Gods of the Earth is shaky in places, but once its longboats settle in the water, it's a force.

If April demonstrates Kozelek’s predilection for reaching backwards, in places it also finds him broadening his range.

This is great for obsessive fans and for the remnants of the Elephant Six community, for with Electronic Projects they can get a more complete picture of the band. But why make them pay for it?

The band still knows how to move gracefully over the duration of long pieces and flash occasional glimpses of that once unrivaled crescendo toward catharsis. But on 13 Blues, it seems like SMZ are more interested in making their own movie than just providing a backdrop.

There's plenty of kicks left over, but it tilts the impression of the band. The Teen Beat questionnaires that come in the disc jacket (What's your favorite color? What's your shoe size?) and the shortened tracklist end up emphasizing the nerdiness over the jerkiness.

These New Puritans play it smart, but in service of an earnest query rather than their own smartness.

If The Kills didn't try so hard to be sultry, they might have a similar breakthrough. They're more appealing when you've got no idea what's on their mind.

Each album isn’t simply a solitary entry into the Destroyer oeuvre, but rather some tile in the mosaic or thread in the pattern.

There are moments, however, when Hung and Power lock into something truly ecstatic, creating passages that more than account for the tremendous amount of pre-release hype that’s been softballed toward these two.

Stainless Style's problem isn't the music so much as it is the ambivalent authenticity; it's impossible to determine if it's supposed to pay tribute to, make fun of, or be fully situated in the time and place of John DeLorean's rise and fall.

On The Odd Couple, Gnarls Barkley gets halfway to the heights of St. Elsewhere and seems content to stay there.

Slight doubts about whether or not Zooey Deschanel is the best person to be singing these songs aside, Volume One is pretty much spot-on.

The lyrical approach has so far kept me from really warming to it, but the words are ugly and weird in an interesting way, which makes me think that maybe eventually a light will come on and it will become one of my favorites.

His Eleventh Hour streams seem to glorify a pre-evolved hip hop.

The Unfairground features ten strong songs without filler or flab. All have melodies that rapidly lodge in the brain, the kind that the paperboy could whistle on his round.

Bozulich stumbles through a sagging mansion of sound like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, which is to say, arch, elegant and utterly used up. But there is power in the decrepitude.

Like Stephin Merritt, his East Coast cognate, Malkmus’ songwriting chops and eye for upper-middle-class detail are too-available excuses for music that is often unremarkable.

It’s in those moments [of appealing moment of vulnerability] as well as in the swarming chorus of 'God’s Children' that the duo hit their true heights, and those same qualities are the ones most likely to mark this album as an enduring piece of work from two icons of a class that has long since graduated.

Quaristice seems most comfortable amidst the modern scrum, a soundtrack for mundane urban maneuvers.

It's easy to hear why Rubin swooped in to release this.

Picture is an album’s worth of universal feelings spoiled by his compulsion to present them as sordid or literary, to make them clever or allusive or needlessly alliterative

There's enough to enjoy here in the murky atmospherics and occasional surges of melody, but Shots can’t be the Ladyhawk album fans were hoping for.

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

As it stands, it's a really good, seriously flawed album, with some great songs and some big misses, a sort of living, breathing justification for your CD player's skip button.

Lust Lust Lust is the best The Raveonettes have ever been.

The new record is less political than its predecessor, but seems to share the same, more expansive perspective.

As interesting as Heretic Pride already is, it misses an opportunity to pick one direction or the other.

Vernon’s voice is the showpiece here––a fragile, technically imperfect falsetto, he multi-tracks it into a shimmering, heat-giving force on each of the record’s nine songs.

He easily sidesteps the drama that dogged he and his band throughout 2007 (and ultimately led to their declaration of hiatus towards the end of the year), turning Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel into a beautifully melancholic slice of shimmering, ambient pop.

The Big Sleep have also gotten better by huge leaps with each outing, delivering on the promise of their earlier songs without maturing too ambitiously.

Though it may hardly win over detractors, there's not much of Made in the Dark that can be lambasted as puckish or precious.

District Line delivers the latest dissertation in cross-pollination and like past projects it’s a bit of a Frankenstein affair.

'Till Kingdom Come' is really the only song that stands apart from the pack, thanks to its strident guitar leads and orchestral underpinnings. The rest of the tracks, while persuasively put, come and go with an effect that’s distantly brooding at best.

Circular Sounds takes the craft aspect to a higher level. Stoltz’s early records were scrappy, guitar-centric home recordings, and his previous LP, Below the Branches, was a piano-dominated, primary colors affair, but this one is a study in how to blend signifiers and sonorities so that they enhance each other.

It's a party, not a revival meeting, This Gift, but a good one.

TMV’s latest major-label misfire is called The Bedlam in Goliath

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

The songs hover around the four-minute mark, and are economical in their implementation, with an overall sheen that does occasionally come close to overdoing it.

This is a wonderful album, easily as good, though perhaps less immediately accessible, than last year’s "Rites of Uncovering."

Venus on Earth proves that world-pop fusion needn’t be a pastiche of watered-down musical tropes, but rather something vital and soul affirming--a fever to embrace.

Black Mountain won’t win any prizes for innovation, but their slightly bruised brand of retro is far more fertile than that of their contemporaries.

Despite a smattering of highlights, there’s no gut-punch anywhere on Jukebox.

Although there are a few ever-so slightly awkward moments, Portrait bears the marks of a perfect collaboration, one in which two very strong (and very different) personal aesthetics merge seamlessly together into one unified vision.

The latest, the crustily erotic Distortion, is nearly its ["69 Love Songs"] equal. But way shorter.

Minus ODB, the collective's most charismatic member, and rife with in-group strife, 8 Diagrams is a long way from the hip hop revolution, "Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)." It still ain't nothin’ to fuck with.

The ensemble crew can't maintain the promising start. Aside from a few lyrical bullets, 'Paisley Darts' doesn't quite live up to the potential of its title.

It’s bit of a risk for Chasny to polish his sound, but he’s succeeded in bottling the imaginative, audacious overflow of his past efforts into perhaps his most cohesive record yet.

It's all so tightly buttoned down that the first listen evokes a certain déjà vu; You haven't heard it before, and yet you know what's going to happen anyway.

That emptiness tempts a listener in, and puts you in its place--you, in a sense, step into the record’s point of view. This invitation to intimacy is a powerful move that most club music is simply incapable of.

Load Blown is stunning. It engulfs. While sacrificing little if anything to compositional templates, the record is remarkable listenable.

Among the remaining eight songs is some of Raposa’s strongest songwriting.

With its shyness, lack of flourish, unvarnished finish and relative dearth of guest appearances, Preparations is, more than any other Pref record, some decidedly this-level-type shit.

I can sense that there's something pretty great going on and even briefly catch glimpses of it. But as an experience, it's a little bit maddening, and eventually I'll want to throw away the glasses and pick up a book.

It might not be indie (whatever that means these days), and it’s certainly not rock, but The Flying Club Cup is consistent in its idyllic, perhaps idealistic charms.

As with their earlier release, Extra Golden seems to shine particularly in two speeds: an amped up tango rhythm that seems to accompany the more soul-driven songs, and a faster gallop that tends to yield the most sweat

This Enon is leaner and more straight-forward--but also more one-dimensional.

What is interesting about the Pipettes is that they're creating incredibly catchy, well-made pop music.... But their music could be something more.

Here are very lovely songs, tempered by oblique though evocative lyrics; here are rustic landscapes juxtaposed with computer sounds and eccentric field samples; here is violence couched in the gentlest possible terms.

White Chalk shifts between comforting melancholy and supremely discomforting performativity with preternatural ease.

The Shepherd’s Dog is a step forward for Iron and Wine in many ways. The only moments where it falters are where the tonal characteristics gesture toward the past. When it shines, however, The Shepherd’s Dog’s clever songwriting and creative instrumentation makes for the most complete record Beam has ever recorded.

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.

Gonzalez has wisely resisted the urge to bulk up his sound, and concentrated instead on seeing how far a guitar, his voice and a few continents worth of influences can carry him.

The consequences are not always dull, and Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy is as enjoyable at points as the music it’s clearly drawing from.

Most surprising here, though, is Nolan and Ambrogio’s wildly successful approach of ballad forms.

That Trees Outside the Academy is more accessible than Moore's usual output is a fair assertion to make, though there are facets innate to his music that seem sure to prevent the gangly guitarist from ever crafting an album of pure pop.

It's as wild and heterogeneous as the rest of the band's work, and manages to bring all the elements at play in their music into the tightest, most carefully balanced equilibrium they've achieved yet.

Matt Pike has changed over the years, though, and it hasn't hurt at all.

Strawberry Jam is a mixed proposition if ever there was one.

The slight psychedelic divergences and other assorted flourishes keep the album interesting, but they’re not enough in the forefront to make Oakley Hall come off like some permutation of psych-rock.

The result is one of the most formally radical indie records in recent memory. It also happens to be Dirty Projectors’ all-around best, not least because it most closely recreates the kinetic force of their live performances.

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.

They have built up a group of songs so restless and unsatisfying that a group of teenagers with the proper training could have made them, or likely something better.

When None Shall Pass drags late in the first act, it's largely due to tracks that seem intended to reprise the contemplative vibe of the Float era. A few Jukie guest spots, brazen as the production, round out the way the album works best.

We are Him is more varied in texture, more resolute in execution and, to the probable amusement of Gira’s long-term coterie, an altogether darker disc.

Inconclusive. Kala plays as mixed media pastiche, a barely restrained amalgam of ideas that are hardly exhausted by beats or flow and double and triple as political references.

It is perfectly pleasant, mildly intelligent pop, perhaps a cut above the vast majority of songs with "la la la" choruses. Yet it has none of the elegant non sequitur of Bejar's best work, nor the barbed hookiness of Newman's, nor even the sheer musical sensuality of Case on her own

Despite its music-geek-pleasing period references and psychedelic density, this is ultimately a frothy pop record full of hopeful love songs.

Ear Drum is his sprawling, messy 2007 manifesto, loaded with rhymes that take weeks to unpack, to say nothing of the bizarre diversity of producers and guests.

The main album is sharp and vitriolic and honest, with hardly a place to take a breath.

Lonely harmonicas, keening fiddles, plinking kalimbas, and vaguely dubby drums twist in and out of the interwoven vocals, their melodies like ivy vines climbing a fence; the lyrics grow on you just as slowly, requiring several close listens before they start giving up their secrets.

The Stage Names is raucous, rambunctious and occasionally quite funny.

The whole midsection of the album is giddily enjoyable.

The Broken String, fails to arouse--the sound is homey, the playing facile and the lyrics keen but not overly precious.

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.

The good news is that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is Spoon's best record in a while - if you liked "Gimme Fiction," you'll probably like this too.

In the studio, it’s a totally different beast--a little soggy with orchestral coloring and the 24-track fuckery often seems rote. Taking St. Vincent at face value, Marry Me can be an enervating listen because Clark is playing against her strengths.

Desire, is a mess: intriguing, puzzling, intriguing and ultimately frustrating as all hell.

They've put out six strong albums, consecutively. And without a pause, they've expanded their range without loosing sight of their limits.

There’s little to grasp onto with The Sun, as the record more often than not locks into a cautious mode of jamming on simple figures with little idea as to where to actually take them.

It’s successful on pretty much every count for two main reasons: 1. It’s well-written and blearily produced; and 2. It's self-aware and not neurotic.

Frantic guitars, hooks that replay in your head, skeptical lust - they're all here.

Tromatic Reflexxions is a great record for all of the reasons you might suspect – unless you don’t like MoM, or MES, or either.

Olson’s songs are as strong as ever.

It's a given that Excellent Italian Greyhound is a masterful offering of jagged minimalist rock from a seasoned and almost ridiculously venerable band, but its mastery is expressed in exclusively expected ways.

Their exploration of the genre's boundaries is so lithe and confident, and their studied aloofness here so convincing, that the familiarity comes across as authenticity and the restless impulse for expansion feels, at times, transcendent.

There’s nothing here that’ll shock experimental music acolytes, but it might be a bit much for those expecting only brawny post-rock. Like Goldilocks, I find it just right.

Voxtrot hew to the genre standards to consistently pleasing, if never thrilling, effect.

Plague Park’s nine tracks seem to be over before they reach their potential. The record gets better as it progresses, and successive listens reveal more interesting facets to the songwriting.