With these five songs, The Fresh & Onlys have finally moved out of the garage for good.

It’s its own thing, and a pretty good one.

The majority of Friend Opportunity fails to surprise. While it’s an easily listenable disc not without its share of good and engaging tunes, for a band who have made some of the best and most confounding pop music of the last decade, it’s a bit of a letdown.

Human Animal is the most textured and abstract of the band’s “official” releases in years, and while perhaps their methods aren’t new, the results aren’t simply the same old Wolf Eyes.

The mix of instruments is fascinating, but the reason this music lingers is that it is just so beautiful. If you’ve enjoyed either artist in the past, prepare to love everything you loved before and add a little extra.

Blonde Redhead haven't run out of ideas, but Misery strips them of their eccentricities so thoroughly that the few that remain sound out of place.

We're on familiarly bleak and gloomy (although not entirely unironic) Tindersticks ground here and, in the case of this band, familiarity certainly doesn't breed contempt.

The pulse and stomp of opener “City of Angels” or the sparkling twilight balladry of “Misery Remember Me” are classic examples of what Ladytron has always done well and why it’s good to have them back. Especially on the back half of Time’s Arrow, though, there are some new wrinkles.

The squalling sax that wends its way through most of these tracks and Josephine’s joyful, yet solidly unsettled yelps temporarily brings to mind a more professional and spacious Mika Miko, but that similarity mostly traces back to a common debt owed to Kleenex/LiLiPUT--all three bands make the ennui and alienation of second adolescence both incredibly vivid and, strangely, a lot of fun.

On this album, Schneider seems a bit torn between his task as a hook-writing pop musician and a seeming urge to rock a bit harder, with the added burden of being unable to put his toys down when he should.

It seems cliché to say that music works on a few different levels, but in the case of Relief, it's true.

While McCombs may not transcend his influences, his sense of...well, humor on Humor Risk does set him apart from the current crop of guitar-based musicians that wallow in the dour and faux-clever.

You could miss whole philosophies by following the guitar line too closely…and forgo featherbeds of tuneful pleasures by worrying too much about the words. And yet, ride the line just right, and meaning floods translucently simple songs, lighting them up from inside and transforming them.

The recording shows little evidence of how acoustically challenging the glass-walled structure can be; every element registers clearly so that the music yields where it needs to and slams where it must. And slam it does, with big beats and massed choruses that bring the messages down hard and certain.

Over its brief 26 minutes the songs crest and fall within a fairly narrow band, and when one feels like it’s about to peak and explode, the group instead will pull back a bit. There are shifts and changes aplenty, and there’s certainly no risk of tedium, but this is a reserved set of songs nonetheless.

It's a given that Excellent Italian Greyhound is a masterful offering of jagged minimalist rock from a seasoned and almost ridiculously venerable band, but its mastery is expressed in exclusively expected ways.

Brown addresses alienation, identity, the lure of the spectacle, religion but she does so with an oblique approach to words that mirrors Drahla’s approach to their music. If this all sounds very serious be assured that Useless Connections is an album that, above all, rocks.

The merging of the two artists’ sounds feels entirely natural.

Saltbreakers is a wonderful album – a little glossy on the surface maybe, but saved from preciousness by its intelligence, restraint and soaring images.

It's a beautiful collection of 'water music' that also serves as a reminder that experimentation often works best when smuggled in, sidereal style, under the canvas cover of pop songs.

Malkmus has the same fractured pop sensibility, but his music is more expansive than it’s been before.

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

The album’s biggest weakness lies in its arrangements.

This album’s austerity puts it more in the ranks of bizarro reduxes like Scott Walker’s The Drift. That’s impressive company, but even with its slight runtime, it’s hard to imagine feeling compelled to come back to I’m New Here once you’ve understood what’s going on.

Much of Real Gone has been stripped so bare instrumentally that its heavy accumulation of rhythmic noise -- manipulated groans and grunts (“Metropolitan Glide”) what sounds like a cracking horsewhip (“Don’t Go Into The Barn”) -- establishes a sustained, bristling mood that electrifies particular songs but bogs down the album as a whole.

This album's problem is a very, very shoddy sequence.

This is what makes Earthquake Glue such a startling arrival. You don’t simply listen to it out of obligation, but instead because you are compelled to return to it, again and again.

The Broken String, fails to arouse--the sound is homey, the playing facile and the lyrics keen but not overly precious.