With Carl Craig producing, Jaumet offers a fittingly stripped-down suite of tense, stomach-churning tracks. Dappled with oily synth slicks, frittered timbres and blacklight radiance, it can be a heavy listen.

It is awfully difficult to bring audiences out of themselves without stacks of speakers, massed bodies and the possibility of timing things just right, all of which only the right context can provide.

Aside from the average genre stabs, What Will We Be is a surprisingly sullen and ponderous album. Absent is Banhart’s mania, the zaniness that he always seemed barely able to contain.

Having established the hypnotic power of loud, dense guitar marches long ago, Pelican sound free enough at last to explore melodic intricacy and inventive theme-and-variation play without hewing to the old layer of protective gloom.

Dip into Ay Ay Ay at leisure and it’s an arresting thing, each song humid with spittle, slick with tongue spit, bumptious and sashaying around the mouth. But when locked together, it’s too homogenous.

In combining antiquated influences with their own postmodern sensibilities, Broadcast and the Focus Group have together created an evocative and imaginative work that is in many ways more challenging and rewarding than the former’s own proper albums.

Kids Aflame is the good stuff, as loosely played as it is meticulously plotted.

The music is vastly entertaining, devilish, solder trickles of white-hot intensity running through cracks in its nailed-down facade.

The main problem with Tarot Sport is that it sometimes seems to be trying too hard, building drama into repetitive riffs by sheer force, urging greater and greater effort on listeners who are already a bit out of breath.

Logos opens a portal through which its artist tells us something about who he is, and though this is not everything, it is enough.

Declaration of Dependence is thus a welcome return from a long-absent band, and a fine easy-listening album, but one that ultimately feels emptier than its predecessors.

The BQE is best listened to in complete ignorance of the track titles, packaging, or even professed subject matter. The music speaks best when it speaks for itself.

As Malkmus and Kannberg each find out what kind of musician each one is, the end result is less interesting than when they were in the process of discovering that and were having fun trying out different ideas and really discovering new things together.

It seems borne more out of logical considerations than organic ones. It doesn’t mean the music is necessarily bad, but rather that it’s animated more out of a lifelessness than anything else. It’s undead music.

By letting their music do all the talking, Russian Circles have told the story of their personal growth entirely in song, and it’s a growth that involves all the melodic intricacy and inventive theme-and-variation play that their contemporaries have had much greater difficulty overcoming.

Doseone’s rapping is thicketed to the point of impenetrability; whatever he wishes to convey gets lost in his internal rhymes.

The ride is fun enough, better than average for the masses, but for this band it’s an off-day: once it’s over, you don’t even think to wonder why it was fun.

Under Stellar Stream does one thing exceptionally beautifully, with great consistency and intelligence (but not intellectualism), rolling out an unending thread of song.

The album clearly fails to find the equilibrium or comfortable midway point between Espers’s debut and II that it seems to be seeking, nor does it make a strong case that such equilibrium is even desirable. At best, it’s a strong set of tracks that ultimately lack the cumulative force of those of the band’s previous two full-lengths.

By repurposing this music with a child’s lack of regard for history, they make it fresh.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an overarching concept. It doesn’t matter one way or another. It’s a gallop from start to finish. Blue Record is going to be hard to top.

Their various styles are integrated and naturally came out of the way the Get Down Stay Down coalesced.

The first couple times through Rejoicer, you might easily dismiss it as self-indulgent, unconstructed indie pop, lead by a pitch-uncertain singer with no great gift for catchy tunes. But after a half dozen listens, the album opens up, resolving its contradictions and bringing its juxtapositions into sharper focus.

There is the danger that The Voidist comes off as a collection of songs, not an album. But for the most part they’re really good songs, and sometimes that’s more than enough.

The weak spot, as ever, are lyrics that clasp to cliches without transforming them. So we get a song about a certain four-letter-word, and lines about rain or taking chances. On the other hand, the punchline of 'Men in Love' is pretty great, and Beth’s belting usually subsumes the stock imagery.

It's a gorgeous and dreamy feeling, and one that's easy to spend a lot of time in.

It's cool that he's trying to change things up, but there's no substitute for a strong result.

Enemy takes the game Built to Spill has been playing for a while now and hits the right emotions in the right way.