Bird Songs is unpretentious and as good a "mainstream" jazz record as you're likely to hear these days.

It is, in short, the sound of a group confidently, and unassumingly, re-defining its own universe.

There are a lot of good songs on here, to the point where the band's consistency can border on monotony.

So it continues with Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, an album with no missteps...because every trick that Mogwai has used in the past is present in almost comically balanced fashion.

While Dulli has mined the same vein of pop music for almost 25 years, he has nonetheless accomplished an awful lot with it.

If she wanted to move or enlighten, Let England Shake falls short.

The world is crawling with Fahey-loving acoustic guitar players these days--in large part thanks Tompkins Square--but ones as good as William Tyler are rare.

The end result is the 11 songs on Unlearn, which I'll save you the frustration of calling "eclectic" and opt for the even more euphemistic "well-informed."

It isn't the transcendental work of which they're capable, but nonetheless taps into a thriving, sometimes exhilarating strain of striated rock music.

Much of what lends the album distinction is the tension created between the band's bold, confident projections and the more delicate core at their center. At times, that tension can be disorienting.

Now, they're just going through the motions.

While Carlson and company continue to explore new influences (much has been made over the band's recent declaration of affection for Pentangle and Fairport Convention), Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 sounds to me like a different manifestation of the same sound they've been exploring for some time now.

A dozen listens later, I'm still not sure if there's a beautiful core here that's half-obscured by the wrapping or whether it's the wrapping itself that's beautiful. Either way, it's a remarkable finish to a very promising album.

This is clearly a departure point, unexpected but more than welcome.

Bardo Pond's self-titled is a massive, monumental piece of work, proving once again that this long-running outfit can still crank the heavy, mind-numbing psych that it's always been known for.

At its best, Surf City's debut is catchy in both melodies and enthusiasm. And while the latter occasionally prevents this album from achieving resonant emotional depths, "Icy Lakes" suggests that they are very capable of achieving those if they so choose.

Truth first: James Blake is not a great record. It is a good record, and maybe even a slightly provocative one, in that an album this spare, minimal, and myopic shouldn't, by rights, be stirring the pot so much.

Every song comes from the same mold that they've been working with from the beginning. And as the critical mass of messy hits continues to pile up, there are new revelations that rise to the surface, as well.

Dye It Blonde ends up capturing the post-Beatles hole in the most authentic way possible.

Techno is, by its nature, hauntingly cold. By pumping some blood to its extremities, the Dirtbombs craft a fresh strain of disco soul.

We get a brief chance to eavesdrop on a band of unique genius at its most raw, its most prankish and its most fun. It almost makes up for the chills, the sweat and the free cans of watery domestic.

The Jackson-White reboot casts the song as a swampy, country vamp, and while it isn't a horrible idea in theory, it does feel contrived and a bit of an unnecessary pander. Even with that misstep in mind, though, it's pretty tough not to root for Wanda Jackson and The Party Ain't Over.

Credit to Beam, of course, for challenging himself rather than continuing to remake The Creek Drank the Cradle over and over again, but Kiss Each Other Clean is unlikely to count among his best work.

It feels like Bejar's comfortable with himself – relaxed even – and that feeling saturates the entire album. It's a confidence that makes Kaputt the best Destroyer album in ages.

Alas, the manic pace of the total structural collage makes it awfully hard to settle in as a listener. Deerhoof vs. Evil has a Guernica quality, in which pleasure and humanity are sublimated to the grotesque, which in turn is justified by the supposed inevitability of rational progress.

The greatest appeal of this record is how little acting takes place, how little consideration has been given to "fully realizing the sound." Because when it comes time to take it or leave it, I'll take the whole thing without any regrets.

The 11 songs here are not only 90-percent hit single material; they work together in concert as an album (as well as in pairs and trios).

Without doing anything revolutionary--and it doesn't--Cape Dory comes to mirror the leisurely pace of a breezy day at sea, remembered after the fact: the subtle variations, the comforting predictability, the passages of time by turns boring and serenely sweet.