There is something very powerful about these interpretations, as Stewart and his crew cut past the elegant phrasings and the precise constructions of Simone’s songs, and expose their bruised and bleeding vulnerabilities.

Declaration of Dependence is thus a welcome return from a long-absent band, and a fine easy-listening album, but one that ultimately feels emptier than its predecessors.

While I’ll miss how amusingly unpredictable TA could be, I can’t complain about their first long-player that works, front to back.

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.

We get a brief chance to eavesdrop on a band of unique genius at its most raw, its most prankish and its most fun. It almost makes up for the chills, the sweat and the free cans of watery domestic.

The album is also horribly sequenced, pushing its best tracks down after a morass of prettier, more insipid melodies had fluffed you.

The record never hits a stride that allows it to pull together as a cohesive album, save its fantastical, paper-thin theme.

At times, there can be an over-reliance on an organic-sounding push-pull rhythm here; on the surface, a few of Riposte's songs do have a tendency to blur together after a few listens. But when everything comes together--as on the aforementioned "Outt!," which builds and builds, effectively ending the album on an exhausted, triumphant note--it's a mesmerizing project.

Throughout the album, as soon as the drums and guitar slide into nod-inducing alignment, they veer off-track. The songs simply do not cohere. The numerous instrumental tracks on the album show off the band’s virtuosity, but to entirely unmemorable effect.

This austerity is reflected somewhat in the duo's avowed debt to the ambient tradition of Harold Budd and Brian Eno and, whilst that's not bad thing at all, it does mean that, at times, Ursprung tends to fold itself into the background.

While there are plenty of thrilling moments, Dungen Live feels less like a coherent journey and more like channel-surfing between chase sequences and zoned-out psychedelic visuals, steam corkscrewing out of the top of the TV. Each of these flights of fancy probably made perfect sense at the time, as instrumental interludes between the songs, but recontextualizing them in this way has made the playing feel somewhat aimless at times.

Almost overflows with a heretofore unheard urgency and shows exactly the kind of energy their songs could -- and theoretically still can -- possess.

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 not sanctimony that drags the album down so much as lack of focus, both lyrical and aesthetic. Coursing between the ham-fisted message-moments is a nimble and reliably engaging display of verbal dexterity.

It was obviously made with care, and, as an result, is pretty easy on the ears. Much of it is also over-saturated, poured on too thick, and it can be cloying in its polite pleasantness.

If anything, it’s the failure to rise above its component parts and create a unique and recognizable sound that keeps Replica Sun Machine from being the breakthrough album this promising trio deserves.

Sex Change is uneven from song to song, but name a Trans Am record that isn't. What's something here is the smoothness with which the record evens out as a whole.

No one can be a teenager again, not after 20 years, and The Vaselines have lost some of the feckless charm of their earliest material. Still, as they've gotten older, they've held onto much of what made them special – the reckless fun, the gritty melodies, the taunting humor – and picked up some skills.

This is brink-of-apocalypse dubstep, wringing your guts with its internal tension rather than banging you over the head - without being didactic.

White, who is deeply respected by his peers, makes some clever moves on All Hits: Memories which clear the way. The first move is to turn toward free jazz, where solo percussion is a bit more familiar than in indie rock. Without doubt he has the chops, too, shifting between groovy phrases and episodes that expand and branch rhizomatically.

He and his accompanists perform perfectly, with Barker’s elegant leads being one of, rather than the exclusive, focal point.

Volume is fine, fuzz is good, but it shouldn’t obliterate the songs.

There is literally nothing on Gauntlet Hair that hasn't been done better by more respectable second-order bands like Tonstartssbandht or Ganglians.

The long, extended space-outs similarly have their moments both good and bad.

Through the Green is one of the finest dance LPs of the year for sure, but it's not something I could listen to every day.

One of the risks of having faith is becoming deaf to plain truths. The truth in this case is that most of In the Grace of Your Love is lousy.

Candela doesn't represent Mice Parade's most memorable outing, but it does showcase a willingness to expand the expectations surrounding their sound.

When they’re not trying to imitate the inimitable, Painted Palms hit a pleasant if not ground-shaking plateau.

Spills Out isn't the best record of its ilk to come out this year, but it's not the worst, either.

Anika was apparently recorded in a short time, and it's hard not to wish it felt at once more urgent and more cohesive.

There are the four originals here on Horses and High Heels. And for my dope money at least, they count among the highest songs she's had since getting off the stuff some 20 years ago.

Everything else seems comparatively flat and unsurprising; while the components of the individual songs are different, the results are of a kind, like a set of recipes using the same ingredients.

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

As much as anything, the record seems to be about holding the dark at bay, with stabbing riffs that jut at odd angles into the void, with frantic, interlocked rhythms that echo over silent spaces, with dance-syncopated sing-songs darting and fading into impenetrable gloom.

The narrators’ weaknesses become the songs’ weaknesses; Mercer apparently prefers to sustain verisimilitude at the expense of Skin of Evil’s potential. It’s a bold artistic move that lends itself to the page far more convincingly than it does to the ear.

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.

Certainly fans of the Blonde Redhead of old may damn Penny Sparkle with faint praise. Yet if Penny Sparkle veers a bit too close to Blonde Redhead meets Sade, it is mostly pleasant, and not for all of us is that word an epithet.

Mainly these songs remain steadfastly, quietly, emotional. For every moment that comes off too lightly, there’s an equal moment of memorable melody.

Adult. doesn't make their music easy to swallow, and some of the tracks here don't feel fully developed. But this is a band in transition, exchanging the spacious rhythms of their electro for a suffocating spin on rock revivalism.

If you flipped over Car Seat Headrest or just harbor a fondness for melodic hiss and fuzz, you’ll like this.

More than once Return To Form reminds me of a regular season game by the Chicago Bulls in the later years of Michael Jordan’s reign; needing something to surmount before they pull out the brilliance, they let things coast until they’re behind and then pull things out of the fire in the last couple minutes.

It's certainly not a perfect album, but Hello Everything represents the pinnacle of performance from electronic music's most thoroughly developed mind.

Its function is not that of a follow-up to Summer but rather as a companion piece that documents a productive period for the band. As such, the record is eminently satisfying, with loose playing and a relaxed air.

But from the stridently Floydian gravitas of its cover to the ponderous, tolling piano notes that close the album, Take My Breath Away finds Boratto straining uncomfortably to make some kind of serious statement.

The best songs on Ultraísta recall the murky pop made by the likes of Broadcast, where clarity and catchiness intermingled

Aside from Church Gone Wild’s best moments, there’s not much material here that can compare with the intelligence and distinctiveness of the duo’s best work.

Vocally, In the Cool of the Day often lacks that urgency: it's a beautifully played, highly accessible album that nevertheless leaves much less of an impact than one might expect.

Together, and backed by the rhythm section of Cornelius' band, one would hope for left-field pop fireworks, but their debut album Salt on Sea Glass is more of a mediocre light show.

For such menacing music, the overall effect is oddly inviting.

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.

The subdued guitars and steady percussive clip-clop are a noticeable change from the band's usual jangly late-afternoon pop, but even on the richest melodies lyrics and delivery drive the album.

Besides their inability to meet the very aims they set out for themselves, Clean and Zegon fail to do much of anything exciting with their all-star cast.

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.

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

This album, like others that nudge closer to perfection without technically breaking new ground--I'm thinking of the Cass McCombs and Tape albums, to name ones I've written about this year--could be a springboard for thinking about why musicians who seem capable of almost anything stay in their comfort zones for albums at a time.

The record finds the band operating in a similar space as the War on Drugs or Real Estate: a fuller sound with a little more polish that still feels homegrown. But in this case, the layers of production do more to maintain a distance than swallow you whole.

This EP still feels like a small plate of leftovers from a meal that promised more than it delivered, as though Wolfgang Puck was on the can, not in the kitchen.

While pleasant enough on a superficial level, the band's third full-length, Traps, falls short of the kind of coherent, compelling vision that would lift them up from intermittently-engaging mediocrity.

The Richest Man In Babylon is strictly background fare. If you run a coffeeshop, you’re cooking with gas.

You need to listen and absorb. It won't always work. But when it does, you'll find the door open and a fascinating terrain inside.

The fact that the middle of the album is easier to swallow than the beginning is not an indication of any real improvement, but a sign that you become habituated, or at least desensitized, to its utter lack of creativity or soul.

It all sounds very much expected, and very much the same. Which wouldn’t be so bad if that didn’t mean putting himself in the same crowd as so many corporatized, for-sale-at-the-mall acts.

Ultimately, though, I can’t escape the feeling that there’s nothing much at stake in All the Way.

Three-Four is simply too filled with excesses and repetitions for its bright moments to add up to a solid album.

Even accounting for his career of uncharitable experimentation, Martin Rev’s eighth solo album is something new again. To wit, it’s a haunting, intricate electro-classical record.

Although sloppiness normally both describes and compliments their sound, Shadows is messy with little to redeem it.

The rehearsal takes are probably the real draw (aside from the customary production corrections and sonic scrub all reissues get) for those already tuned to the album’s contrary wavelength, and they do not disappoint.

A totally hit and miss affair, with only two of the five songs clicking.

For the most part, Donkey flounders in a sterile morass. It may well bring CSS to a larger audience, one that doesn't consider subversiveness an impediment, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing.

On an emotional level, LISm is hard to get at.

The Mother Stone sounds like a flowering of long gestated creativity but the over gilded lily looms heavy over the bed and smothers the delicacy of his songs. For all the admirable experimentation, the breadth of his vision and the pristine production, Jones takes his leave before an audience overawed and enervated by sensory overload.

Nothing is entirely serious. It’s all in fun--and it is fun, fortunately.

OK, it’s not pretty, but it’s pure Fall. And that’s what makes them a difficult band to feel disappointed with, even if the release is, like Re-Mit, something of a second-rate offering.

The Ark Work is certainly not black metal. The problem is that it’s really not much else, either. Indeed, even after repeated listens, it comes across not so much as an album but as a sort of formless mass, which could be a good thing, in the right hands, but here does little more than baffle and exasperate.

The disappointments of Walking Cloud are really quite perplexing, given Mono's limited but impressive history and the promise of their collaboration with Albini. Still, if it fails to live up to the heights of One Step More and their debut Under the Pipal Tree, it has its share of moments.

As a mood piece, there are poignant moments, but nothing resembling a clear emotional statement.

While Beaus$Eros retains his playfulness and wordplay, and while the songs are without doubt catchy, Farquhar is out of his depth.

The cadre of eclectic guest appearances... make it seem like this record would play more like a mix tape, but Shadow pulls it off, and for the most part, each of the guest artists deliver the goods.

He’s smart enough to be aware of his dorkiness, and by the end of Live From Rome he has almost turned it into an asset.

By the end of No Wig, it’s hard not to feel like it suffers from the level of simplicity inherent in much of Nosdam's production.

What makes Strength In Numbers interesting is the way it departs from the usual.

Brilliant Colors understand to stick to what you know, and keep it short and sweet--a couple of platitudes that serve this band well.

It's not really very interesting, bold or exciting, but neither is it ever objectionable.

Alas, the new Earth Sound System is a particularly undecided record, offering two disparate approaches that make no attempt to cohere. The caveat "your mileage may vary" has rarely been so applicable.

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.

Mr. Impossible feels both inquisitive and hermetic, half closed off to the outside world, half chasing noise and patterns to their logical conclusion.

Far from snuffing out, Windsor For The Derby sounds like a band with a new lease on life.

RZA still sounds determined, but his rhymes are self-obsessed, repetitive, and dulled by constant calls for drugs and women.

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

James Pants may well develop a style or voice of greater substance with future releases. But, as of now, his reliance on his synthesizer aptitude is too repetitive, too flat, and too conventional to convey much meaning or purpose.

Despite a few quality tracks, the album feels wholly uninventive and listless.

The personality is still a little cutesy, half-baked at times and downright cultish at others (“You! Are! So! Beau! Ti! Ful! To! Us!/ We! Want! To! Keep! You! As! Our! Pets!”), but it coheres, and makes a good focal point when the music fails to. That’s fails to, not fails.

Jet Lag is a modest slice of lonesome lo-fi indie folk as they used to make it back when the para-Pavement galaxy was still busy splintering into its constituent planets, the ruminative Bermans and the verbose Pollards and the melodically off-kilter Barlows.

Too much of The Listener finds Gelb bridging his inspired moments with monotonous jazz piano and dusty crooning.

Nine bracing blasts of terse, catchy noise-pop.

An often fascinating, if frustratingly uneven record.

Espoir is an unusual release, part interesting artifact of aesthetic oddities, part field recording of a talented man with a smooth voice who knows his way around a guitar. Not the ideal introduction to Burkina Faso, but worthwhile nonetheless.

The band clearly understands what their strengths are, and the decision to continuously return to them, keeping the songs simple, short, and straightforward, staves off boredom while covering very little territory.