On 4, he tinkers a bit with the trim, options and manufacturing methods, but leaves Dungen’s styling fundamentally unchanged.

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.

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

Despite the subtle stylistic shifts and gradual momentum building and releasing, no song feels out of place or misjudged.

The potential guitar soup and airless drum patterns of death metal is helped along by Bogren’s crisp production. And with Twilight of the Thunder God, they’ve written a set that takes full advantage of experience and polish.

This one is subtle, but very much worth exploring.

'Stardust to Sentience' is the only piece on the album with memorable words and a melody, and it’s accompanied by very interesting instrumental warbles that heighten the song. Most of the other singing is bleached out, a pale ghost of what one wishes it were.

It’s good where it has to be good and it hits the notes it’s supposed to, but other than that it’s tough to find Furr inspiring in any way, especially with such a specifically backwards-looking strategy employed.

At other times the songs--while still enjoyable in a nebulous “go to the light” kind-of-way--simply lose all pretense to distinction, bleeding together in a tonal wash of echoed vocals, tremolo guitar and gooey organ.

Earth Junk doesn’t sound like anything else in his discography. However, it does betray Hagerty’s encyclopedic knowledge of rock history, which yields some respectful iconic nods and a few bizarre what-ifs.

For a handful of solid pop songs, S-M Backwards adds nothing good to our conception of Serena-Maneesh, historically or otherwise. It’s a boon for the deeply interested, but it fails to make the case for its own existence.

The record’s terminal mission aside, Keith’s latest exploit is one more chance to befuddle insipid rappers and flex his uncalculated argot.

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold aims for timelessness with its fusion of chamber pop, indie rock, and popular folk, but falls short as just another likable, ephemeral fall release.

England’s most defiantly rococo pop group can make a richly detailed record without really trying.

There’s a calmness, a baroque beauty perhaps, to this mode of singing, but on Paperwork, it’s enmeshed within swiftly moving song structures.

While Freedomland has all the weakness of live albums, it compensates with one main critical strength: It documents a living, breathing experience of music, improvised on the spot, moved by strong, ineffable currents, never to be repeated again.

This is mom-and-dad rock, no more ready to pack up the fuzzboxes than it is to become a grandparent.

Carried to Dust represents a refreshing return to eccentricity.

Its vaguely experimental ambitions and occasionally interesting musical flourishes don’t do much to separate it from the mass of baroque indie already circulating, amassing often unwarranted critical acclaim.

This is exquisitely made, moodily complicated stuff, and if it doesn’t fit into the current landscape, that’s more our problem than theirs.

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

It is really a much more modern album than the Americana tag would at first suggest, and the songs are as instantaneous and memorable as the best pop music.

Caught in the Trees is neither as ranging or as raw as what Jurado’s capable of. While that still slots it comfortably above most records of its ilk, in the context of this catalog, it’s essentially caught in the middle.

Ultimately, though, I can’t escape the feeling that there’s nothing much at stake in All the Way.

Don’t worry if Smith’s quirk is your main draw, though, because Slime & Reason only furthers his evolution into becoming a mad scientist of digital dub production (with excellent contributions from Toddla T and Metronomy) and vocal menace.

It’s frustrating to see someone taking the middle of the road, especially Sweet, who can do better, and has done better, but there’s no sense in questioning it.

By most measures, Cream Cuts is Tussle’s most enjoyable and fully realized release yet, but its excellence can’t compensate for the nagging sameness that plagues most of its songs.

Ingenuity and sincerity (two things in which Hayes excels) are priceless, and the sum of the parts is quite a masterpiece indeed.

Chemical Chords is more compact, true, but they’ve not lost their character through economy.

There’s no question that when they get it right, the Walkmen are captivating. But with songs like 'Long Time Ahead of Us' and 'New Country,' the only thing keeping your attention is Hamilton Leithauser’s slurred laments.

There’s no question that Where You Go I Go Too is one of the year’s most coherent, craftily executed albums.

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

Clouds and Tornadoes ricochets back and forth between these three levels: the familiar, the unfamiliar but recognizable, and the unfamiliar and unrecognizable, and like Maddin and Katchor, it’s this tripartite feeling that gives the music its uniqueness while still feeling like an unearthed artifact.

The net result of The Uglysuit’s formula sounds something like an imagined pairing of Bedhead and Phish. It’s all right as far as it goes.

As far as 2008 sleepers go, this album’s near the top of the pile. Don’t Be A Stranger is good advice, indeed.

There’s charm here, but it’s mostly second-hand, photos from a party you didn’t go to.

Considering the host of absolutely killer tracks, London Zoo might just be Kevin Martin's finest album, which is astounding considering the man has been making music for two decades.

Oneida’s chemistry alone isn’t enough to make modest material effloresce.

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.

For the most part, Donkey flounders in a sterile morass. It may well bring CSS to a larger audience, one that doesn't consider subversiveness an impediment, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing.

Each song seems a logical move from the song that preceded it, and no track stands out particularly from the rest. As a distinctive sound, though, as a warm, pulsing vibe, they succeed.

What makes Muhly’s work particularly interesting then is not only his use of this style--comprehending the four movements of the title track is particularly vexing as bits of voices mingle and move at different velocities--but the use of the style in a dynamic way itself, reminiscent of Nyman’s compositions.

I think one can get a much better grasp on the band’s music by seeing the songs as long, somewhat-complex pop songs--ones derived from much different circumstances than The Decemberists’ boring narratives--rather than grand, theatrical gospels

The in-the-moment experience of Fernow’s music is all physical; the aftershock is almost all intellectual, the specifics of the apparent transformation provided entirely by the listener, who is left standing not so much accused as self-implicated.

Various people have tried to explain to me why I find Object 47 so frustrating.... My inclination is to forget all that and just play the last four tracks over and over.

Less encumbered by the colonial detritus of Konono's overdriven drums-meet-junkyard sound, the Allstars let the rhythm section breathe and get funky with indigenous instrumentation. No distortion necessary.

The final rush commingles anguish and ecstasy quite powerfully, glorying in the significance Mapplethorpe held for Smith and resonating for anyone who has lost someone and is willing to be taken to the water.

This is what jamming econo means to kids whose horizon isn't classic rock and hardcore, but grunge and post-hardcore. It sounds really good.

Hercules and Love Affair is a sincere and sumptuous stab at the mirrorball splendor of the 1970s.

Only after the shock of genre and time warping wares off does the album’s real beauty become apparent.

The record never hits a stride that allows it to pull together as a cohesive album, save its fantastical, paper-thin theme.

Lookout lacks the piercing insight of Berman’s best work––those Old Testament and American Gothic retellings laced with sarcasm and self-loathing. At the same time, there’s a casual quality to this set that trumps the belabored tangle of the last go-round.

While it’s a solid follow-up to "Neon Golden," The Devil, You + Me falls short of its predecessor in that, taken as a whole, it doesn’t amount to more than the sum of its parts.

His voice is a delightful constant through good writing and bad. The propeller-arms guitar rock supplied by Pollard's various flesh-and-blood bandmates tend to provide just-off-enough accompaniment, but Tobias mucks it all up.

There is a coherent sound throughout the album––psychedelic electro-hop perhaps––while each song develops fruitfully without ever being dragged out.

Despite all these potential distractions, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill remains, quite simply, a beautiful album, possibly because. Harris feels so comfortable in her own skin.

There is no ideal on-ramp for the Sparks canon, but Exotic Creatures of the Deep once again re-energizes this weird little alternate universe.

Takes is most worthwhile for Adem fans, but intriguing for anyone who enjoys a new perspective on old tunes.

Their sound is as big and manic as it’s always been, and the melodies as infectious, but the content slinks away from even the prickly personal politics that populated their first singles.

At times, it sounds as though the band was still working through exactly how they wanted all of the various elements to work together, such that there are some immediate, hook-filled songs ("White Winter Hymnal," "Your Protector," "He Doesn't Know Why") and other songs whose more complex structures require more from the listener.

If Rook is as ambitious as they feel they can be without adding excess, then that's a good tradeoff, but their sound right now fits them like a pair of shoes that are a size too small.

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

Life has a wholly predictable uniqueness.

The album may not set the world on fire like "Ladies and Gentlemen," but it stands as the best Spiritualized album since that milestone, and a worthy successor.

James Pants may well develop a style or voice of greater substance with future releases. But, as of now, his reliance on his synthesizer aptitude is too repetitive, too flat, and too conventional to convey much meaning or purpose.

It's rare that historically important recordings are also essential listening, but this is such a case.

Trying to meet somewhere between the dancefloor and the bedroom, between the realm of communal delight and solitary reflection, Booka Shade just wind up in the middle of the road.

Everything about this record, from its goopy over-production to its brooding, listless demeanor, suffers from a one-dimensionality that completely prevents connections to the listening audience.

Anywhere I Lay My Head falters on Johansson’s vocals, or lack of a distinctive voice.

The eleven tracks here are tight, raw, and marked by insistent thumping rhythms and taught chunky riffs, laying the groundwork for one of the band’s most straight-ahead rock albums in years.

Gardner and Hammel haven’t come close to exhausting their songwriting prowess, and Re-Arrange Us is probably their most appealing album to date.

While not without its pleasures, particularly in its first half, the album seems to find the Bonnie ‘Prince’ just a little too much at ease for his (and our) own good.

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."

On the mic end, MC Naledge has a comfortable flow reminiscent of a more polished Kanye, but his lyrics on The In Crowd are less than remarkable.

Way is cleaner, clearer and more luminous--in all ways Ecstatic Sunshine’s best effort yet.

It's more cohesive than their debut, and just as catchy.

Though generally safe and un-"sexy," Nouns is the sort of album around which healthy musical communities could grow, and that seems to be the point.

The recondite spirit remains, but the sense of restlessness has disappeared, and with it much of the impertinent energy that propelled "Gone Ain’t Gone." What we gain in its place, though, is more rewarding: a closer look at the mechanics of Fite’s itchy-legs sophistry, the nature of his controlled eccentricity.

Ultimately, it underscores everything that’s right with Supreme Balloon--in the absence of any larger narrative structure, the group’s latest album afford them the chance not to be modern theoreticians par excellence, but rather a couple of earnest music fans that convey their own passion through the sounds they create.

While aesthetically they are rather progressive (in indie rock or pop terms), conceptually and symbolically there is a lot lacking, and that this conflict drives a lot of what is interesting in their music.

Ringer is another step forward in one man's ongoing aural self-actualization through refinement of his experiences and influences.

It’s a lot less singular than its predecessor, but that makes it a more directly exhilarating experience.

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.

Third is about the potential for being, not being itself. It’s the base chemistry of the Portishead sound, a compound awaiting reaction. Which is up to the listener to produce, like the lightning that brings the Monster to life.

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.

Kensington Heights isn’t drastically different from anything that’s come before, but it’s Constantines’ most consistent album so far, and a good starting point for anyone who hasn’t heard them and misses that old-time galvanizing, anthemic music.

Jim is pleasant, polite, listenable, smooth (it’s like Yacht Rock for the nu-soul set), undemanding…and a bit of a bore.

Though excellent in brief parts, much of the album is still worrisome, at times specifically seeming to document a band running out of steam.

Not quite the revelation of the seamless debut, and missing the duck-down mentality of the Beady Eye in his prime, The Formula is the hip-hop definition of maintaining.

For all the grunting and studio manipulation (the way the levels shift around, it's like there's a cat loose on the mixing board), this is as playful as the Fall has ever been, with long stretches of taking the piss.

There are many moments here when the good times roll effectively enough, but rarely as well as past Born efforts.

I feel like Flight of the Conchords could do something interesting if they embraced the absurdity of their act and didn’t stand aloof from it at an ironic distance.

When Life… is not all bad, however. It is merely middling.

From the Valley to the Stars doesn’t have that directness [of her first album]; it gives the persistent feeling that it is nothing but parts.

Cryland is, for the most part, a collection of psyched-up blues riffs that underpin lyrics full of anachronistic clichés about old-time religion and various other tried-and-true topics about which people sing The Blues.

With the exception of the engorged 'Couleurs,' 'Dark Moves of Love's' lift into the stratosphere, and the ambient feather-on-the-breath drones of 'Midnight Souls Still Remain,' Saturdays = Youth is strangely leaden, an album fenced off by its conceptual constraints.

He sacrifices none of his newfound momentum on the fantastic Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, his sharpest, wittiest, most resolute album in over a decade.

Mountain Battles gets less right than Pod or Last Splash did, but hits the target more often than Pacer or Title TK. Either way, it's probably a bit better than you expect.