Leo and company go over a lot of territory on this release, but it is not bothersome or a stretch; the band pulls off all of these styles very well.

The band’s ability to sound unforced, unpretentious, unusual, and most importantly, real, is a breath of fresh air.

Like all free jazz albums, The Exchange Session, Vol. 1 should be approached with caution. It’s a great night-driving companion and opens up to the patient listener willing to give it more than one chance.

Alpine Static, while inherently visceral, is also emotionally gripping.

While there's no immediate pop hit present a la "Feel Good Inc" or "Clint Eastwood" to get sucked into straight off, Albarn's ability to juggle his rotating ensemble cast and still spin a cohesive yarn for all of sixteen tracks remains something to behold.

With his soundbombing past set aside for the moment, DJ/Rupture proves he's just as capable of providing a different kind of head trip, one that sufficiently aids the comedown from whatever your nocturnal activity.

Omnibus offers a lot of quality songs from a quality songwriter.

Perfect it may not be, but as perfect as possible it might, and Let's Stay Friends certainly has more than enough fervor to make it one of the more refreshing punk purist releases since Fugazi laid down a baker's dozen of songs in the last century.

Despite it’s pitfalls, Mo' Mega has great entertainment value.

The best part is that nothing feels forced or overtly formulated; every bout of vocal scatting, jazzy electric guitar coloring and organ chord arrangement seems to be the product of gradual mixing sessions.

Rife with contrast and irony, Infiniheart plays like a series of short stories or films, somehow interwoven to a common conclusion.

A mostly brilliant, though occasionally lackluster, album.

A mixed bag of bouncy, speed-fueled pop songs and spacey neo-psychedelia flooded with waves of synthesizer.

The album is at many times more open and engaging than some of those earlier gems and has a lighthearted nature that retains the balance of sating old fans and sparking new ones.

14 songs focused intently on melody and chord progressions, not licks or repetitive riffs or tricky drumbeats.

Blake Sennett’s second album with The Elected is more magical and limitless than his first and reminds us why we love his projects in the first place.

These songs are gorgeous and the band knows how to milk the beauty for all it's worth.

Present are the hints of early Guided by Voices, spotty Who outtakes and country-tinged acoustics that make East River Pipe so beloved, but here these influences tread, weighted, underwater.

The end result is a rewarding record fraught with introspection and melancholy but also one that perhaps signifies that Moby's shaken off his early 90's sentimentality...for now.

The Past Presents the Future strongly matches the high bar he has set with his past few albums.

There is nothing here that pushes past what we expect from New Order in their current incarnation, but it is facile, shiny, bright and well-behaved around strangers.

Through all the fascinating genre shell games, the constant on Trying To Never Catch Up is a smart pop sensibility that rarely expels an unoriginal thought.

A dark carnival for pale shoegazers who burn up when the sun hits their papery skin, Surgery is acid rock cloaked in leather jackets and chains.

It's only now though that Patton's fully manifested his passion project minus the avant-garde overlay--and ironically scoring an unheard-of #2 debut on the Billboard classical chart in the process, possibly the strangest highlight yet of a strange talent's career.

While Johansson's debut is not as pleasant as Zooey Deschanel's work with M.Ward, Anywhere I Lay My Head will surely surprise Johansson's doubters; having grown to appreciate Scarlett Johansson for being more than a pretty face and mediocre actor, I can speak from experience.

The Mountain Goats find a way to bounce back from the psychiatrist-worthy lyrics with strong, vibrant but subtly crafted compositions.

One coup this unexpectedly friendly record makes me miss is when my favorite records used to have a string of highlights as moments rather than memorable refrains.

While there's merit to the charges that songs suffer from sameness and that musicianship is a secondary facet of the band, the Girls' detractors don't consider tradition; walking in the footprints of Bikini Kill, Ramones, and other like predecessors who faced similar criticisms, their flaws serve to be their most interesting, differentiating features.

Favourite Worst Nightmare finds the band getting louder, more aggressive, and, as a consequence, losing some of their youthful charm.

So when Era Vulgaris comes as a bit of a disappointment, well, that's all relative, since it still rocks mightily.

Smalldone's solemn and controlled croon, though subtly emotive, amounts to dismal verbosity. The Red River is a serious, introspective project that, like the narrating wanderer, shows no signs of its roots.

Easy to hate and easy to love.

Although it teases at the contrary for its first half, the idea that we really have no idea quite what to expect from the future of Bon Iver is the greatest gift this four-song breath gives us.

It's every bit as enjoyable as the last two. Which isn't to say it's a masterpiece, just that the abrupt backlash is proportionate to the fawning affection she received on Kala and Arular.

8 Diagrams is intricate, inoffensive, interesting.

Despite the similitude of both discs, their respective modesty and muscularity present variety without overreaching. To put it into trite punny terms, Well has some depth.

Depending on how interested you still are by the record's third act, this can be either good or bad. It depends on your taste for disorientation.

With plenty of talent, the Raconteurs have a unique sound; they only need to spend more time trimming it down.

There is experimentation for the sake of experimentation and experimentation for sake of enjoyment. Money, unfortunately, is mostly the former.

Real Close Ones will likely leave listeners dumbfounded, but the album should nonetheless be lauded for its break from convention.

Despite its lack of youthful anarchy, The Hawk Is Howling is an impressive record. Mogwai are among the world's most gifted musical collectives; perhaps they have just been making music too long to want or need to reinvent the game again.

Unfortunately, the opener is really the musical peak of this self-titled disc and as the album slowly slumps toward its egotistically long final track, listeners will probably have already tuned-out.

Kill Them With Kindness works on some levels, but overall it lacks the gravitas of other contemporary pop specialists like... Stars.

This is the kind of headphone or background music that won’t have you looking to change discs, but won’t distract you from whatever else you’re doing, either.

Despite their tendency to wade dangrously close to parody, the Black Heart Procession's continuing themes of despair, gloom and doom are still what make them so appealing as they continue to defy their sunny upbringing.

As much as I enjoy Stage Names, it will never be as highly regarded as the comparitavely masterpiece Black Sheep Boy, as the songs lack the depth and magnitude needed to influence a much more musically inclined indie fan base.

Overall, A Hundred Miles Off is less intense than one may expect; there is no "The Rat" on this record.

Autumn Of The Seraphs is more of the same I have come to expect from Pinback--lovely harmonies and catchy hooks, all with an underlying emotional depth.

It's not the easiest listening by any means, but how fitting that on an album that pays tribute to Darwin, The Knife unveils their most significant evolution yet.

What it lacks in standouts it makes up for in atmosphere and starkness.

Mr. Beast is by far Mogwai’s most accessible album to date, teetering between epic hard rock and a melodic, driven vocal delivery.

Overall, the diversity of the production overcomes the same-ness of the verses to make Feedback worth a listen.

Their singles have always been enjoyable, and the increasing diversity and confidence exhibited on Day & Age could hint that it might not be so far fetched to expect great albums from the Killers in the future.

While some tracks are absolutely reminiscent of these lads’ former bands... Maritime comes off most like Tahiti 80 or the Postal Service, crafting lofty, affable pop concerned with pristine beauty.

At once introspective and indisputably catchy, their complex dynamic and easy likeability should certainly satiate the radio gods.

There isn’t much that Lady Sovereign did prior to Public Warning to gain the amount of respect that she attempts to command and, to some extent, she still doesn’t make it all up here. But at least this is a good start to showcase her abilities.

Nothing on Curtis is great, but everything is listenable or better.

Travellers appears top-heavy, with a mid-section whose only correlation to time travel is that its melodies could've felt predictable in the 1890s, with the limitations of straight 4/4 beginning to wear. But listeners are rewarded for not giving up after that stretch.

We’re left with a brilliant, often mesmerizing but all-too-sketchy defeatist manifesto on the surface, which, with further musical fleshing-out (Verve guitarist Simon Tong is woefully underused), might have been worth serious investigation.

Its sagging middle aside, Valende may be one of the stronger psychedelic pop releases to come my way in the last couple of years.

The Cave Singers' methods are clearer and less complicated than say, Joanna Newsom or Sufjan Stevens.

For such a tortured swarm of piercing feedback-drenched feedback and electronically-manipulated electronic manipulations, this record feels surprisingly coherent, almost to the point that it’s comforting.

Love Songs for Patriots sounds just as one would expect an aged AMC to sound: with mature, yet loose arrangements with an edge but without balls back up Eitzel’s gloomy, brooding voice, taking wry bitterness to familiar but novel highs and lows.

Supreme Balloon's vintage synthesizers and basic drumbeats make for the least sonically varied of Matmos' recent albums.

Timeless is a step up for will.i.am and a step down for Sergio Mendes, somewhere between decency and exceptionality.

It goes without saying that The New Year is an album that will draw comparisons to the Kidane brothers' previous group. The good news is that in the face of such unavoidable observations, the album easily stands up on its own.

2009's Entertainment finds the duo reverting somewhat to their more flamboyant origins while still trying to stay current. It's a divergent approach that fortunately works more for the record than against it.

Sons and Daughters stand apart from their poppier counterparts with their less-produced sound and their sturdy foundation of nothing more than a chugging rhythm section, intense vocals and that awesome mandolin.

Whereas previous efforts spawned a shrouded sadness that sought engagement by keeping a distance, this work squares its shoulders at once, fervent in its desire to have its audience lend an ear for at least a moment.

Ultimately there's so many ideas vying for attention on this album that there is not enough room for its songs to breathe. And the discordant styles, some of them on their own of much merit, never truly mesh together.

Either you’ll go nuts for this or run screaming from it.

The Age of the Understatement is weirdly epic (Nick Cave), full of harmony (Mamas and the Papas), a little charming (Robbie Williams) and dead fucking sexy (any James Bond but Timothy Dalton).

Cinematic and purposefully clumsy, coy and cutesy and sprawling in intermittence, this is music to prance to.

Mixtapes can be sloppy and scattered, but every Alchemist beat on Return of the Mac works - so well, in fact, that with a little more effort, this could have been an actual album worthy of heavy promotion and radio edits.

It sounds more like half an album than an EP. It also sounds more like half-an-album than half-assed.

Laura Burhenn just smolders over a piano-heavy groove. It really is as close to Dusty as they get, but what makes this record special is the way that even when the lyrics clunk up some of the smooth blue-eyed soul (opener and sort-of title track "What We Gained in the Fire" comes to mind), the production is so plainly gorgeous that it really feels like nitpicking (even if it really isn't).

The next album from the Most Serene Republic will be the real deal breaker, though; they'll have to define their role within Arts & Crafts either by diverging from the Broken Social Scene sound, or by mimicking it even more.

There is sort of a standard formula from song to song within this album.... They need to vary it up just a touch.

Where Songs for the Deaf found the perfect middle ground between aggressive rocking licks and experimental flourishes, Lullabies falls to the experimental side.

Other People’s Lives is a record to get lost in, especially for those who can close their eyes and trust a sly old cuss to bring them back.

The band’s performance overall is agonizingly perfect and deserving of much praise.

Imperfect as it is, you still have to admire Free To Stay as a gleeful paean to the joy and freedom of being young and a happy.

This is a band that has a sterile aesthetic but is somehow able to create plenty of emotion and energy.

This is, by no means, Mogwai’s finest hour, but Government Commissions deserves praise for its proof positive of the consistent quality of the band.

I can't say with conviction that Elephant Shell will stand the test of time--it could be forgotten within a year--but such is the peril of retreading well-worn musical ground. The album should, however, stay fresh for the summer.

Here Come the Tears fits nicely in Anderson and Butler's catalogs and certainly beats anything they've done in the last five years, but it makes matters clear that all they'll ever do is release clones of what they once were.

When not so buried in dank sonics, Farrar's familiar songwriting drawl feels more crisp and lively; being able to hear the record's engaging pop hooks is a revelation. On the other hand, this newfound production clarity reveals that Farrar might be running out of ideas.

Yellow House is a keeper.

You Could Have It So Much Better might as well be titled You Could Have It Just As Good A Year Later, since Franz Ferdinand seem to belong to the school of "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it."

Overall, Black Forest (tra la la) is one of those albums which grows in likeability the more you listen to it, as the charming sounds of many subtle instruments appear with more spins.

Garden Ruin is good, but there are a bazillion alt-country Coors rockers who could pull this off, and coming from an outfit with such a remarkable past body of work it is a disappointment.

The overall sound is a bit too polished and loses some of the raw power edge that previous albums rode to critical success.

There are enough interesting things going on throughout the album to keep it fresh for several listens.

The music is jovial and upbeat, yet utterly simplistic.

Listening to The Avalanche is a lot like going back to visit old friends - familiar, cozy and safe.

Do the Bambi proves that art rock can be both obvious and alien at the same time.

While this is definitely a likeable album, and an extremely contagious pop effort at that, it's a hard one to get attached to.