In the end, Hall Music is an enjoyable but paradoxical album, both an expansion and contraction of Svanängen's palette.

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.

He never quite sells us on the necessity of getting into Bobby D.’s head, and only rarely evinces that he’s done so himself. The good news is that the album is strong anyway, more so when unyoked from the underlying concept.

Occupied With the Unspoken can be challenging and obtuse. It can also unrepentently beautiful. And, at its best, it's both.

It's music like this, intelligently composed and played, delivered with clarity and purposefully varied, that, finally, makes sense of the Fucking Champs.

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.

Subtlety is clearly not a strong suit here.

The result is a pastiche of deja vu moments that distract from a significant level of musicianship that this growing Philadelphia sextet possesses.

The sound on Darkness Rains is in line with 2016’s Glow in the Dark but seems to have sharpened and gained force in the intervening years.

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.

Kinski’s boldest statement to date.

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.

Their greatest undoing comes from slouching toward completion. So much of their debut worked because it lacked finish. The holes in the record were where the charm oozed most freely. But now that those have been filled in by pedal steel and organ, many of the songs shine with an unoriginal veneer.

There's a strength in what these four musicians are capable of together, and the best moments on Tidelands explore the boundaries of such an approach.

Untilted’s sound is warmer and rounder, but at the expense of sonic and rhythmic scope, initially a disappointment. It’s nice to report, though, that repeated auditions expose a new tightness in composition.

Make no mistake, Glazin' is a simple pop-rock record. It's fuzzy, and it has a nice swirling psych touch, but it also displays a relaxed, confident craftsmanship - a touch of reverb here, a Martin Hannett nod there (check out the snare on "Crush") - that elevates it just so, pulling it out of the garage gutter and into the warmth of the sun. Or the Jacuzzi, as it were.

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

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.

The confident, relaxed, but still concise and appealing “Vertical” indicates that Animal Collective still have some life in them, and as much as some of Painting With can tend to grate, it’s still an improvement from the band’s last two albums; trying to write pop songs instead of dance records or noise jams suits them in their middle age.

'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.

Aside from the average genre stabs, What Will We Be is a surprisingly sullen and ponderous album. Absent is Banhart’s mania, the zaniness that he always seemed barely able to contain.

Though the harmonic material isn’t always major keys, everything (mix, production, sonic universe) is pleasant, resolves nicely; the song structures are divided into equal measurements; much peace and congruence are present.

They simply begin, evolve, repeat, and end, very much as though they were designed to play out while we directed our attention elsewhere.

Broken Water's second full-length, Tempest, is at once a deeply competent and unoriginal record.

It’s nothing new and it’s nothing scary, but its renewed vigor is encouraging.

Nomad doesn’t particularly depart from the parameters that have already been set by the growing population of techstep tricksters, but it does serve as a concise document of dubstep’s travels to date.

Aside from the chopped vocal of the title-track, the mind-warp of "R in Zero G," and the woodpecker rhythms that liven up "Fraction" on the back end, the album feels dated.

It is way over the top in the way that Roxy Music was, all sheen and sigh and gorgeous inertia. Romantic Music, yes, no irony there.

Love & Desperation is one hell of a good time. A testament to both the cathartic, healing power of rock, as well the undeniable joy to be found in an arena-sized riff, Sweet Apples’s debut makes for excellent listening.

In a vacuum, it’s a captivating and well-designed experiment. But in this real world where hip-hop is history, where it owns that history, wears it, references it, reflects it, bounces it around, Two Fingers’ record comes off overcooked and overflowing.

With their new third record, though, Horse Feathers have tightened and thickened their autumnal moodiness with a classicist, chamber-ensemble sound--and stifled themselves in the process.

There's nothing new here, but much to love, and if "Tally" makes you think 10 songs by 10 other bands, that's only because it succeeds where they fell short.

Castlemusic is short, at 31 minutes, but diverse enough to suggest real potential.

As always, the playing is impeccable, although the cool professionalism evident on each song makes many of the album's tracks indistinguishable.

Holy Ghost!'s self-titled debut puts me at a loss. There is no way to penetrate this album. It's dance music that exists entirely for its own disposal, either into your iTunes, your DJ set or your garbage can.

It's not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination. But it also feels (not necessarily is) like someone forcing a turn in their art instead of allowing it to naturally come out of them.

Model of You is neither sparse nor overstuffed, relying on a few, highly polished elements to make up each song and allowing each of them ample space to unfold.

It's scattered, without a singular vision, and successful nonetheless.

Cold Cave are neither here nor there. The pop hooks aren’t catchy enough, the ‘coldness’ too rote, the flirtation with eroticism simply an abbreviated spin on Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.”

The songs are fun in a fizzy, party-in-a-box, ephemeral way, but nowhere near as interesting as those of similarly structured (part-female, double-guitared, 1960s-inspired) Fresh & Onlys.

If you listen to this album a lot, you may spend the first two or three times through snorting at odd phrases, recoiling from the venom and viscosity in Smith’s vocal delivery, but as you go, you begin to pick up the ferocity of the grooves underneath. No one else balances articulate, convincing hallucination with freight train propulsion like the Fall does, and this album, they take it further towards the edge than before.

There’s something Spinal Tap-ish about the reach for grandeur here--not that it’s bad exactly, more that it seems not fully justified by the material.

[Mould's trademark] coupling of aggression and tuneful economy is one of the chief attributes sometimes compromised on Body of Song.

There are two fairly strange intermezzo experiments and a few heavier-hitting sing-a-longs thrown in to excite ardent fans of their self-titled debut, but overall the album sacrifices listenability to broadcast and hint at Payseur’s “I will say what I will” evolutions to come.

Where earlier tracks tended, endearingly, to drift and wander, these new ones move not faster but with more purpose, as if they have somewhere to get to.

A solid, if not predictable emo-tronic excursion.

Kowalsky’s chants are more meditative than elegiac, more active than atmospheric and don’t have any air of scientific inquiry about them.

These aren't songs simply notable for their attitude or irreverence--they're a fine collection of songs, period.

Drone Trailer comes off as one of MV & EE’s richest conciliations of primal rock impulse and agrarian drift – the kind of record that a confused major label would have leaked out into the world in the early 1970s, the last time the underground had any chance of seriously warping the mainstream milieu.

Maybe Butler was aiming higher than simply "dance music." A laudable ambition, but one that sadly isn't matched by the content of Blue Songs.

Biasonic Hotsauce is broken up by some campy skits that buffer the genre hops, and after a few of them, the record turns toward electro.

You’ll Be Safe Forever is a wormhole backward in time. It’s also a timeless reminder of how valuable both Mark Van Hoen and WFMU are to the contemporary music landscape.

It’s a serious, earnest “lighten up, kid” that returns to Francis’s strongest mode, the slightly stilted personal journal; like the rest of Li(f)e it’s honest, sometimes brutally so, occasionally just brutal, and it’s hard to ask for more than that.

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.

The emotions channeled here are wrenching, but they’re also honest, and this album’s victories feel earned.

The music is too monochromatically saccharine (whether cheery, wistful, or both) to faithfully conjure anything more than a narrow and fleeting slice of human experience.

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.

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?

Its melodic songs lack the fiery drive and urgency of rock and roll, consciously recalling an era of music of interest only to people looking for something truly vintage.

Costello stays away from pop hooks here, concentrating instead on a tentative but engaging marriage of words and melody.

Clearly steeped in the great tradition of the British folk song, yet able to combine its structure and ethos with rock rebellion from both classic psych and more recent guitar rock, Erland & The Carnival's Nightingale is a distinctive exemplar of folk revivalism for the age of indie.

This is a hard record to get a hold on, but its vapors make you dizzy.

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

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.

This album doesn't reinvent the sound, nor does it subvert it--but on its own modest terms, it provides a concentrated dose of smart, verbose pop.

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.

III is something to be appreciated and savored, but not necessarily obsessed over.

Burning Daylight's best songs emerge from an ominous fog of sounds.

The token swell to storm that has come to characterize the post-rock set seems mailed in here; the build-ups are never ominous, the explosion of guitars never reach the near cacophonous bliss that their heroes so effortlessly visit.

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.

Ultimately, as the disc draws to a close and one hushed sonic wisp after another drifts by, justice is done to neither Foster’s considerable talents nor Dickinson’s genius.

Wham! Bang! Pow!, with its extravagant punctuation, is as brilliantly self-absorbed, as needlessly clever, as tightly wound and tautly played as the mid-aughts debut.

Slowed down, the only thing revealed is how seamless his stitching his, how clever his adjunctions are and how much musicianship it takes to create a good sample-based record.

It’s beautiful and playful and spiritual and full of soul, like their earlier work was. If you miss the aughts-era AC’s handcrafted, bitter-sweet-sour jamborees at all, you’ll want to check Eucalyptus out.

McCombs has performed a bit of rodeo jiujitsu, stealing his band's name back by invoking the myth of the West.

Though a solid and promising outing, Wavves isn’t a revelatory record. It fits nicely into the "scene," however vague that semblance is these days.

The album’s elements--large scale pop and tightly controlled electro--don’t always work together, but they come together on the very last track, 'Radio Kaliningrad.'

When their sound tends towards the more coherent and homogeneous (even on the excellent title track) they risk falling victim to an imitativeness, or perhaps simply a lack of aesthetic ambitiousness, that threatens to overwhelm the originality that they bring to the table.

They’ve clearly been listening, and taking notes. But between the blatantly derivative style of basically every song and the inherently specious nature of their source material, it’s hard to really take anything they’re saying or playing seriously.

It’s stale, predictable, and pedestrian in its fussy perfection.

A Dream A While Back is entertaining enough. Hearing Higgins recorded so simply can be starkly beautiful. Yet, anyone contemplating picking up a copy should be reminded there's another, far better record that should be heard first.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

Mostly these songs seem slight and shy, unable, really, to support the massive facades of synth and disco drums that Small Black layers onto them.

The proceedings would be a lot less palatable if they didn’t often achieve a forceful, unhinged immediacy; amid the heavy themes and brash posturing, there’s still room for the band to elbow in some loud, rousing real life.

While Work doesn't feel emotionally engaging or really deviate from an amiable pace, it's still engaging enough to hold one's attention for most of the 41 minutes.

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

While nothing on TNT or Standards was as influential as Tortoise's earlier work, those records succeeded largely because they marked new stylistic departures for a group that sounded genuinely excited by that prospect. Too many moments on It's All Around You lack that excitement.

There’s not a lot behind the well-polished surfaces.

No Elephants is a gorgeous album, but maybe the most interesting thing about it is the way it bites through the beauty.

It still has a sonic attack and extreme enough structural sense that the genre tag on its own probably doesn’t do enough to sum up what’s going on here. Baker and Buckareff are the rare creators who absolutely locked into their particular sound pretty much immediately and through many (many) releases over the years have never really sounded like anything but Nadja, and yet within that distinct soundworld they continue to find new shades in what in lesser hands would be a pretty limited palette.

Later in the CD, Middleton makes room for his own voice, and there's something very powerful in the way his rough, organic morose-ness combines with the bright glow of electronic instruments.

Drums Between the Bells at its simplest is often Drums Between the Bells at its best.

Sushi sounds enthusiastic but slight, with generic synths and run-of-the-mill dubstep-inflected bass lines.

They show that they can write sloppy songs with real hooks and something to bop along to. Something that rarely happens thereafter, unfortunately.

[Animator is] the sound of a group taking a familiar sound, segmenting it, and discovering that the results can be infinitely compelling.

Now, we’re certainly all pro-happiness and exuberance, but the same doggedly optimistic message reiterated during several songs begins to sound more than a little shallow, even if such statements have a way of lending themselves more grandeur than they deserve.

The good news is that this is, in fact, a throwback to their earlier work. The bad news is that it’s not throwback enough.

It's hard to believe at first listen, but they've got nuance.