A few tracks wisp away into nothingness, but on work like "Your Heart is a Twisted Vine," Nadler approaches timelessness as well.

The music is what stands out. Vile has no problem bringing any of his talents across--steady-handed, Appalachian-inflected psychfolk reels, doe-eyed wisecracker vocalese.

The ingredients that make up Dark Crawler are a tasty mix, and Danjah could do worse than keep cooking with this recipe.

Far from terrible, Echo Party sounds merely confused.

The Coathangers are clearly a band in transition, and it's very possible that this album's disjointed nature is a result of the band throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks.

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.”

It's cool to hear all this stuff put together in one package, but it's so smothered in nostalgia and cheekiness that the predictable analog incidents that keep the tracks from sounding repetitive seem clichéd.

For the most part, what hampers the recording is a reliance on a single type of musical form: the vamp. Over simple (and endlessly repetitive) chordal structures, the players just noodle.

It's a fine album, but after each listen I find myself wishing a little more had happened, that more of the human behind it all might shine through in unexpected ways.

Black and Miller aren’t as bluntly exposed as on their earliest records, but they still keep Diamond’s production bracingly in check for a sound that preserves a pervading visceral punch.

Fans might enjoy the history lesson, while non-fans are probably better off waiting for the next full-length.

What a disappointment.

The result is a lot of chaff and wheat that still need to be separated.

Havasu is raw with current and remembered emotion, but there’s love at the center of it – for the girls at school, for the places he went and even for the family that misunderstood him— and that warm forgiveness makes it all the more powerful.

Haley tows the line between soundtrack and banger throughout, exposing the similarities between the two but also the pitfalls that come with catering to a particular demographic.

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

Imperial Teen crafts a super-clean, super-sharp, inordinately complex collection of songs that, nonetheless, go down like cherry cola.

So even though Popp's new sound palette seems like a step back, the way he uses it is as au courant as an oil-soaked pelican. O is not a retro move, but the work of an artist dealing with the now.

It's got an energy that's usually associated with naiveté and learning instruments on the job. The trio knits their little hand-played loops together loosely, and in a certain light, there are places it unspools completely.

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

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.

For the uninvested outsider (neither lover nor hater), it's distinctively spooky background music with a few satisfyingly jarring surprises, nothing to get terribly worked up about. For Patton's large army of obsessive pupils, it's an essential document of the Master at his most conceptually obsessive.

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.

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.

The more you recognize its complications, the better Tidings sounds.

American Gong is frustrating. It's not a bad album by far, based on the usual criteria one arranges on the bar graph of goodness: it's melodic, paced well, pleasant and so on. At the same time, however, there's nothing that marks it as unique in any real way or different from any Quasi album of the past.

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.

The more faithfully you capture these songs, the worse they sound. The Lillywhite Sessions may be DMB’s darkest, most dangerous material, but it is still slick as hell. No question, though, that Walker approached these songs out of love, and for that, you have to give some credit.

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.

As an album, Brain Pulse Music feels like two things at once, a dichotomous effort in which the nobility of the endeavor is at the core of its biggest aesthetic weakness.

It’s a lengthy, reflective and beautiful record that mostly steers away from the more rock-oriented sound of Shearwater’s last two releases.

Despite its uneven presentation, Someday is Today is a beautiful, evocative record, whose charms invite and reward repeat listens.

'Seeplymouth' is a complex and beautiful song, and one that displays the talents of all the collaborators in Volcano Choir. A lot of people were enamored of "For Emma, Forever Ago" last year; they’ll be well rewarded if Justin Vernon’s involvement leads them to Unmap.

This album will doubtlessly appeal to a broader audience than previous outings, but that's not to say it lacks the inventive, leftfield sensibility that has permeated Warren's other records.

Perpetuum Mobile is an album of skeletal songs, many of them little more than percussion, bass, and vocals. What's remarkable is the band's ability to create an effective atmosphere with so little -- and much of the credit must go to Bargeld's ever-astonishing voice.

There’s a remarkable continuity from track to track, and its obvious those contributing to Venomous Villain are long-time fans of Dumile’s work.

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

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.

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.

Early music is fascinating to people in a way that goes deeper than anything else, and for musicians and artists, all those early things spill out in the things we make. Gonzalez does that here in a fun and remarkable way.

The compatibility between the browbeating belligerence of hardcore and the glitzkrieg of techno’s bare repetition is undeniable – and much more enjoyable than it reads on paper.

Bundick occasionally turns the energy up, like in the last 30 seconds of album highlight “Low Shoulders,” but those moments are too few and far between to make an impact.

False Beats and True Hearts may move slowly, but it moves with grace, and it never lapses into the sameness of yore. The varied arrangements help.

Universe Room may not be the best of recent recordings by the band, but it is certainly a wide reaching addition to their catalog.

Fading Parade brings back the guitars, but continues the slide toward formlessness, with songs that are always pleasant but no longer very compelling.

Paper Dolls is a really delightful piece of work, tender and whimsical and, despite a certain amount of artifice, touchingly sincere.

This is clearly a departure point, unexpected but more than welcome.

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

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

There’s something that lifts the music of Laika above its essentials: A balance of melancholy and sobriety.

Riches' voice can still sound a bit flat on some tracks, but his vocal and lyrical abilities have grown by leaps and bounds.

While Múm's music has always posed a mysterious, melodic invitation to the listener, their latest offering feels flat at times, with very few signposts marking the way and even fewer landmarks inviting one back again.

It’s been ages since he’s sounded this self-assured, or this much at home.

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

Jaill's indie-major debut, That's How We Burn, further refines the strengths of its predecessor--tight, no-nonsense songwriting and straight-ahead arrangements with tinges of jangle and psych.

Even if The Diver is too lacking in originality for many, it does what it says on the tin, with verve, energy and a keen sense of what went before.

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.

As their music has grown more detailed, the details have become ever more foreboding.

Spirit Counsel doesn’t make for an easy listen, but largely because of its length. Moore’s compositional work and tonal explorations remain intriguing on repeated listens.

Veronica Falls are enjoyable to listen to, but they don't seem to offer more than that fleeting smile.

Gesturing, though, is just about all it does.

Listen to the tracks that are not being released as singles and you'll see that the band truly does have something to offer outside of their super-fun-party-time aesthetic.

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

Mohn is a foreboding album that also has its comforts.

This is not a bad album, and if it weren't carrying the Gang of Four name, you might find it casually enjoyable.

Mostly, though, the record shows off Grass Widow's continued ability to hone their own style.

While the individual songs here impress, Holograms feels more like a collection of singles than a cohesive work.

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.

If the last Red Krayola With Art & Language record, "Sighs Trapped By Liars," surprised with its gentility, Thompson’s dialectical relationship to/with form pretty much dictated that its follow-up had to jut out at right angles from its predecessor.

But largely, Jacaszek's wedding of disparate styles pays off in Glimmer's evocation of certain moods and expert shifts from mode to mode.

Barry Adamson, formerly of Magazine and The Bad Seeds, has released his most commercial-friendly album to date.

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.

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

On earlier albums, Egyptrixx proved the possibilities, but Pure, Beyond Reproach doesn’t live up to its predecessors.

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.

Defever can still write great, melancholic pop songs.

Alcoholic ne’er-do-wells or not, New Bums has allowed the duo to ditch old genre entrapments and celebrate new life as troubadours of enrapturing darkness.

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.

It's always interesting to hear artists develop, but one can't help but question the conviction here.

Together is a good album that is catchy and full of hooks and does a lot of what we've come to expect from the band. Having said that, it's also a step down.

It feels like a genuine use of the source material; not even as something conscious, like a person that travels around hoping to find new sounds, but rather as an act of dialectical eruption--the past naturally coming back in a different form.

Vocalist Ryan McPhun deftly walks the line between embarassing naivete and calculation.

English Little League starts with a memorable and high-quality opener in “Xeno Pariah,” a compact showcase of everything the band does right.... They don’t maintain that high quality--the off-key “Sir Garlic Breath” is just painful--and more often than not, the songs fall into good-not-great territory.

Bardo Pond's self-titled is a massive, monumental piece of work, proving once again that this long-running outfit can still crank the heavy, mind-numbing psych that it's always been known for.

Despite its velocity, the album is ambient in the sense that it sounds best when heard with the same indirect, free-associative attention that’s behind it.

This set is intriguing, though recent Fall is easiest to take in small doses.

I is the result, four long, loosely-related tracks that bump and groove and thrum and throb, often hypnotically, sometimes with a lively intensity. As an idea of musical process reimagined, I is always interesting. But as music, it’s uneven.

A glorious and preposterous journey.

Just as Yeasayer appears to have planted its two feet firmly on the dance floor, it seems to have lost much of its capacity for eccentric pop magic.

Sometimes, too often, you start a band and it's good, but by the time anyone really cares, you've run out of interesting ideas and your live show is boring because you're burnt out and your record sounds like it was sponsored by Guitar Center.

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.

The guitar is the wild card in these tightly reined-in, metronomically repetitive cuts. It rises in fits and starts, jabs at solid masses of beats, tests the outer limits of rigorously defined song structures.

It lacks the thrill of seeing Nace stalk the stage, balancing Gordon’s cool command with understated menace, let alone the body English each needs to exercise to procure the sounds that they get out of their guitars. It also lacks the contrasting spectacle of the experimental films that the duo often projects upon the rear wall of the hall. What you get instead is a slightly murky recording that filters their outsize rain of blows and ends up conveying solid representation rather than out-of-body transcendence.

Thee Oh Sees conjure sweet, sticky fuzz, and there's very few spaces on Warm Slime to take a breath, or think about what you've heard. Then again, it's this very saturation that makes Warm Slime such a natural high.

Where Beaches blended human touch and electricity to create heart-stopping climaxes and an air of constant expectancy, Broken Ear attempts a streamlined repetition of the formula with much more emphasis on the electricity, and the whole does not equal the sum of the parts.

At its best, then, Vanity is Forever seems to be an album where the nostalgic references are intentional: New Wave as touchstone rather than simply gazing backward fondly.

A band that glides effortlessly when it might benefit from a bit of friction. A little ugliness might break up these pristine gate-reverbed vistas and make them seem not just stylish and cool but real.

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.