Thankfully, the music that accompanies their lyrical flights of fancy and ever so stoned imagery soothes the chafing caused by such unabashed and often lurid flower power ranting.

What a disappointment.

The layered caramel of [Brett's] voice stays thick from track to track, but finally, it's Rennie's poetry that gives Last Days Of Wonder its legs.

The slower songs on The Warning have a kind of raggedy, pioneering charm.

The opening seven tracks on The Sun Awakens are probably the strongest sequence of songs on any Six Organs release so far.

It’s a fitting overview of everything that’s always worked for Sonic Youth in the past.

The songs are simultaneously more richly detailed and more succinct than those on Segundo and Tres Cosas.

Yet for all its surface appeal, the record has a curiously soulless quality, a lack of vulnerability and humanity that undercuts most of its songs.

Neither of them could truly be called “free” players - most of their own music is fairly composed - and it sometimes seems like they don’t really know what they’re doing with each other.

Puzzles Like You... is not at all Halstead's best work, and what has sounded simple and subtle before begins to feel simplistic and blunt; the songs here move with an energy that seems either forced or mocking, and on the whole embrace the kind of triteness they used to offset.

On the stereo, Who Loves the Sun is almost too pretty, coming perilously close to that "beautiful music" vibe popular in dentists' waiting rooms.

Now You Are One Of Us is worth checking out for its amazing production alone.

That shiver of foreignness adds interest to what is essentially a frothy pop sound, as does the occasionally mesmerizing distortion.

With the exception of the somewhat dull “Dormant Love,” I’m altogether satisfied.

No easy listening feat by any stretch of the imagination, Scott Walker's The Drift will provide critics and general music fans with talking points for the next 10 years. It is, simply, a work of staggering emotional sentiment and complexity that few will be able to match.

Last time, the surprise was that after 20 years of hiatus, the band was just as good as ever. This time, they're even better, more cohesive and confident, louder and funnier, still learning from life and each other, and using that experience to create ever more compelling music.

A puny, ill-conceived record in comparison to both Alphabetical and its predecessor United.

This is a decidedly unhurried album, and it takes a while to find the small pleasures within each song. But once you do, it’s really fantastic.

I was really hoping that some critical insight the bigger publications had missed would shine through here, and on this front I am let down, albeit pleasantly: all this record strives to be is a power-pop record, of second-string Lennon/McCartney-crossed-with-Americana type that proliferated in the ‘70s and has carried on, doggedly, through the decades.

Ultimately, the album is explicitly notable for its musicality, rather than its content.

They’ve upped the speed quotient considerably on this outing, forgoing much of the Melvins-inspired slack of previous efforts in favor of ugly, rapid-fire riffing.

It may fall short a few instances, but it’s a record with genuine ingenuity.

A magical collection of songs where the lyrics, instruments and voice somehow blend perfectly, matching each other moment to moment to tell the same story, set the same mood.

The hooks are nearly endless, each catchier than the last, and each song features a Technicolor array of instruments that create a perfect sonic version of the mildly psychedelic album art that comes with every Danielson release.

Matmos have created a digital manifestation of their own personality, one that would be done more justice through psychoanalysis than musical description.

Beirut’s brilliant debut album is full of grandeur and intimacy, with accordions, ukuleles and brass instruments complementing contemporary notions like drum machines and digestible song structures while simultaneously channeling the ancient appeal of Balkan folk music.

At the end, S-M is still a silly tribute band, years away from hoeing a unique row. But when musicians crank out such a joyously chaotic mess of someone else’s forced nostalgia, it’s hard to be mad at them.

Songs From the Year of Our Demise never achieves the crunch or the sugar highs that still makes Posies records so addictive, but it never really needs it. This is pop for adults.

Zeroes and Ones, like Eleventh Dream Day’s early work, has the direct, immediate quality of a live performance.

Really, these songs are dance tunes, and the proper place for them is in a club at high volume. Listening to them at home is, to be honest, somewhat disappointing and perhaps does the tracks a disfavor, because they're not that detailed.

It's not an intrinsically triumphant album, and in part that's why it's a triumph: comfortable, well-adjusted rock by and for aging erudites, a bit greyer, a bit wiser, but no less creative or inspiring.

Certainly, people will inevitably point back to Mogwai's similar peak-and-valley approach, but Mono manage to make both the valleys more subtle and beautiful, and the peaks more powerful.

Filled with an ineffable spiritual longing and a fractured sense of alienation, the album packs an emotional punch and a dark intelligence that sneaks up on you after repeated listens.

The record paints The Concretes’ personality in richer detail without giving up one iota of their distinctive spookiness.

It covers too much ground, spreads its inventive energies too thin.

Return to the Sea reins in its eccentricities successfully enough to illustrate that the most understated risks can be the most rewarding.

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.

I'd be surprised if anybody, in any field, drops something this potent in the next nine months.

While a well-concocted snotty attitude may be a decisive factor in any number of great rock albums, Born Again in the USA feels lazy without any particular agenda. It’s good for a laugh and a couple of listens, but ultimately does not resonate.

Ultimately, it's not likely that those who've yet to be Quasi fans will be converted by this album, but it would nonetheless be worth their while to give it a listen.

For the most part, Cannibal Sea differs little from The Long Goodbye: the elements that made that album successful – tight songwriting, precise arrangements and elegant performances – are once again employed with aplomb.

Falling somewhere between a compilation, a beat CD and a producer showcase, this fails to satisfy on any of those levels.

All At Once shares many of the same stylistic preoccupations as War Prayers, but by carefully reworking similar material, it improves on its predecessor.

While it’s not bad per say, it is certainly lacking in spark.

Fab Four Suture is a virtual treasure map, a plane of possibility.

So what’s a band to do that sticks to its guns and produces some of the finest sludgy blues-punk this side of Blue Cheer? Well, for starters, add horns. Call it a gimmick or a last-ditch effort at reinvention, whatever the case, but it works.

Their efforts at stretching boundaries falter because they have inscribed themselves within such narrow aesthetic parameters, hitting a fourth chord feels like a massive achievement.

In the end, there is nothing too paradigm-shifting to be found here, just a nice genre pastiche from two unique talents who won’t disappoint their fans.

Axis of Evol may not be a great album. It remains prey to some of McBean’s obnoxious corner-cutting. But it is his most resolute outing to date, certainly the first record he’s made that can be heard front-to-back, repeatedly, without losing most of its shine.

It’s frustrating to hear them in this context – sounding jaded and uninspired, a slump they haven’t been in since the late ‘80s.

Dead Drunk on the whole could be taken as noise music, noise music with none of the brutality and half the imagination.

How you’ll come down on Etiquette depends, I suppose, on how interested you are in the tales of sad-sack twentysomethings.

The record doesn’t sound much like a free improv session, but it retains the crucial dynamic of starting from zero and seeing where it goes, and there’s enough going on here to make me curious where they’ll go next.

There's something really interesting about the way these two conflicting styles fit together here, a groove for headbangers with flowers in their hair.

Malcolm Middleton’s electric and bass guitars have never sounded so big, and they’re better that way.

It's as if More and Black set out to purposely compose a more "mature" album. By slowing things down they're able to accommodate R&B outings, spoken word stories and artsy offerings, but to be honest, it's not all that much fun.

It's tempting to spend hours excavating metaphors and translating references on a record this complex and interesting, but Destroyer's Rubies also works well as pop.

Each moment of each song is completely unpredictable, to the point where even after multiple listens some of these transitions still seem to come out of nowhere.

This compilation goes for breadth where Konono’s Congotronics went for depth.

Songs like "Walky Talky" and "Bye-Bye-Bye" reference the band's Devo inspiration a bit too explicitly, but overall Polysics show themselves to have for the most part outgrown their influences.

One of the most important anthologies to come along in quite a while.

Though these may succeed as pop songs, Belle & Sebastian ultimately subvert their appeal by contradicting precious, self-effacing sentiments with brash music.

Comfort Of Strangers is the best thing Orton has recorded since her debut.

There's no arguing that it's pretty entertaining.... But there's the nagging sense that it's all sound and fury.

Particularly in the lugubrious opening half of the disc, Clogs tends to repeat things simply for the sake of repeating them without really building towards anything.

A schizophrenic palate of honeyed soul, downbeat electrix, timeless hip hop and bare-knuckle beats, these 31 tracks (spread over 44 minutes) are packed with triple the hooks – and suffer from attention deficit disorder (to the listener’s benefit).

A record that spits in the eye of assertions that they don’t make records like they used to.

To be sure, grime is a hybrid genre, but Run the Road 2 often shows how the balance can be weighed too heavily towards American rap idioms.

The experiment does at times rush off the tracks into the bushes, where either the spastic tempos prove too much for Oldham's cool croon, or the meat-and-potatoes song structures reject Tortoise's occasional proclivity toward overseasoning.

It's a fairly fun album, albeit not one that sticks with you.

The group [is] at it's best when it stays close to it's R & B foundation. Standing in the Way of Control expands the Gossip's pallette, but the keepers here hug tight to the rump.

Pearls and Brass have your ultimate Friday afternoon "just got paid today" soundtrack right here. Turn it up loud and enjoy.

A pretty percolating electro-pop record that embraces sweetness and strangeness in equal measure.

More like faithful reiterations of soul cliches than anything fresh or interesting, nearly every track will remind you of someone else.

Defever can still write great, melancholic pop songs.

The Line may be as polarizing as ever, but fuck me, can it play a righteous drinking song.

Father Divine ranks among the best of Ladd’s efforts, and is easily one of his most adventurous.

Cheers to the second installment of this beautiful friendship.

Pollard’s imagistic lyrics and ragged musicality create a bridge between the mundane and the exceptional.

Tiny Cities differs very little from how we might expect it to sound.

Given that it’s a collection of EPs and singles, These Were the Earlies is predictably all over the map, a problem exacerbated by the Earlies’ wide-ranging stylistic ambitions and long-distance collaborative methods.

Most of Tom Vek’s influences are at least fifteen years old and easily triangulated. But he’s unencumbered by nostalgia. We Have Sound is so difficult to isolate from Vek’s ass-backwards charisma, I wonder if the man might be a visionary.

That Vashti Bunyan had the courage to step out of seclusion and follow up her classic debut is admirable. That she was able to do so with an excellent batch of songs is a joy to behold, pure and simple.

So refined at times it borders on the insipid.

“Dayvan Cowboy” is almost worth the price of admission, but it makes the remainder of the album seem derivatively “New Age.”

Essentially, the Brians don't really need to innovate that much anymore and instead are just fine-tuning their craft in glorious ways.

If another band were to serve up the fiddling strings and lollygagging vocal harmonies of “Animal Shapes,” the wanky guitar breakdowns of “The Poor, The Fair, and the Good,” perhaps Tanglewood Numbers wouldn’t feel like such a disappointment. But Berman’s a brilliant lyricist with 30 or 40 minutes to spare every couple of years, and his voice seems oddly absent from this record.

Nine bracing blasts of terse, catchy noise-pop.

Here’s a band so fond of their particular brand of mid-tempo dream pop that they do not feel compelled to try anything else. At least they take the time to be particularly observant as they comb their territory.

What makes the Constantines appealing, then, is not that they do something totally new but rather that they do something familiar very well.

Like Paul's Boutique, The Mouse and the Mask is at times frustrating in its top-heaviness. Thank god it's got Doom.

The Runners Four manages to capture the unbridled intensity and utter joy these four carry across in a live setting.

With a solid emotional through-line and a few sonic surprises, Cinder is a musical novella, whose narrative compels you to its last luxurious line.

So yes, they've still got it. But that still begs the question; do you need re-recordings of tunes that changed the face of rock music? Not as badly as you need the originals, that's for sure.

They cram in so many styles it could easily come across too clever, like a band that claims to be equally inspired by Wu Tang, Cheap Trick and Cher. It doesn't happen. The tracks have a life apart from the name-that-tune layering that drives their sound.

Elephant Eyelash is fantastic, an indie rock record that nicely balances absurdity and directness, pop hooks with stoned weirdness.

It's not as good as Ugly, but it's not as bad as Travels, and it's a welcome step in the right direction.

These Audion recordings thrive on nervous energy, sounding like the twitchy mumblings of a speed freak at their most hyperactive.