Nightshade's 10 songs unpack desire and affection and come up with the notion that disappointment is every bit worth savoring as joy because a romantic betrayal might acquaint you with real (not necessarily romantic) love. So while this record sounds pensive and lingers on experiences of loss, it's not depressing.

That contradiction between the wistful and the prickly was one of the really fascinating elements of Green Lanes, and it’s gone now, but weirdly Dusk is none the less for lacking it. In fact, this third outing outdoes the second in an unambiguously soft indie rock embrace.

The music is progressive as hell, but this feels less and less like the right thing to be concerned with.

While it wouldn't be fair to hold Obscurities up to Merritt's 1990s albums with The Magnetic Fields and others, the material here certainly makes a strong claim for achieving next-best-thing status, providing a welcome nostalgic reminder of the many pleasures offered by what has already more or less become a nostalgia act.

Tempting as it is to try, given the linear nature of both the album’s first half and the journeys it references, Raft resists being poured into any one narrative container.

A visceral and intriguing record, and one that doesn’t always gel, but it at least stands by it’s own convictions.

Islet have lovingly crafted their own kaleidoscopic little world. It’s easy to step inside and get lost there for a while among the colorful flora and fauna.

An album full of cover versions is not really essential listening, although there are a few songs here reminiscent of the better covers from past Yo La Tengo albums.

As usual, band members pile multiple textures onto one another in baroque, overpopulated juxtapositions.

The Sound The Speed The Light is as good as "Obliterati."

As one comes to appreciate them through repeated listens, it becomes clear that what initially sounds like a letdown is, from another vantage point, an impressive achievement.

Each taken singly can easily be appreciated, as they’re all gorgeous. But Mellow Waves as a whole is ultimately difficult to recall. Cornelius has certainly achieved the waves he was after, but the mellow winds up needing something more.

Jurado’s ambition seems to have outpaced his execution this time out.

Most of Tom Vek’s influences are at least fifteen years old and easily triangulated. But he’s unencumbered by nostalgia. We Have Sound is so difficult to isolate from Vek’s ass-backwards charisma, I wonder if the man might be a visionary.

Surrounded as a minor spit-polish improvement on Our Blood is sure to please Buckner’s cultish devotees.

These 40 minutes for maybe the most well-rounded Los Campesinos! record yet.

It's as wild and heterogeneous as the rest of the band's work, and manages to bring all the elements at play in their music into the tightest, most carefully balanced equilibrium they've achieved yet.

It's the kind of recording many people can enjoy and want to have in their collection. You can throw it on in most any circumstance. It has the sensuality to seduce, the edge to agitate and the style to inspire.

The guitar throughout the album has an unusual approach which certainly helps PGMG stand out from the crowd.

Over its 23 songs, Iron & Wine’s sound changes, from scratchy sparseness to well-appointed sparseness and through to the jittery clamor that marked The Shepherd’s Dog, but the underlying world doesn’t.

This isn’t Black Eyes, or Public Image Ltd., or even the Mi Ami you knew, and it sure as hell ain’t Bob Marley. This is just a band at their very best pointing a fresh way forward for anyone lucky enough to listen closely.

Mountaintops certainly isn't radically different from Mates of States' other albums, but when the band has this kind of rapport, there's no need to deviate.

True with its fey, reverb-soaked vocals, its synths and the jangle that recall the late 1980s/early 1990s when college rock started to segue into indie rock, is fun and catchy and worthy of an audience.

Skullways settled into a sound that's unstuck in time, and works for both the brain and behind.

If the first half of Chiaroscuro is tragedy you can vogue to, then the ending is just tragedy--pure, simple and affecting.

Dereconstructed poses a challenge and stands defiant, and it works surprisingly well as the unexpected convergence of a number of long-running cultural traditions.

This is a four-way conversation rather than a competition for attention and the musicians display a depth of mutual understanding that belies the fact that they are playing together for the first time. Urselli’s production gives each instrument room to breathe and the tracks swell and recede at a relaxed pace as layers of guitar, synth and sound effects form palimpsests of sound.

If you like jagged, body-moving beats and clever kids slinging dissatisfaction, try Silverbacks.