Someday the Smithsonian will file this sprawling musical celebration into their collection between Van Dyke Parks’ Discover America and Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers -- joyous, generous Americana filtered through a singular sensibility.

The band falls apart attempting to sound like the whole of the late ’60s and the start of the early ’70s all at once, like listening to The Notorious Byrd Brothers, American Beauty, Moby Grape’s self-titled, the Hollies’ Stop! Stop! Stop! , and a Sloan record played simultaneously; a tepid mash of classic styles all fine on their own that cancel each other out when played together.

A silky, bright, singing-in-the-shower masterstroke of joy and elation.

Pajo employs quiet space beautifully here, amplifying his hushed couplets and fret noises by surrounding them with nothing but a vague tape hiss.

As inconsistent as it is, Every Kind of Light, the first full-band Posies record of the century, curbs the pair’s excesses enough to reward repeat plays.

In theory, there may be nothing wrong with a desire for mainstream acceptance, but Cantrell’s music suffers for it.

While there’s no disputing the attractiveness of its well-polished recording... it’s patchy and... in places, disturbingly adult-contemporary.

Nosdam is most similar to the New Jersey trio Dälek, although Nosdam's beats tend to be a bit bulkier and he seems to approach his music with a psychedelic sense of wonder rather than with Dälek's anger.

Five years is a long time to make fans wait, but the quality of the material and willingness to tinker with their fairly rigid pop formula has resulted in another memorable, extremely listenable collection of songs.

The music here feels not so much modern as refurbished.

Five years on, We Are Monster finds Raijko Muller so confident and articulate that Rest comes off in comparison like a set of hastily scrawled clutch notes.

You’re going to want to hear this one.

Even if it is hard at certain points to cut through the thick fog of psych drum riffs, Everything Ecstatic leaves ears ringing like a loud summer afternoon in the city – sun-drenched cacophony that doesn’t quite know where it’s going just yet.

A musical tour-de-force, and probably Sleater-Kinney’s best album to date.... If it lacks the immediate appeal and accessibility of One Beat or All Hands on the Bad One, it feels more mature and meaningful than either.

Malkmus has the same fractured pop sensibility, but his music is more expansive than it’s been before.

Ultimately, nobody's likely to claim The Secret Migration as a great album, I'm afraid. But it possesses energy and inspiration that its predecessor greatly lacked, and even the weaker songs here have something to recommend.

For the most part, it sounds like giddy, faux-innocent psychedelia filtered through a kaleidoscope, moody but never mopey.

Axes works as an hour-long piece of tension, dread, and release, with little room for interpretation, demanding to be listened to as a whole.

It’s easily Niblett’s most challenging album to date, and also her most accomplished.

Two compact chunks that could have made a gooier whole, one can certainly consider the potential excellence of “Seadrum”’s sprawling galaxy-march against some “House of Sun” morphed licks.

This is an awkward pairing -- there are a number of nice moments, but many haven't been fully developed, and seams divide them.

Snaith rips the rarefied sounds of modern pop from their established context and forms nonlinear compositions constantly in flux.

Oceans Apart is the album that fans have been waiting for, the one that brings back the flawless production of their early releases and the cynical/idealistic tradeoff in Forster and McLennan’s songwriting.

Oneida have never sounded more ambitious, yet they’ve kept their proggy impulses on a short leash; the flourishes serve the music, not vice versa.

They’ve attempted to tighten up where their debut hung slack – shorter, less songs, less room to drag. Yet dragging is all that Celebration Castle does, falling deeper into the garage-meets-new wave dichotomy that looks good on paper but would require considerably more talent to execute.

The most astounding thing about Lord Quas is not Madlib going against the grain, but that it’s basically The Unseen 2005, completely devoid of hits, and still ultimately compelling.

Clearly, John Darnielle has a life story that’s inspiring as more than just the tale of an unconventional indie rock hero. Now that he’s making his best music, I think we can all be glad that he’s finally telling it.

Smith’s tracks are both banging and self-effacing, yet the two opposite impulses never seem fully at odds with each other.