On The Odd Couple, Gnarls Barkley gets halfway to the heights of St. Elsewhere and seems content to stay there.

Slight doubts about whether or not Zooey Deschanel is the best person to be singing these songs aside, Volume One is pretty much spot-on.

The lyrical approach has so far kept me from really warming to it, but the words are ugly and weird in an interesting way, which makes me think that maybe eventually a light will come on and it will become one of my favorites.

His Eleventh Hour streams seem to glorify a pre-evolved hip hop.

The Unfairground features ten strong songs without filler or flab. All have melodies that rapidly lodge in the brain, the kind that the paperboy could whistle on his round.

Bozulich stumbles through a sagging mansion of sound like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, which is to say, arch, elegant and utterly used up. But there is power in the decrepitude.

Like Stephin Merritt, his East Coast cognate, Malkmus’ songwriting chops and eye for upper-middle-class detail are too-available excuses for music that is often unremarkable.

It’s in those moments [of appealing moment of vulnerability] as well as in the swarming chorus of 'God’s Children' that the duo hit their true heights, and those same qualities are the ones most likely to mark this album as an enduring piece of work from two icons of a class that has long since graduated.

Quaristice seems most comfortable amidst the modern scrum, a soundtrack for mundane urban maneuvers.

It's easy to hear why Rubin swooped in to release this.

Picture is an album’s worth of universal feelings spoiled by his compulsion to present them as sordid or literary, to make them clever or allusive or needlessly alliterative

There's enough to enjoy here in the murky atmospherics and occasional surges of melody, but Shots can’t be the Ladyhawk album fans were hoping for.

Devotion goes down a little easier is both its strength and a feature that proves a bit disappointing in the end.

As it stands, it's a really good, seriously flawed album, with some great songs and some big misses, a sort of living, breathing justification for your CD player's skip button.

Lust Lust Lust is the best The Raveonettes have ever been.

The new record is less political than its predecessor, but seems to share the same, more expansive perspective.

As interesting as Heretic Pride already is, it misses an opportunity to pick one direction or the other.

Vernon’s voice is the showpiece here––a fragile, technically imperfect falsetto, he multi-tracks it into a shimmering, heat-giving force on each of the record’s nine songs.

He easily sidesteps the drama that dogged he and his band throughout 2007 (and ultimately led to their declaration of hiatus towards the end of the year), turning Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel into a beautifully melancholic slice of shimmering, ambient pop.

The Big Sleep have also gotten better by huge leaps with each outing, delivering on the promise of their earlier songs without maturing too ambitiously.

Though it may hardly win over detractors, there's not much of Made in the Dark that can be lambasted as puckish or precious.

District Line delivers the latest dissertation in cross-pollination and like past projects it’s a bit of a Frankenstein affair.

'Till Kingdom Come' is really the only song that stands apart from the pack, thanks to its strident guitar leads and orchestral underpinnings. The rest of the tracks, while persuasively put, come and go with an effect that’s distantly brooding at best.

Circular Sounds takes the craft aspect to a higher level. Stoltz’s early records were scrappy, guitar-centric home recordings, and his previous LP, Below the Branches, was a piano-dominated, primary colors affair, but this one is a study in how to blend signifiers and sonorities so that they enhance each other.

It's a party, not a revival meeting, This Gift, but a good one.

TMV’s latest major-label misfire is called The Bedlam in Goliath

Vampire Weekend is an exemplar of contemporary establishment indie rock, sandblasted clean but striking a dirty pose nonetheless.

The songs hover around the four-minute mark, and are economical in their implementation, with an overall sheen that does occasionally come close to overdoing it.