It’d be hard to be disappointed with Convivial, however. It’s not necessarily an immediate listen; it took a few spins before the leaps Ripatti has made started seriously to sink in. But it’s the strongest thing he’s done, either as Luomo or under his Uusitalo or Vladislav Delay guises.

The difficult thing about Fun House, which by this point becomes apparent, is that musically it primes you for a very different experience than the one it delivers. The middle section’s prolonged, sedate atmosphere feels like a slog following the album’s energetic opening. Not that the material doesn’t reveal its own strengths over repeated listens when given the chance.

Eight is both more concise and more varied [than his last outing, Drawn and Quartered].

On Air Museum, they've turned more toward rhythm and pulse. So the melodies now are more like elegant patterns tattooing out micro-rhythms, and the ever-present warm timbral glow the two do so well has become a kind of undertow, a more urgent wave motion.

While Goldfrapp's new sound calls to mind the likes of the Human League, Donna Summer, and Soft Cell, it's more than the sum of those parts and benefits from much heavier beats than many of its apparent influences.

I suppose that this isn’t the album a lot of people were probably hoping for. But it’s never the album people were hoping for.

You could easily call this the sequel to Secret Wars - it has the same mix of baked acoustics, crushing organ and electric guitar lines, staccato vocals, and a meditative finale built around interlocked piano and drums.

It’s hard to criticize the Wooden Birds at any length, because their music is so harmless, so unashamedly pretty and honest.

At just four songs, each hovering around the 10-minute mark, Destination Tokyo feels more like a peek than a coming-out party.

Make no mistake, Glazin' is a simple pop-rock record. It's fuzzy, and it has a nice swirling psych touch, but it also displays a relaxed, confident craftsmanship - a touch of reverb here, a Martin Hannett nod there (check out the snare on "Crush") - that elevates it just so, pulling it out of the garage gutter and into the warmth of the sun. Or the Jacuzzi, as it were.

It’s easily Niblett’s most challenging album to date, and also her most accomplished.

Gordon’s vocals remain strong, but Play Me is a jittery record. The brevity of the songs captures the nervous mood, flitting from one worry to another, staying sharply focused for a couple minutes before veering into the next disaster.

This collection of songs straddles the line between cloying twee, exuberantly noisy indie-pop, and a K Records/Plan-It-X childish naïveté that has been all but absent from most of Doiron’s solo work.

This collection stands as an odd object--somewhere between a historical document and a fresh statement. Of its two components, Dethroned makes for the stronger half, and that's reassuring in its own way: in a work that weds older material with newer contributions, it's encouraging to find that the high points come from the latter.

Johnson only reveals so much. Fruit Bats excel in that sort of space. Johnson sounds less becoming when he lets too much irony in.

They pull off a wide sound for a duo, sometimes creating too much space. There's some room in the back seat for more low end. Then they'd really boogie.

Envelopes could so easily be a cheap Belle & Sebastian clone or a second-rate Magnetic Fields, but they pull off what nobody remembers to in this line of work anymore: personality.

Where on earlier albums, you could sense her thinking about what to do with the sounds she could make, now she seems more fully in control of her set of instruments. Process has slipped into the background, as she gains fluency in an invented language.

With 15 short tracks stacked tightly into 37 minutes, 2 doesn’t always cohere, but it’s certainly playful, freewheeling, and occasionally inspired.

Offers taught electro evidence that conviction and innovation can be found in the most minimal environment.

The album's moments of schticky nonsense ('How Do You Tell A Child Someone Has Died,' 'Transcendental Light') are tiresome, but they’re surrounded by such good rock songs that they wind up being equally rewarding.

Anjimile has come a long way since the last album, but you sense a journey still in progress, an evolution still finding its own best shape.

The main problem is that the songs are so quietly pretty that they slip by without friction, so that you're halfway through the album before you've registered a shift in mood or tempo.

Endless Arcade will do nothing for the people who wish they would let it rip again one more time—but it’s fine, well-crafted, intricately plotted mid-tempo rock. The edges, if they were ever there to begin with, have been sanded off, and it’s all rather noddingly pleasant.

Occulting Disk is not a record to approach lightly. Often it seems deliberately constructed to hold the listener at arm’s length daring one to submerge oneself in its frozen depths.

It’s a record that is fine in its own right but is all the better for what it portends in the future.

Pop's newest princess? Let's just call it a modest success and save our enthusiasm for when she's better figured out what she wants to be. On a Mission isn't convincing as an answer.

The result is a slinky, spiky, minimalist groove, clanking like some kind of extinct, rusty machinery. Lyrics are impressionistic, insinuated over heaving rhythms in not-quite-linear blurts of imagery, but they seem to consider the place of music in times of conflict.