I Blame You is mean, raw and instrumentally tight, with splashes of surf and punk. Froberg and Habibion’s twangy guitars effectively interweave in highlights 'Fake Kinkade' and 'Pine On.'

Cudi deserves credit for such an audacious high-concept debut. It falls a bit flat, but at least it falls forward.

Despite some cliched lyrics and cheesy moments (Bootful Of Beer is pretty goofy, the groovy Wheels is straight out of a steamy 80s-rock-chick video), the album--the Wilsons' first in six years--is both tough and tender, and makes a girl like me dive into the YouTube archives to relish the ass-kicking awesomeness that was and still is Heart.

The album as a whole is still more interesting than any of its individual parts, but now we can truly appreciate each and every fragment.

Diarrhea Planet have always aimed for the rafters, but on Turn To Gold they crash through them.

Unfortunately, Furtado doesn't have the rhyming skills, vocal chops or attitude to pull off any one of her new personae.

Some of the 80s references take a few listens until they stop sounding goofy, and MacLean’s deadpan vocals occasionally grate next to Whang’s light and floating tone, but once your ears adjust, there’s a lot to appreciate.

The production (thanks to Jim Diamond) also sounds more radio-ready, but the increased crispness makes the looseness of Maya Miller’s drums far more distracting than it used to be, and everything is far too cold.

Her percussion is often mesmerizing, the glue holding it all together. It’s all cinematic in a broad sort of way, the kind of album you can put on and walk through the streets, imagining how the movie of your own life would unfold. Thematically, it swerves through early 20-something existential angst in a rather predictable and trend-chasing way, which starts to lag and feel samey in the album’s second half.

There are some really gorgeous moments here, as on sleepy waltz 'Don’t Watch Me Dancing' and beautiful lazy closer 'Evaporar,' but overall the album comes off as an incomplete and thrown-together hobby project.

Angelakos’s Hot Chip-meets-MGMT sound also works on I’ve Got Your Number. His distinctive vocals backfire only on the too-cutesy Cuddle Fuddle.

Turkey is erratic, disjointed and full of loose garage swagger--in other words, classic Krol.

Eraser Stargazer is full of ideas, a lot of them half-baked. But for the band, it's a courageous, wholehearted lunge into a more danceable form of convulsive mayhem, and into more elliptical and impressionistic narratives.

If you can disregard the arrogance of proclaiming yourself outside the parameters of musical taxonomy and if you don’t mind Anna Barie’s shrill chanting, appropriately ghoulish on Sand Tassels, you’ll probably dig this synthesized blueprint of the future.

Understandably, he’s lost a little youthful edge: there’s no defiant Mr. Cab Driver, for example. But the songs hold up.

They've still got a way with grand, sweeping crescendos and haven't forgotten that the build is as important as the payoff.

Just cold, robotic electro beats with Wiley's aggressive cockney flows on the usual subjects.

Stylistically, their fourth record doesn't depart much from previous ones.

When you have to think this hard about music, it becomes a somewhat joyless ride, especially since Booth and Brown deny the listener a single danceable beat until track 10.

Meh. Patti Smith does it better.

Black Radio 2 falls a note short of its Grammy-winning predecessor, but just shy of spectacular is still damn good.

Sustained by romantic tension, they walk a strange line between being mesmerizing and washing over you like sonic wallpaper.

It’s far from a perfect record, but it’s their best in years.

The quieter moments that give his voice less to compete with are more interesting.

It’s a rare and amazing thing when an indie musician finds ways to keep chugging along on her own steam for years and then releases an album that brings together in the most powerful way everything she’s learned. Moncton singer/songwriter Julie Doiron has accomplished this with her eighth album.

Trouble, while not a huge departure from the Woodpigeon canon, proves Hamilton's songwriting is always growing. Here's hoping his audience will be, too.

It isn’t until album closer Spring Fever that you get a sense of how much further the band could’ve pushed the experimentalism.

This is still effervescent, hook-based pop, but it eschews the Delgados' more orchestrated moments in favour of simpler instrumentation, whipped into cabaret-ish arrangements or pared down into frantic post-punk, with driving lines of ringing single-note bass and guitar.