It’s all very soft and comfortable, musically speaking, like an old couch you can’t get out of.

The main issue with this Arbouretum album is that it sticks stubbornly in a mid-tempo calm. There are no big, ripping guitar solos and few instrumental crescendos. The one big exception comes late in the album with “Let It All In.”

The Midnight Organ Fight is sharper, more polished, and better in parts than "Sing the Greys." There’s only one unfortunate downside. This sharper, more polished effort displays fewer of the things that made the first album so enjoyable.

This is one record that gets better when you play it on shuffle.

Nothing on Fantasy Island is as sharp or cataclysmic as that ["Voodoo Wop"] (the title track comes closest), but the unease is palpable. ... It’s very hard to tell whether Clinic is enjoying the hedonism of their hand-clapping, synth-bopping, drum thumping songs, or just trying to forestall the apocalypse. Perhaps a little of both.

It’s all rather good in a discombobulating way, where the monotonic tension of, say, the Pop Group, meets lavish, emotion-harboring flourishes reminiscent of Orange Juice and even, in a couple of places, the Joe Jackson Band. You can’t get too comfortable even being uncomfortable, because Omni likes to mix it up, the jitter and the sway.

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.

It more or less picks up where Beaches and Canyons left off, allowing for more subtle changes in tone while distilling the Black Dice sound down to a considerably purer essence.

The initial pleasure of past Animal Collective albums is missing, but that may be the point. Panda Bear's grasp of the sublime makes this disc more than worth checking out.

It is a hazy and misty record, delightfully ambiguous to an extent, pulled together by meandering but highly competent playing tied down by small grooves, at times reminiscent of Sandro Perri.

The Jackson-White reboot casts the song as a swampy, country vamp, and while it isn't a horrible idea in theory, it does feel contrived and a bit of an unnecessary pander. Even with that misstep in mind, though, it's pretty tough not to root for Wanda Jackson and The Party Ain't Over.

The Twilight Sad’s second proper album is an encouraging step in the wrong direction. Perhaps the sensory overload of these recordings will encourage a more conservative route in the future.

Sniper is nothing if not reliable, and consistent. But what I will return to, even after the memory of this particular album becomes blurred, is "Blurred Tonight" and the other songs that have deviated, even in the slightest, from the program.

Nothing here is as punchy or infectious as Make Out’s “Boys Who Love Girls,” or Unwind’s “You Better Get Ready,” but the bangers aren’t missed; Birds Make Good Neighbors finds a lovely, whisper-quiet continuity to supplant the unevenness of these previous efforts.

It’s a testament to the strength of Ashley’s reality, and more importantly his adaptability, that the album holds together at all. Although it draws on half a continent’s worth of source material, The Golden Hour still bears, at every turn, the dark, swaggering cynicism that has always defined Firewater.

Nomad doesn’t particularly depart from the parameters that have already been set by the growing population of techstep tricksters, but it does serve as a concise document of dubstep’s travels to date.

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.

Glynnaestra is not quite of this world, but that has a good bit of its appeal.

Sakamoto and Fennesz don't say how you should take their music, but its piano-forward sound aligns it with decades of delicate minor-key melodies that have accompanied countless images of rain on window pains and lonely pining lovers.

Declaration of Dependence is thus a welcome return from a long-absent band, and a fine easy-listening album, but one that ultimately feels emptier than its predecessors.

I Love People is over-the-top in a completely different way to Western Cum. It’s less freewheeling, and leaves an uncomfortable feeling, like a Todd Solondz movie soundtracked by Randy Newman.

The Mynabirds should probably have cut a couple of the less memorable and longer songs (“Omaha” and “Hanged Man”) to keep the disc focused. Even so, Lovers Know makes a strong statement, full of well-rendered wisdom and heart.

Skelliconnection feels more like a series of singles and EPs rather than one statement.

Ancient & Modern's one sticking point is that, like 2007's predecessor Natural, it's a slow grower.

McCombs has performed a bit of rodeo jiujitsu, stealing his band's name back by invoking the myth of the West.

Though far from perfect, they flit by in an instant, all washes of trebly guitars and nervous vocals that leave enough heartwarming traces to warrant subsequent returns.

Spooky Action at a Distance is an album with a lot of footholds--different kinds at that--and it spreads them out in a fashion just as lazy and distracted as the songwriting itself.

Say this for The Joy Formidable's debut effort, The Big Roar: It tells no lies and seeks no modest ambitions.

if you like holey-jeans music, BITS is quite good--singer Michael Pace has a great indie-rock croak, and when these guys are loud, there's no stopping them.

It’d be hard to be disappointed with Convivial, however. It’s not necessarily an immediate listen; it took a few spins before the leaps Ripatti has made started seriously to sink in. But it’s the strongest thing he’s done, either as Luomo or under his Uusitalo or Vladislav Delay guises.

The difficult thing about Fun House, which by this point becomes apparent, is that musically it primes you for a very different experience than the one it delivers. The middle section’s prolonged, sedate atmosphere feels like a slog following the album’s energetic opening. Not that the material doesn’t reveal its own strengths over repeated listens when given the chance.

Eight is both more concise and more varied [than his last outing, Drawn and Quartered].

On Air Museum, they've turned more toward rhythm and pulse. So the melodies now are more like elegant patterns tattooing out micro-rhythms, and the ever-present warm timbral glow the two do so well has become a kind of undertow, a more urgent wave motion.

While Goldfrapp's new sound calls to mind the likes of the Human League, Donna Summer, and Soft Cell, it's more than the sum of those parts and benefits from much heavier beats than many of its apparent influences.

I suppose that this isn’t the album a lot of people were probably hoping for. But it’s never the album people were hoping for.

You could easily call this the sequel to Secret Wars - it has the same mix of baked acoustics, crushing organ and electric guitar lines, staccato vocals, and a meditative finale built around interlocked piano and drums.

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

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

Make no mistake, Glazin' is a simple pop-rock record. It's fuzzy, and it has a nice swirling psych touch, but it also displays a relaxed, confident craftsmanship - a touch of reverb here, a Martin Hannett nod there (check out the snare on "Crush") - that elevates it just so, pulling it out of the garage gutter and into the warmth of the sun. Or the Jacuzzi, as it were.

It’s easily Niblett’s most challenging album to date, and also her most accomplished.

Gordon’s vocals remain strong, but Play Me is a jittery record. The brevity of the songs captures the nervous mood, flitting from one worry to another, staying sharply focused for a couple minutes before veering into the next disaster.

This collection of songs straddles the line between cloying twee, exuberantly noisy indie-pop, and a K Records/Plan-It-X childish naïveté that has been all but absent from most of Doiron’s solo work.

This collection stands as an odd object--somewhere between a historical document and a fresh statement. Of its two components, Dethroned makes for the stronger half, and that's reassuring in its own way: in a work that weds older material with newer contributions, it's encouraging to find that the high points come from the latter.

Johnson only reveals so much. Fruit Bats excel in that sort of space. Johnson sounds less becoming when he lets too much irony in.

They pull off a wide sound for a duo, sometimes creating too much space. There's some room in the back seat for more low end. Then they'd really boogie.

Envelopes could so easily be a cheap Belle & Sebastian clone or a second-rate Magnetic Fields, but they pull off what nobody remembers to in this line of work anymore: personality.

Where on earlier albums, you could sense her thinking about what to do with the sounds she could make, now she seems more fully in control of her set of instruments. Process has slipped into the background, as she gains fluency in an invented language.

With 15 short tracks stacked tightly into 37 minutes, 2 doesn’t always cohere, but it’s certainly playful, freewheeling, and occasionally inspired.

Offers taught electro evidence that conviction and innovation can be found in the most minimal environment.

The album's moments of schticky nonsense ('How Do You Tell A Child Someone Has Died,' 'Transcendental Light') are tiresome, but they’re surrounded by such good rock songs that they wind up being equally rewarding.

Anjimile has come a long way since the last album, but you sense a journey still in progress, an evolution still finding its own best shape.

The main problem is that the songs are so quietly pretty that they slip by without friction, so that you're halfway through the album before you've registered a shift in mood or tempo.

Endless Arcade will do nothing for the people who wish they would let it rip again one more time—but it’s fine, well-crafted, intricately plotted mid-tempo rock. The edges, if they were ever there to begin with, have been sanded off, and it’s all rather noddingly pleasant.

Occulting Disk is not a record to approach lightly. Often it seems deliberately constructed to hold the listener at arm’s length daring one to submerge oneself in its frozen depths.

It’s a record that is fine in its own right but is all the better for what it portends in the future.

Pop's newest princess? Let's just call it a modest success and save our enthusiasm for when she's better figured out what she wants to be. On a Mission isn't convincing as an answer.

The result is a slinky, spiky, minimalist groove, clanking like some kind of extinct, rusty machinery. Lyrics are impressionistic, insinuated over heaving rhythms in not-quite-linear blurts of imagery, but they seem to consider the place of music in times of conflict.

Fall Be Kind really mines the depths of the b-bin: musical theater + jam band + Putumayo. Liking it feels goofy, even though it’s pretty good.

A balls-out, hateful, heavy, and catchy piece of work that rocks like it was 1994 all over again.

Like a lot of music benefiting from the blogosphere's voracious appetite for the new, Boys and Diamonds is a bricoleur's hodge-podge of style.

Even more densely angular and awkward than usual, It’ll Be Cool finds a band so deeply immersed in its own idiom that it’s hard to imagine an ear making any sense of this music, and yet, in spite of itself, the record works.

Vertigo may be the Necks’ best studio album yet, but they are still far from recreating the magic of their live shows.

It certainly makes for a more expansive work, but loses some of the immediacy that defined Stott’s music as recently as on Drop the Vowels.

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.

The Bears for Lunch is a far more solid affair than Let's Go Eat the Factory, balancing Pollard's Who-like aggression and Kinks-like whimsy in punchy, melodically memorable songs.

Even with bursts of ill-tuned twang, Prinz and Horn's harshness is centered and tame.

Sisterworld includes mixtape-friendly stunners and make-it-stop agony in its cryptic commentary on the passive aggression of California. For that, it will get partisans who vouch for it as the best thing they’ve done, while others will declare it unfit to suckle the teat of Blixa Bargeld. It’s worth arguing about.

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.

Sprawling but consistently clean and light, Among the Leaves is sprightlier than much of Kozelek's previous work.

Their take on classic guitar rock sometimes lapses into a mid-tempo morass but Bush Tetras have been a constant state of evolving for nearly four decades. Sley and Place are still compelling presences, and it’s good to have them back.

Remarkably, the substitution of instruments seems not to have affected Segall’s overall aesthetic much. If you didn’t know, you might not recognize exactly what’s different about First Taste, except that it feels a bit more overstuffed and baroque. Yet whether it’s due to the change in instrumentation or not, there are some diversions from the usual.

Molina succeeds in creating a sound refreshingly unfamiliar and exotic.

Ultimately, nobody's likely to claim The Secret Migration as a great album, I'm afraid. But it possesses energy and inspiration that its predecessor greatly lacked, and even the weaker songs here have something to recommend.

Even when you don't understand fully what's going on (is this song about L.A. or Baghdad?), the songs are catchy enough that you don't mind.

They don’t shy from their strengths, but they don’t struggle to feature them either, creating an album that never feels like a flippant one-off. Big Walnuts Yonder might be doing a whole bunch of things, but it’s largely an album about making those things cohere.

There is palpable excitement in both the songwriting and the performance. And this energy prevents what might have been some late-stage lulls, where the riffs seem retread but the songs still feel new.

As always, the playing is impeccable, although the cool professionalism evident on each song makes many of the album's tracks indistinguishable.

The Seduction of Kansas is, all things considered, a solid second album. It builds on the promise of Nothing Feels Natural, and while it occasionally fumbles its own goals, it’s hard to fault Priests for aiming high. One can only hope that the radical ambition and sense of purpose on display here carries them far into the future.

Out My Window, Koushik searches for--and at times strikes--the fine balance between structure and flexibility, rigidity and looseness, body and soul.

To Willie seems more like a personal effort than a proper follow-up to "Pride," and it’s not as inventive as that album. It works well as a covers collection.

Now comes the Orchestre's first album in 20 years, Cotonou Club, and it has some of the bet-hedging one tends to see when musicians don't trust what they've got--re-recordings of old material and guest stars.

Though Good Sad Happy Bad do outstay their welcome across these 40 minutes, there’s plenty here to enjoy if you like sing-song sweetness that’s bent lysergic and girded with a sneering, switchblade edge.

Most of what’s here isn’t memorable, but there is a steady flow of moments so ersatz that it is oddly listenable.

In Heaven is a significant advance for Twin Sister, both in the way that it smoothes over and clarifies its original aesthetic and in the way it explores a handful of new avenues.

It’s an eminently listenable album, but there’s no need for unchecked evangelism. Just enjoy the damn thing.

A solid 64 minutes of cavernous drumming, propulsive, grating guitars and cotton-mouthed moans.

The music has a bare-trees feel that dovetails with the wintry theme. There's plenty of orchestration, but it's all framing and backdrop for Bush's piano and voice.

Vampire Weekend is an exemplar of contemporary establishment indie rock, sandblasted clean but striking a dirty pose nonetheless.

With his piano, classical flourishes and superbly layered production a la E.L.O., it’s out of sync but, when it works, wonderfully so. Whether Lytle’s vocals work for you or not will probably be the main deciding factor as to whether the band itself works for you. Oftentimes he smooths out the edges, but his singing can come across as whiny.

Goodnight Oslo is more like the seemingly “normal” yet slightly “off” one-night-stand, the one you don’t think about much the next week but wonder about 10 years later. Don’t expect it to enthrall on contact, but it might settle gently into the subconscious.

Agriculture comes closer earlier on the record, when “Micah (5:15 am)” commences its final run through the song’s compelling set of tremolo chords and then the massive riff of “The Weight” crashes down. It’s the best part of a good record, excepting perhaps the middle portion of “The Weight,” when the band’s playing reaches an acutely feverish pitch.

It doesn’t take long for the characters to come alive the way ...Is a Woman’s seemed too exhausted to. [combined review of both discs]

The pulsing, nodding, whisper-y grooves are a kind of accomplishment, too. Subdued, sure, enveloping and lucidly becalmed, you can float on them like warm salt water, no effort required at all.

The album is an enjoyable listen, but not enough is at stake for it to get under your skin.

Hair works because even when the pieces aren't well integrated, they are often enjoyable listening.

This is Devendra Banhart...eclectic and whimsical and poking genres with a stick to see if they'll bite. It's a little mad, a lot overstuffed, and probably a degree or two calculated.

They are super-tight and competent, but with an undercurrent of madness and chaos, a well-oiled machine that is infinitely more interesting because it might blow up at any time.