While Feorm Falorx may have some of the duo’s more simplistic songwriting, it’s well worth a spin for its textural delights alone.

If The Kills didn't try so hard to be sultry, they might have a similar breakthrough. They're more appealing when you've got no idea what's on their mind.

Oneida’s chemistry alone isn’t enough to make modest material effloresce.

Their various styles are integrated and naturally came out of the way the Get Down Stay Down coalesced.

Outside Love, two years later, is another solid effort with a handful of quite good songs--and only a few embarrassing ones.

It's enjoyable and I find myself anticipating the songs.

If you took away the melodica, the masks and the mystery of a band like Clinic, you’d be left with a Brakes; competent, middle-of-the-road, going nowhere fast.

This is an impressive statement from a band that’s still forming itself. Its sound is distinctive and compelling, but still audibly shifting as they go. It’s hard to imagine where they might end up ten or even five years out, but my guess is it’ll be someplace cool and very different from where they are now.

The Knot turns the cliche about sophomore slumps on its head by being much stronger than If Children.

Your lost loves will not come back, but the morbid and exquisite plummet of losing them will, and rare is the artist that can make such a prospect as starkly comforting as it is here.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing to the band besides the concept. Far from ramshackle, exploratory fun, the songs are paint-by-numbers melodramatic nonsense with a few interesting genre gestures.

Eight is another slow burner but the flame is more ostentatious than we’re used to from the L.A. trio.

The stylistic ground covered on Pumps is a logical progression for Growing and leaves them with a number of interesting places to go from here.

With Mind Bokeh Bibio recognizes that our happiest, hands-in-the-air, hedonistic moments are shadowed with memory. A bit of hiss, crackle or distortion can evoke the sadness under the celebration.

His most personal recording yet.

The only real downside to Louden Up Now is the surprising amount of filler surrounding the meaner cuts.

The songs, then, have a warmth and immediacy, even when they turn to otherworldly topics.

Axis of Evol may not be a great album. It remains prey to some of McBean’s obnoxious corner-cutting. But it is his most resolute outing to date, certainly the first record he’s made that can be heard front-to-back, repeatedly, without losing most of its shine.

Nothin’ But Blood is a wild, discontinuous kind of ride, rattling from tradition to mayhem, from salvation to specific descriptions of sex acts, in a flow of songs that are no more like each other than if you’d pulled them from a pile of tapes. What unites them? A bristling electric guitar. A laceratingly unsentimental view of life. A coruscating energy that burns right through whatever you were expecting and reveals the hard true life-force at the bottom of Biram’s songs.

This is a feral, dangerous variety of punk rock, and if your favorite thing is Dry Cleaning mouthing witty asides in a BBC accent, you will probably not like it. But if you have any sympathy for the idea of burning it all down, here’s your jam.

For the most part, Write About Love is a disappointment. That's even truer, I suspect, because Belle and Sebastian aren't the only ones getting older.

It's easy to hear why Rubin swooped in to release this.

he's made one of his strongest, and certainly his oddest, albums.

Lesser artists might fall prey to pastiche, something Murcof artfully avoids. Instead he pulls off a remarkable feat--he makes the forgotten sound formidable, and the contemporaneous sound credible.

What makes KAPUTT so exciting is its elasticized unpredictability, the sense that these taut, punched-out firestorms could head in any direction. Anarchy has rarely been so tightly coordinated, nor order so slapped bloody and sore as on this debut.

Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle is like a Technicolor epic--brass accents, swelling strings and an odd, lingering hollowness at its core. Apocalypse, on the other hand, is more like an 80-minute Ranown picture--sinuous, slippery, less accessible, more satisfying.

It’s all very soft and comfortable, musically speaking, like an old couch you can’t get out of.

Gone is all the nervous tension that crisscrossed most of Finberg’s twitchy, dystopian vignettes, replaced instead with carefully plotted fuzz and a general hazy ambience that suggests calculated late-1960s ennui more than anything else. Overall, that’s a really good thing, especially when accompanied with the band’s seemingly newfound ability to ply their songs with unexpected twists and subtle new details.