This is a record that makes me hope for even better things to come.

Songs of Shame is more humble by an entire order of magnitude, but still contains that feeling of honesty, a feeling that should allow Woods to be more than just some ephemeral pleasure once the hype around the band and their Woodsist label inevitably withers away.

Despite the up-tempo spunkiness of half the album’s songs, the prevailing tone seems to be that of a musical android--equal portions ukulele and digital distortion.

This go-around does lack the face-sucking gravity of "In the Morning" to serve as a point of access, but the best way to experience Junior Boys’ music has always been total submission.

More important than the album’s conceit and whatever toehold it might offer, though, is that it sports less flab than their critical breakthrough.

Repo is likeable for all the right reasons. That the band hasn’t challenged themselves or their audience to find new ones is the album’s chief drawback.

There’s a lot that could go wrong with this approach on Sun Gangs--but nothing does. For all the arch drama, the big rock songs on here are frenzied, and the small indie pop songs are lean and melodic.

The Atlantic Ocean is impressive, at times even masterful, yet falters in reminding us more of what it lacks than of what it possesses.

It’s Blitz isn’t FTT, and may not be remembered as highly (particularly by those who never give it a chance), but it is a logical progression.

The weird and promising thing is that it works without ever feeling natural. The actual coexistence of the earnest and the smoove stops being so striking after a while, but the best songs on Rules don’t let you forget there is one.

Therein lies the power of this understatedly great debut – in avoiding a simple homage to sounds that came and went a couple of decades ago, Gonzalez managed to imbue her music with a greater historical perspective.

Regardless of the frames built around them by producers or the press, Amadou and Mariam make great pop music, and their new album gives us more of it.

She’s at her best when sticking to a palette of steel, indigo and black.

Deacon is a gifted musician capable of so much more, and that makes Bromst feel like a waste.

Hinds and Co. have dispensed with the neanderthal growls and screams of past records, which might have robbed Crack the Skye of its surprising grace and pushed it closer to the nu-metal end of the spectrum.

The album is also horribly sequenced, pushing its best tracks down after a morass of prettier, more insipid melodies had fluffed you.

An album full of cover versions is not really essential listening, although there are a few songs here reminiscent of the better covers from past Yo La Tengo albums.

Album closer 'Warlock Psychologist' is a glorious mess of distorted keyboard and poetic non sequiturs that less dedicated bands would probably have left off the record. But not Swan Lake, whose perverse commitment to farty art-rock is to be respected, perhaps even embraced.

More bands should, logically, sound like this. It’s a wonder that no one wrote the song 'Pine On' before now, as incredibly basic and memorable as it is. That said, Obits fall short of Froberg’s Hot Snakes.

DOOM’s sounds as bold and battered as ever. You can almost hear the accumulation of Dutch Masters on his larynx.

This is, undoubtedly, one of the most beautiful records of this year, and its very indistinctness forces you to go back to it over and over.

It’s the sound of epic detail in exquisite registration, and Albini perfectly vivifies Mono’s Technicolor wall of sound.

Ultimately Beware’s designation as a "big" record feels arbitrary--it is polished and competent, but at the same time disappointingly bland.

Though a solid and promising outing, Wavves isn’t a revelatory record. It fits nicely into the "scene," however vague that semblance is these days.

Scratched up, indifferently tuned, coming in ghostly and pale like AM radio, Strange Boys’ first full-length has the banked fire of a slow burner.

Speck Mountain might have a great album in them; this one isn’t bad. But I hope that some day they get over themselves and really get down.

The album’s elements--large scale pop and tightly controlled electro--don’t always work together, but they come together on the very last track, 'Radio Kaliningrad.'

Throughout, Mirah picks her soft, knowing way through songs that soothe even as they challenge. Her melodies curl gently up into question marks, as she asks you to make sense of life and love and loss.

In the newfound center on Thank You Very Quickly, Eagleson and company have stealthly transitioned from indie ethno-experimental vanguards to genuine Afro-Rock champions, erasing 7,000 miles of distance and so many years of history.

An Imaginary Country is a solid record, but in the context of Hecker’s discography, it can also be underwhelming at times.

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

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.

What ties all the disparate elements together is a taut thread of hip hop breaks, clattering electronic beats and wobbly dubstep bass.

The songs here have engaging, melodic hooks to spare.

It’s worth making it through these bare patches for the two gorgeous glimmers of light at the end of the album.

But from the stridently Floydian gravitas of its cover to the ponderous, tolling piano notes that close the album, Take My Breath Away finds Boratto straining uncomfortably to make some kind of serious statement.

This disc has all the ingredients that made Faust the force it once was, plowing headlong through rock establishment and leaving us to reassess the wrecked landscape.

Little Hells, for all its melancholy, gives Nadler’s fans another reason to celebrate; any continuation of the momentum birthed with Songs III is a happy thing, indeed.

While most of Here We Go Magic works well as a unit, the more noise-based, non-vocal tracks detract from momentum; they’re the least interesting things on the album.

No matter what tweak to the overall aesthetic Nelson may make, Pan-American’s music is as interesting as ever, precisely because there is no end in sight.

Dissolver sounds like an album made by folks who are mostly sick of challenging convention and just want to swim in something that reminds them of why they love rock music.

March of the Zapotec and Holland won’t get people as stirred up as "Gulag Orkestar" but they do suggest some interesting new directions.

Hold Time, Ward’s latest batch of songs, seems slighter, happier and louder than those on 2006’s "Post-War," but also distinctly complacent.

It’s a formidable return to his more familiar post-’04 pop form, a better album by any assessment than YATQ.

The good news is that this is, in fact, a throwback to their earlier work. The bad news is that it’s not throwback enough.

Besides their inability to meet the very aims they set out for themselves, Clean and Zegon fail to do much of anything exciting with their all-star cast.

On the surface, Tight Knit may sound like more of the same for Vetiver, and thankfully so. While the band reaches a bit further than previously, they are careful not to stretch too far, focusing instead on the continued refinement of their position as rock’s youngest elder statesmen.

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.

On All Aboard Future, These Are Powers’ songs distract from the music. Consequently, the record sputters.

Reviver might make for interesting enough listening in the immediate, but it‘s also a prime candidate for the cut out bin of memory once the band finally arrives at its aforementioned new destination.

He never quite sells us on the necessity of getting into Bobby D.’s head, and only rarely evinces that he’s done so himself. The good news is that the album is strong anyway, more so when unyoked from the underlying concept.

The unifying factor is Mi Ami’s live vibrancy. Except for the overdubbed vocals, almost the entirety of Watersports was performed live in the studio, allowing the three musicians to explore texture and space, collapsing their influences into a gripping dialogue on the darker side of human experience that we so often ignore.

There’s not a bad song in the bunch, but the songs from Death’s only official release are the clear highlights on ...For the Whole World to See.

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.

It’s fine for a lark, but you can leave the tikis in the attic where they belong.

The record’s oversized persona feels strange because these sounds don’t owe that much to the twang or crate-digging excavations that built Romweber’s reputation.

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.

It’s a confident outing from an outfit with all the right reasons to be confident, a unified and often arresting record with few qualms about what it’s supposed to be.

Rather than erupting with new insights, The Mountain sags audibly beneath the weight of its new strata.

They’re simply better songwriters than many others in the field, and their ability to recontextualize these sounds into something so subsequently fresh and familiar is a stunning achievement.

Overestimate it for the wrong reasons, and you’ll still get a lot out of A Fool for Everyone; underestimate it for the right reasons and you won’t have to look too hard for a replacement.

The music is progressive as hell, but this feels less and less like the right thing to be concerned with.

Loney Dear’s latest, Dear John, is an endearing slice of small sigh indie-pop, well ornamented and too cute by half.

It's not a return to form so much as a complete reinvention, this is an album that highlights a particularly buoyant Animal Collective, one that’s managed to expand their sound in surprising ways while still retaining the same basic creative impulses that made them such a joy to watch develop over the past decade

As an album, The Crying Light is neither as revelatory nor as consistent as "I Am A Bird Now."

Get Guilty isn’t an easy album at all. It just sounds like one.

It has a warm, uncertain humanity that its predecessors, for all their depth and beauty, did not: it scans as genuine, music made from necessity rather than from the impulse of an extraordinary showman.

The narrators’ weaknesses become the songs’ weaknesses; Mercer apparently prefers to sustain verisimilitude at the expense of Skin of Evil’s potential. It’s a bold artistic move that lends itself to the page far more convincingly than it does to the ear.

Drone Trailer comes off as one of MV & EE’s richest conciliations of primal rock impulse and agrarian drift – the kind of record that a confused major label would have leaked out into the world in the early 1970s, the last time the underground had any chance of seriously warping the mainstream milieu.

Throughout the album, as soon as the drums and guitar slide into nod-inducing alignment, they veer off-track. The songs simply do not cohere. The numerous instrumental tracks on the album show off the band’s virtuosity, but to entirely unmemorable effect.

The balance--between groove and experiment, organic and synthetic sound--shifts constantly on this very strong album, sometimes prodding listeners to think, other times comforting them with familiar sounds and, occasionally, overwhelming them with ephemeral beauty.

Fans ignore these efforts at their peril, since Chasny’s long-form efforts are often his best.

Lesser artists might fall prey to pastiche, something Murcof artfully avoids. Instead he pulls off a remarkable feat--he makes the forgotten sound formidable, and the contemporaneous sound credible.

It’s great fun, but it’s all boundless energy without centre.

The low tide image on the cover Black Sea suggests that this process of covering and uncovering is cyclical, and the music bears it out by adding a welcome bit of noise and depth to some stately and slowly evolving melodies.

The nostalgia of postmodernity, that backward glance, is apparent in every moment of Parallax Error Beheads You. While it can sometimes seem like a quagmire for the less creative, it’s transformative here.

Reid’s rolling, sweeping, ever-present groove takes on colors and textures, courtesy of Hebden and his suite of gizmos (real or imagined), but it’s always the same hard road, the same track of tandem steel rays that cut through every borough, every station, every hall and every mind.

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 squalling sax that wends its way through most of these tracks and Josephine’s joyful, yet solidly unsettled yelps temporarily brings to mind a more professional and spacious Mika Miko, but that similarity mostly traces back to a common debt owed to Kleenex/LiLiPUT--all three bands make the ennui and alienation of second adolescence both incredibly vivid and, strangely, a lot of fun.

With The Red River, his best yet, richer, more fluid arrangements tip his songs from straight folk blues into gospel, soul and even hints of R&B.

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.

These songs are dull because they are about dullness, as sad movies are sad because they are about sadness.

Lamping has some catchy songs and some interesting lyrics, but feels too inconsequential, too easily sloughed off.

Car Alarm feels different, though. What’s difficult to figure out, however, is whether that’s merely a feeling or whether there’s something actually, appreciably novel about the album.

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.

No massive steps forward, admittedly, but I think Wood can justify exploring this patch of ground for a short while yet.

Temper is rewarding in a conventional way compared to the surprise of Precis, less something iridescent found in the sand and more the product of resourceful and masterly design.

When Religious Knives stretch their limbs, they’re still good, but both 'The Storm' and 'On A Drive' lack the power of their more formed songs.

Over its eight tracks, the album never fails to find a musical pleasure center of one sort or another.

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.

Taken as a whole, however, OH consists of more stellar stuff from a band that’s always taken the tortoise’s view of the race.

So, Offend Maggie doesn’t offer much in way of change. As cynical as the times we live in might be, that could be taken as a polite rebuke, but it’s not meant that way. They’re a creative band.

This final tension--between the desire to exceed perceived aesthetic limits and the reality of the artists’ own limitations--is one that is present throughout Futuristically Speaking. Jwl B and Shunda K are, as of now, stronger conceptually than they are in execution.

There is nothing but the interlocking parts that together combine to become something new, something wholly different than merely the additive sum of their individual atoms: the “It.”

Chemistry may represent an attempt to marshal these influences into a massive, unified sound. Alternately, it could be the sound of Fucked Up fucking around with a big budget in a studio and seeing who might be duped into believing it genuine. Indeed, who will listen to this record?

Ferndorf gains little from its back story but loses nothing without it; to a greater degree than most records of its ilk, it is resolutely 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.

That global element isn’t as prominent on his fourth proper CD, Uproot, but it peaks out in samples and vocal tracks. Indeed, not much on Uproot achieves the outward intensity of a "club banger," but perhaps that’s a reflection of the current state of bass and break culture.