishes.

Mostly because the stakes are so high, By the Throat, the would-be comeback from prodigal Minneapolis duo Eyedea & Abilities, has to rate as a disappointment, despite interesting intentions and a few sublime moments.

The technical virtuosity on display on Embrace is something to appreciate, but the delicate balance between their austere and manic moments, the way they bridge hazy folk and psych so frequently, needs a little more refinement.

A stronger verse/chorus foundation might make the songs more instantly accessible and easier to remember. But by making it easier to access, Bowerbirds might well be depriving listeners of the chance to make their own way, to wander in the desert a little even.

Catacombs isn’t an exception to or refinement of what McCombs has done previously, just a soft demurral of the singer-songwriter career arc.

Wilco is a Great Band, if you like stuff that’s boring. And a lot of people seemingly do.

The results are quietly remarkable.

Far is a bright and gratifying listen; one that doesn’t aim at ideas above its station or flounder in search of unity.

On Dragonslayer, perhaps more so than any of their previous albums, Sunset Rubdown is able to create memorable, multi-part songs that stay engaging throughout and that don’t meander aimlessly.

Rather than the longer, complex compositions, the four shortest tracks here are the most intriguing, as they compress Tortoise’s way of layering disparate ideas into brief, disorienting beatscapes.

McCauley writes within genre, embraces its trappings, and emerges with completely acceptable results.

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

The Guilty Office feels different; it sounds quite a bit like its predecessor (which in turn sounded quite similar to early ’90s efforts like Fear of God and Silverbeet), but like a new eyeglass prescription, it renders the familiar in sharper detail.

Despite the occasional filler and silliness, Guns Don’t Kill People...Lazers Do! takes dancehall, club music and a genre that can probably best be described as “Diplo” to new and very interesting places.

The thing that really sucks about Bitte Orca is that the guy is probably onto something pretty good, but his allegiance to cleverness rather than consistency fucks it up.

The Eternal is a rock group playing at the peak of their powers: assured but not ‘comfortable,’ and free with each other.

Beam doesn’t lack wit or inventiveness or honesty, or any of the other things that are good about "conscious rap," but it implicitly disowns them all as impotent or corrupt, as failures before the fact. Its self-loathing is too self-aware, too pervasive, to accomplish anything more productive than wallowing.

Ellington and Bean’s voices braid pleasant timbres that sound quite right sailing over the band’s strum and shuffle, but they’re curiously lacking in the chemistry that separates necessary from nice.

Kowalsky’s chants are more meditative than elegiac, more active than atmospheric and don’t have any air of scientific inquiry about them.

Though much of Dilla’s later works were quick jots, Jay Stay Paid sounds too much like the unrevised pages of a journal.

On Veckatimest, by contrast, the experimentation can go over the top: the additional arrangements may not add much aside from being one more thing to admire. And, paradoxically, doing that moves some songs out of the avant-garde and squarely into the middle of the road.

It doesn’t hurt that they’ve made their most pleasing record yet. It’s slick but not stupid, the results of a traditional rock band working closely with a producer of electronic music, one which merges the clean lines of dance music with the grandeur of a crack studio band well-heeled in ’70s pop and ’90s indie rock.

Eating Us is still an unqualified success, the pop album that many followers in the footsteps of Kraftwerk have tried and failed to make.

What makes II so vital on a grander scale is that they have reached a masterful equilibrium with the elements that have made them the preeminent producers they are today.

The melodies are often big, but they rarely stick with you after the song is over, having been overcome by nervous tension and a project whose first goal is self-effacement.

Monoliths and Dimensions is a bold step forward and bodes well for Sunn 0)))’s future relevance as not just musicians, but honest-to-god composers.

Alpers is smart, you can tell immediately, yet the album feels carefully scrubbed of identifying marks, swinging between Flaming Lips-size pomp and Laurie Anderson-style catatonia.

Gone is all the nervous tension that crisscrossed most of Finberg’s twitchy, dystopian vignettes, replaced instead with carefully plotted fuzz and a general hazy ambience that suggests calculated late-1960s ennui more than anything else. Overall, that’s a really good thing, especially when accompanied with the band’s seemingly newfound ability to ply their songs with unexpected twists and subtle new details.

Parts of Litany were pretty but kind of dull, and The Glass Bead Game is similarly afflicted. Blackshaw’s easy development seems to have reached a plateau.

Every song in the first half of the album tries so hard to get somewhere, but just ends up breaking down when it becomes obvious there’s no end in sight.

The music offers plenty of reasons to feel good about feeling bad; too bad that the lyrics, which suggest these feelings in the first place, evacuate themselves moments after they surface, making for a curiously glossy listening experience.

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

Over its 23 songs, Iron & Wine’s sound changes, from scratchy sparseness to well-appointed sparseness and through to the jittery clamor that marked The Shepherd’s Dog, but the underlying world doesn’t.

The songs/pieces/tracks are too long. They take too long getting where they’re going. Everyone loses. But it’s a good record. Hang onto it.

This is a “nice” album, not a great one. It pleases with clean, intelligent production, thoughtful arrangements, clever, elliptical words.

Lewis' strengths are primarily lyrical. The musical arrangements, though good enough not to distract, tend to disappear into the songs.

Espoir is an unusual release, part interesting artifact of aesthetic oddities, part field recording of a talented man with a smooth voice who knows his way around a guitar. Not the ideal introduction to Burkina Faso, but worthwhile nonetheless.

Here, as elsewhere, there may be subtext and hidden allusions but the important stuff is bouncing around on the surface.

It’s hard to criticize the Wooden Birds at any length, because their music is so harmless, so unashamedly pretty and honest.

There’s something Spinal Tap-ish about the reach for grandeur here--not that it’s bad exactly, more that it seems not fully justified by the material.

The band clearly understands what their strengths are, and the decision to continuously return to them, keeping the songs simple, short, and straightforward, staves off boredom while covering very little territory.

Though it doesn’t hit the peaks of No Earthly Man, his 2005 foray into the pure history of the ballad, Spoils easily holds its own.

Set ‘Em Wild, more so than many albums like this, at least has the quasi-coherence of forming out of the above-mentioned process, and if anything, that makes it more interesting than just a collection a songs.

Outside Love, two years later, is another solid effort with a handful of quite good songs--and only a few embarrassing ones.

Wavering Radiant is strong enough on musical merit that decade-strong devotees deservedly ought to join new converts in welcoming the latest Isis album into the world.

Now, 17 years removed from the original stateside release of the band’s music, this expanded reissue (buttressed with an additional disc of decent live tracks and a few cool demos) gives an entirely new generation of pop fans an excuse to dive into the group’s music.

One of the best things about Balf Quarry is the way it builds on the game-changing craftsmanship that Magik Markers brought to Boss.

If anything, it’s the failure to rise above its component parts and create a unique and recognizable sound that keeps Replica Sun Machine from being the breakthrough album this promising trio deserves.

She succeeds in a rare feat here, making a mood-sustaining record comprised of songs that only improve when listened to in sequence.

Summer of Hate is fairly diverse, with bits of punk, pop, shoegaze and space-rock woven into nine distinct tracks. What unites all these elements is a fascination with tone, rather than song structure or lyrical content.

On Help, bits of digital noise have worked their way into the sound, like the band is absorbing the textures of Dwyer’s more avant projects. Or maybe it’s just a crunchy topping to contrast with the creamy icing, because this is one cake of a record, as approachable as Dwyer has ever been.

The applause will only grow louder with the release of The Bright Mississippi. It’s quite simply one of the best albums we’ll hear in 2009.

When their sound tends towards the more coherent and homogeneous (even on the excellent title track) they risk falling victim to an imitativeness, or perhaps simply a lack of aesthetic ambitiousness, that threatens to overwhelm the originality that they bring to the table.

It’s that prickliness that makes this record intriguing, and durable enough to reward repeat listens.

While MacLean isn’t a self-conscious wit, he’s never seemed too invested in trying to not sound silly, and it doesn’t cost him. Sometimes, when the darkness gets heavy, his limitations add a much-appreciated levity. As Brody Stevens might say, “Enjoy it.”

His latest LP, Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian is another sinuous but seamless blend of the organic and synthetic, embodying the hand-in-everything spirit of hip hop.