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.

This is not a bad album, and if it weren't carrying the Gang of Four name, you might find it casually enjoyable.

The charm of these songs won't last forever. They'll have their season in your heart or car stereo, their refrains will seep gently into your vocabulary, and at some point you'll stop needing them, but it's welcome company while it lasts.

I'm more than happy to take this album as it is, blemishes and all.

This collection stands as an odd object--somewhere between a historical document and a fresh statement.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.

The sound is physically propulsive, enveloping and mildly psychoactive. The beat pounds hard on the most lizardly parts of the brain, bringing a catharsis, a sheer rush of physicality.

Back to Reality's themes are pretty simple: having fun, getting laid and falling in love, all on the dance floor. It has just the right mix of crassness and manners, in a proportion that seems more than a bit quaint by today's standards.

On Civilian, the band shows that it can be serious without being overbearing, evocative without being histrionic, and accessible without being derivative.

Sure, you can hear that they're awed and distressed about the state of things, but the emotion in Friel and Warshaw's singing seems undercut by the lyrics.

Fading Parade brings back the guitars, but continues the slide toward formlessness, with songs that are always pleasant but no longer very compelling.

It's bold without making a big stink about it. It's personal without being solipsistic. It's a musical proof of Umberto Eco's thesis.

As a statement of intent from that band, Pyramid is promising in a shaky kind of way: it's clear that there's still creative magic to go around, but also that the old chemistry is going to be a tough one to reorient.

The Psychic Paramount's music lacks words, but not a voice. These songs have a lot to say, and I'll be surprised if I hear a rock album this year that packs as strong a punch as II.

Echoes of Faust's enduring impact leap to the forefront constantly, but by the end of Something Dirty, it is clear that the anxiety of influence remains on the present generation, not vice versa.

The result is deep, it's broadly imaginative, it's tightly focused, and it's utterly essential.

The nuanced defeatism on Nothing Fits separates these brash, loud punk anti-anthems from the standard hardcore fare. The most ephemeral evidence of this is also the most effective: instead of battering you into submission with unadulterated force, songs are separated with just enough silence to make you uncomfortable, impatient. The subtle natures of hell are often the worst.

As these descriptions should suggest, none of the songs on No Witch grabs you on its own as a standout piece of songwriting. It's less that the instrumentation and tones are structural veneers concealing merely passable songs and more that the record is just one extended riff on a host of roots music styles.

The Babies' debut, released on the long-running Shrimper label, speaks well of collaboration. The album succeeds by touching on the hallmarks of both bands' sounds, while standing strong on its own thanks to some unexpected touches of true rock 'n' roll grit.

The People's Key, more or less Oberst's 10th album as Bright Eyes, finds him aiming for the prophetic over the personal, embracing the luxuries of the studio instead of hunkering down in the bedroom.

I'm not particularly enthralled by that idea; rock minimalism often is rather aesthetically empty. While faulting the band for taking that route doesn't feel right, it does make the album a rather uneven, if still interesting, affair.

His inventive and affective pairing of resonating melodies and noise is impossible to deconstruct--that is to say, narrow down to a specified meaning or reason behind each piece. We, the listener, get to apply each of Hecker's abstractions to whichever feeling we choose. That's definitely an ocean worth diving into.

Anika was apparently recorded in a short time, and it's hard not to wish it felt at once more urgent and more cohesive.

Luckily, the songwriting on Minks' debut hits far more frequently than it misses. It's a solid establishment of a noteworthy sound--the proverbial "encouraging first album."

With Asleep On the Floodplain, Chasny returns not just to his personal roots, but also to the roots of popular music itself.

The Gathering is weighted in every way, heavy with distortion-crusted guitars, sluggish tempos and an earnest, perhaps even over-earnest, search for meaning.

If you come to this record for the title, expecting rueful literacy and songwriterly self-deprecation, you might be pleasantly surprised by how hard it rocks and what an undemanding good time it can be.

Playing any of these three records on home speakers while choring through the day, their subtle modulations will melt away, their wispy chimeras passing unnoticed. An immersion through headphones, or at pane-rattling volumes, provides the magnification that these cataclysmic environments call for.

You may stumble upon an experiment or a minute-long fragment here and there, but the deck is stacked with memorable songcraft and an attitude that understands silliness without succumbing to sketch-comic dead ends.