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.

Like a lot of music benefiting from the blogosphere's voracious appetite for the new, Boys and Diamonds is a bricoleur's hodge-podge of style.

Seems to be a misguided stab at radio-friendliness.

Easily 30 minutes too long and four symphony orchestras too many, Human Conditions feels like a soundtrack to Barnum and Bailey, with Ashcroft’s earnest vocals drowned out by a cast of thousands.

The A List of Burning Mountains performance is a stand-out LP, which shows a pleasing growth of confidence to expand beyond the confines of hyphen-rock.

The balance--between groove and experiment, organic and synthetic sound--shifts constantly on this very strong album, sometimes prodding listeners to think, other times comforting them with familiar sounds and, occasionally, overwhelming them with ephemeral beauty.

In the Maybe World feels like an (unintentional, perhaps) sequel or response to Geek the Girl, turning down the intensity while sharing a twilit mood.

Reid’s rolling, sweeping, ever-present groove takes on colors and textures, courtesy of Hebden and his suite of gizmos (real or imagined), but it’s always the same hard road, the same track of tandem steel rays that cut through every borough, every station, every hall and every mind.

When obtuse means nonsensical and there's no one consistently there to tie the free associations together, it becomes less a case of judging Vast on his own street odyssey and more a case, ironically, of falling back to where we started in the least desirable way: It's good, yeah, but it's no "Iron Galaxy."

A bit melodramatic, but undeniably compelling, Scattergood’s work has already drawn comparisons to Tori Amos and Kate Bush.

This final tension--between the desire to exceed perceived aesthetic limits and the reality of the artists’ own limitations--is one that is present throughout Futuristically Speaking. Jwl B and Shunda K are, as of now, stronger conceptually than they are in execution.