The songs here simply stand together as individuals, each quite memorable while comprising a solid album.

What makes II so vital on a grander scale is that they have reached a masterful equilibrium with the elements that have made them the preeminent producers they are today.

The melody is maintained, with the only difference between the two sections is a very pregnant pause added to the notes, the whole of robotic Europop from the '70s lodged into one oversized chrome éclair.

On Air Museum, they've turned more toward rhythm and pulse. So the melodies now are more like elegant patterns tattooing out micro-rhythms, and the ever-present warm timbral glow the two do so well has become a kind of undertow, a more urgent wave motion.

Techno is, by its nature, hauntingly cold. By pumping some blood to its extremities, the Dirtbombs craft a fresh strain of disco soul.

Sleep on the Wing is quite pleasant, but so soothing and gentle that it’s hard to focus on.

Marked by inconsistent, not fully formed songwriting, Here We Go Magic's new tracks also make for an indecisive, if not bipolar, collection.

Transistor Rhythm clearly isn't the full-force, wall-to-wall banger album that many were hoping for, but it does show that Addison Groove can successfully and consistently operate in a more relaxed mode.

It isn't as succint, and heart-wrenching, as Someday... and it may not have the slicing modernity of HNIA's earlier works, but the idea of the project propels it still.

It’s pleasant enough, especially with the shift away from Broken Social Scene towards a dancier Cut Copy aesthetic, but it’s ultimately forgettable. The perfect connector for a full album, but not strong enough to hold its own.

There are two distinct types of songs on The Power of Rocks: the herky-jerky, dada-ist contraptions described in the first two paragraphs and a sort of luminous dream pop that might remind you of the Green Child.

Lights certainly has its charms--cribbed Afropop, bits like A Rainbow in Curved Air, and a general poppy through-line--but those charms wear thin when placed up against an entire album’s worth of monotonous, mobius strip dance beats.

What you're really hearing is the sound of Mark Ryan thinking out loud, through song. And even though this can be frustrating at times, it's still plenty refreshing to get such an eclectic survey of what most reformed punks are taking for pop music nowadays.

Overall, Dub Egg isn't as strong as The Young's debut, Voyagers of Legend, but second-album jitters aren't the problem. If anything, The Young have a little too much confidence in their style. By the time the finale drifts into its dissipating breakdown, it feels a song too long.

The entire panoply of sounds from past recordings is brought to the forefront and depleted prejudicially. Sonic serpent rattle, centrifugal drones, cottony flashes and fizzes, dog-whistle squelch, electronic hives freed of their bees – the whole lot's here, and it's incrementally larger and more agitated than prior show-'n'-tell sessions.

It is a very accurate document of Wire's 2011 live set; its strengths and weak spots correspond exactly to the ones of the concert they played in Chicago the same year.

The album isn’t easily chewed or digested, but certainly worth the taste.

They remain a fantastic band, constructing their own cities of sound, a strange architecture with wine-dark interiors.

His melodies hang in the air, homespun like Saturday afternoon arts and crafts, creating a lush foreground that contrasts something lovely with his minimalist production. This latest holds to that formula, and improves upon it.

Many will understandably bore of it quickly, for there’s nothing to new to discover after repeat listenings. Yet, it contains enough rock solid tracks to make it recommendable to fans of the genre.

When they're on, Mates of State recall the better moments of fellow smilers Quasi or The Anniversary, and the rest of the time their friendly pop buzz is more harmless than irritating.

[Space Homestead] is another in a long line of seductive drift-songs from this most wise, peripatetic and yet enigmatic duo.

Given that everything here is a like a jam from musicians suspicious of jamming, the charms and defects are like a whole album of B-sides.

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

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.

The Trip is casual, low-stakes pop that is easy to live with.

Eight is both more concise and more varied [than his last outing, Drawn and Quartered].

The problem with Since We’ve Become Translucent is that it doesn’t measure up to the standards Mudhoney set with the undeniable gripping music they produced in their heyday.

Ultimately, what you see here is indeed what you get: amour, imagination and rêve from two men who fell to earth...from the dark side of Méliès' moon.

Ultimately, Cornelius has shown that he stands alone when it comes to future pop, and the results are an exceptional pleasure to hear.

The Babies' debut, released on the long-running Shrimper label, speaks well of collaboration. The album succeeds by touching on the hallmarks of both bands' sounds, while standing strong on its own thanks to some unexpected touches of true rock 'n' roll grit.

Other than some inoffensive feignings at trying something new, there's not too much else to be heard.

The sounds don't mesh, they stand separate and unique, a convoluted series of unique experiences looped and falling over each other in a series of accidents Whitman wants us to call 'dance.'

The team of Weitz and Shaw have a camaraderie and collaborative spirit that shine through in these recordings, and the individual tracks taken together reveal multiple facets of the pair’s friendship. Working apart, but spiritually together, these two reflect platonic love in musical form.

Stoltz's recreations are means to an end; he wants to write songs about good-old fashioned topics like falling in and out of love that sound fresh enough to make you play them over and over.

Granted, Buzzcocks sounds very '77/'78, albeit with better production, but it's largely devoid of the hooks, the melodies, and the anxious, deconstructed bubblegum pop feel that made the band's early material so memorable.

Upon repeated listens, the album gets about as intimate as Wembley. Played-up drum fills, crescendoed dynamics and large soundboards add little to the Turin Brakes sound.

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.

These songs stick in your head in a way that 15-minute guitar jams never do, while still maintaining a bit of hoary mystery at their core.

As an album, Ride Your Heart seems less like a collection of songs and more like a collection of expertly selected Tumblr-ready rock ‘n’ roll signifiers.

Ski Mask is almost certainly not Islands’ most accessible or enjoyable work, but it ranks with the band’s most forceful and accomplished.

While Puny will likely draw few new fans into Neville's unique sound world, those who have long fallen under the spell of his corroded Kiwi fuckery will be rapt yet again.

The problem with Golden Void is that it sounds so much like the Black Sabbath, with its intricate, chopped up time signatures, its big-footed riffs, its surprising facility with tunefulness even during mayhem.

A series of songs that are seriously well-constructed and complicated - yet deeply, deeply odd.

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

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.

Axes works as an hour-long piece of tension, dread, and release, with little room for interpretation, demanding to be listened to as a whole.

Even at Phosphene Dream's best moments, you can't help feeling that this is a very competent, earnest reproduction of things that have already been done.

Its appropriation of G-funk hooks and production is really off-putting, and makes me wonder exactly who this record is for.

It’s plenty theatrical, and tries to be upsetting at some points and rustic at others. It’s hard to get too worked up either way, however, especially when the sound turns fuzzy at all the key moments.

He puts together a good melody for each of these songs, as effortlessly as Ray Davies and in as nasally a voice.

Intense and moving throughout, Six builds a fair amount of variation into its downbeat aesthetic.

The sound is harder, more precise and altogether more of a sock in the gut.

It's a record with 20-20 hindsight vision. It perfects the past's mistakes, but misses the fun in making them.

[The final track is] less antic and virtuoso than the earlier tracks, but a good deal more touching. Elsewhere Neufeld jets off for the stratosphere, technical dexterity gleaming in a rarified, surgically clean space. Here she sinks into a rich, loamy here and now, luxuriating in slow exploration of certainties.

Range Anxiety provides plenty of action and feeling, though not always in the ways you catch on a surface listen.

It’s an ambitious album, but only in the sense that most of the songs are outrageously long and feature approximately eighteen gratuitous time signatures each.

It's a collection of veiled promise, but only partial pay-off.

Though Kid Sister might lack some versatility, her club-friendly material is more than above average, and gleams colorfully if synthetically, like her outstretched hand of freshly painted nails.

Its successes -- its pleasing idiosyncrasies, its moments of charm, and so on -- are there, but underneath a veneer of such blandness that finding them seems like more trouble than it's worth.

It’s incredibly inexplicable, and inexplicably incredible.

A few promising moments aside, most of it hardly resounds at all.

This is still a fun and fast record, showcasing a band with as many ideas as bratty rave-ups. Next time out, they might take a look at the pros with ridiculous hats that co-inhabit their hometown, though, and tell a story.

Despite the added breadth, Porras still sticks to the bare necessities to get his point across, making for guitar passages that meditate on every ringing note and hazy chord.

The tunes still aren't anything too memorable (though in fairness that's never been Boris's particular forte), and the frippertronics and sonic detail on songs like "Galaxians" makes things less ordinary than they might otherwise be, ranging between fairly standard chugging and brief breakdowns intended to sound heavily narcotic.

Coming Out of the Fog is quite a good album, but it contains no real surprises.

I’ll be listening to Through the Devil Softly for years to come.

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.

It’s elegantly expressive music where warm tones from cold machines cut to the quick of human emotion.

Even more densely angular and awkward than usual, It’ll Be Cool finds a band so deeply immersed in its own idiom that it’s hard to imagine an ear making any sense of this music, and yet, in spite of itself, the record works.

The People's Key, more or less Oberst's 10th album as Bright Eyes, finds him aiming for the prophetic over the personal, embracing the luxuries of the studio instead of hunkering down in the bedroom.

Pretty Ugly is neither very pretty nor particularly ugly, rather a lumpen, unengaging mess.

More often, Disappears's new sound plods--especially by comparison with the frantic, loopy movement through spacy echo chambers that characterized much of the group's material on Lux and Guider

Cold Showers uses that cavalier attitude behind such a simple bedrock of references--Joy Division (a song called "New Dawn" all but writes a countermelody to "Insight"), The Church, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Strokes, Interpol--that creates a level of tension across Love and Regret that sustains them far better than any of their peers.

Like Masana Temples as a whole, “Dripping Sun” is fun but uneven, too ambitious stylistically and not quite ambitious enough sonically.

The weak spot, as ever, are lyrics that clasp to cliches without transforming them. So we get a song about a certain four-letter-word, and lines about rain or taking chances. On the other hand, the punchline of 'Men in Love' is pretty great, and Beth’s belting usually subsumes the stock imagery.

Unfortunately, after the initial rush of the opening tracks, the album slows down perhaps too much.

“The Drunken Boat” one of the best tracks he’s done to date. The rest of the album isn’t as daring or unique. Joyner mostly follows the "Hotel Lives" template and reaps the same rewards.

This is an album that pulls you up out of gloom and into exultation, and if it’s manipulative that way, so be it. As Watts says, we would like to be like that, and Full Circle makes it feel, at least for a little while, like we are.

They have always written insanely short, catchy pop songs in the modern idiom, and, for those looking for the one line post mortem, Innings doesn't just not disappoint, it delights.

Just as Dedication surprised many listeners by aptly navigating theme, mood and flow, Nothing demonstrates Zomby knows his foundational sounds, the everything upon which he builds, better than anyone.

Established fans will appreciate a few new gems in the catalogue (I've returned repeatedly to "(They Found Me On the Back Of) The Galaxy"), but those unfamiliar with The Intelligence would do well starting with Deuteronomy, Fake Surfers or Males before circling back to this one.

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.

Walking With the Beggar Boys has so few bells and whistles that it might not make it through your earwax on the first listen, but these songs are the most rewarding the band has created.

On Glass, the Sea and Cake make music that’s as beguiling as ever, while displaying an odd sense of humor and implying that their best collection of sounds may still lie ahead.

Where on earlier albums, you could sense her thinking about what to do with the sounds she could make, now she seems more fully in control of her set of instruments. Process has slipped into the background, as she gains fluency in an invented language.

The presence of familiar things makes their music go down easier this time around, but it remains a challenge, even after many listens, to feel like you understand what you're supposed to feel.

Even with bursts of ill-tuned twang, Prinz and Horn's harshness is centered and tame.

In Longtime Companion, he puts the drawl and shuffle of country into the service of a very peculiar vision, embracing and even seeking out the contradictions.

For a band who made their name on straightforward, meat-and-potatoes indie pop, Strapped is all over the place.

Summer of Hate is fairly diverse, with bits of punk, pop, shoegaze and space-rock woven into nine distinct tracks. What unites all these elements is a fascination with tone, rather than song structure or lyrical content.

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

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

For now at least, the fragments are intriguing enough to keep me waiting for the next ones.

This is a record of a rare stripe--one that manages to pull a lot of disparate ideas and influences together to inhabit a unified world all its own.

Bachelorette is undoubtedly a step forward from her previous work, but until she fully throws herself into it with abandon, both sides she's working here will invariably suffer.

The charm of these songs won't last forever. They'll have their season in your heart or car stereo, their refrains will seep gently into your vocabulary, and at some point you'll stop needing them, but it's welcome company while it lasts.

If there's a flaw on Original Colors, it's that these 10 songs are so closely related--in tempo, vocals and instrumentation--that they're enjoyable enough on their own but become an undifferentiated blob when played back-to-front.