The quality of the album isn't the issue, it's the qualities, the contradictions, the duplicity: it's what makes it as durable a listen as ever, but oddly empty when it comes to empathy.

The good news is that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is Spoon's best record in a while - if you liked "Gimme Fiction," you'll probably like this too.

In the studio, it’s a totally different beast--a little soggy with orchestral coloring and the 24-track fuckery often seems rote. Taking St. Vincent at face value, Marry Me can be an enervating listen because Clark is playing against her strengths.

Desire, is a mess: intriguing, puzzling, intriguing and ultimately frustrating as all hell.

They've put out six strong albums, consecutively. And without a pause, they've expanded their range without loosing sight of their limits.

There’s little to grasp onto with The Sun, as the record more often than not locks into a cautious mode of jamming on simple figures with little idea as to where to actually take them.

It’s successful on pretty much every count for two main reasons: 1. It’s well-written and blearily produced; and 2. It's self-aware and not neurotic.

Frantic guitars, hooks that replay in your head, skeptical lust - they're all here.

Tromatic Reflexxions is a great record for all of the reasons you might suspect – unless you don’t like MoM, or MES, or either.

Olson’s songs are as strong as ever.

It's a given that Excellent Italian Greyhound is a masterful offering of jagged minimalist rock from a seasoned and almost ridiculously venerable band, but its mastery is expressed in exclusively expected ways.

Their exploration of the genre's boundaries is so lithe and confident, and their studied aloofness here so convincing, that the familiarity comes across as authenticity and the restless impulse for expansion feels, at times, transcendent.

There’s nothing here that’ll shock experimental music acolytes, but it might be a bit much for those expecting only brawny post-rock. Like Goldilocks, I find it just right.

Voxtrot hew to the genre standards to consistently pleasing, if never thrilling, effect.

Plague Park’s nine tracks seem to be over before they reach their potential. The record gets better as it progresses, and successive listens reveal more interesting facets to the songwriting.

Thoroughly boring.

If TaDet Lugnt was pristine portraiture, carefully aligned and composed, then Tio Bitar is the off-the-cuff action shot – freely flowing and effortlessly jammed, its hair ruffled and with a face in need of a shave.

As rich as this stuff sounds (it’s hard to think of a working musician with classier production values) or how much she emotes on the mic, it’s calculated, cerebral and a little bit cold.

An album that is easy to listen to, but hard to grasp, Everybody wraps its complexities in bright soap bubble diaphanies.

The results, though rarely the caliber of the albums that bookended this era, are a consistent delight.

The spiraling, distortion-drenched guitar solos, the cracked and ruined moan of Mascis, the passive-aggressive romanticism, the relentless beat, the pedals, the sheer turbulent volume...it's just like Where You Been? all over again, with all the positives and negatives that the comparison implies.

Bill Callahan's latest solo effort is so laid back that it almost never gets going at all.

Ultimately, Cornelius has shown that he stands alone when it comes to future pop, and the results are an exceptional pleasure to hear.

It's music like this, intelligently composed and played, delivered with clarity and purposefully varied, that, finally, makes sense of the Fucking Champs.

Grinderman is as refreshing, bracing and absurd as the Birthday Party were when they blew onto the scene with their Old Testament zeal.

When the energy is present, 23 is a strong, pleasant album that connects a number of dots in a way that belongs almost exclusively to Blonde Redhead.

On There’s No Home, Hunter reveals a human (albeit a chemically depressed human) range of emotion, making her narrative more believable but much less captivating.

Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline is a return to the same blissful twilight as before, virtually unpaused.