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.

Even more densely angular and awkward than usual, It’ll Be Cool finds a band so deeply immersed in its own idiom that it’s hard to imagine an ear making any sense of this music, and yet, in spite of itself, the record works.

Vertigo may be the Necks’ best studio album yet, but they are still far from recreating the magic of their live shows.

It certainly makes for a more expansive work, but loses some of the immediacy that defined Stott’s music as recently as on Drop the Vowels.

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.

The Bears for Lunch is a far more solid affair than Let's Go Eat the Factory, balancing Pollard's Who-like aggression and Kinks-like whimsy in punchy, melodically memorable songs.

Even with bursts of ill-tuned twang, Prinz and Horn's harshness is centered and tame.

Sisterworld includes mixtape-friendly stunners and make-it-stop agony in its cryptic commentary on the passive aggression of California. For that, it will get partisans who vouch for it as the best thing they’ve done, while others will declare it unfit to suckle the teat of Blixa Bargeld. It’s worth arguing about.

A stronger verse/chorus foundation might make the songs more instantly accessible and easier to remember. But by making it easier to access, Bowerbirds might well be depriving listeners of the chance to make their own way, to wander in the desert a little even.

Sprawling but consistently clean and light, Among the Leaves is sprightlier than much of Kozelek's previous work.

Their take on classic guitar rock sometimes lapses into a mid-tempo morass but Bush Tetras have been a constant state of evolving for nearly four decades. Sley and Place are still compelling presences, and it’s good to have them back.

Remarkably, the substitution of instruments seems not to have affected Segall’s overall aesthetic much. If you didn’t know, you might not recognize exactly what’s different about First Taste, except that it feels a bit more overstuffed and baroque. Yet whether it’s due to the change in instrumentation or not, there are some diversions from the usual.

Molina succeeds in creating a sound refreshingly unfamiliar and exotic.

Ultimately, nobody's likely to claim The Secret Migration as a great album, I'm afraid. But it possesses energy and inspiration that its predecessor greatly lacked, and even the weaker songs here have something to recommend.

Even when you don't understand fully what's going on (is this song about L.A. or Baghdad?), the songs are catchy enough that you don't mind.

They don’t shy from their strengths, but they don’t struggle to feature them either, creating an album that never feels like a flippant one-off. Big Walnuts Yonder might be doing a whole bunch of things, but it’s largely an album about making those things cohere.

There is palpable excitement in both the songwriting and the performance. And this energy prevents what might have been some late-stage lulls, where the riffs seem retread but the songs still feel new.

As always, the playing is impeccable, although the cool professionalism evident on each song makes many of the album's tracks indistinguishable.

The Seduction of Kansas is, all things considered, a solid second album. It builds on the promise of Nothing Feels Natural, and while it occasionally fumbles its own goals, it’s hard to fault Priests for aiming high. One can only hope that the radical ambition and sense of purpose on display here carries them far into the future.

Out My Window, Koushik searches for--and at times strikes--the fine balance between structure and flexibility, rigidity and looseness, body and soul.

To Willie seems more like a personal effort than a proper follow-up to "Pride," and it’s not as inventive as that album. It works well as a covers collection.

Now comes the Orchestre's first album in 20 years, Cotonou Club, and it has some of the bet-hedging one tends to see when musicians don't trust what they've got--re-recordings of old material and guest stars.

Though Good Sad Happy Bad do outstay their welcome across these 40 minutes, there’s plenty here to enjoy if you like sing-song sweetness that’s bent lysergic and girded with a sneering, switchblade edge.

Most of what’s here isn’t memorable, but there is a steady flow of moments so ersatz that it is oddly listenable.

In Heaven is a significant advance for Twin Sister, both in the way that it smoothes over and clarifies its original aesthetic and in the way it explores a handful of new avenues.

It’s an eminently listenable album, but there’s no need for unchecked evangelism. Just enjoy the damn thing.

A solid 64 minutes of cavernous drumming, propulsive, grating guitars and cotton-mouthed moans.