Though the expected tracks of washed-out vocals, shimmery keyboards, lonely drum machine thumps, and efficiently told tales of romantic disappointment abound, there are also surprises here....[But] Advance Base Battery Life is not likely to earn Ashworth many new fans.

While it's nice to envision Western acceptance of non-Western music, it's nicer to imagine the universe's collective ass jiggling sympathetically to the best moments on Dirty Bomb--music so thoroughly uprooted that its traditions exist only as pivot points; fragments of sounds we know mashed together so intuitively that we barely recognize them.

From the first track through its final seconds, Invaders joylessly stomps through overly familiar territory. It's another lunkheaded, loud mash-up of rock and dance, a sound now so beefed-up and campy that it's perhaps only suitable for shotgunning cheap beer and practicing UFC chokeholds with your pals.

Case remains her own best muse, a strong, feminine presence who demands you meet her songs halfway (she calls herself a control freak in every article I've read), but her band deserves credit for creating the ambient, dark-night setting in which her tales of murder and animals sound natural and compelling.

The album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms.

The band has easily come up with its best set of songs since its sort-of 2001 breakthrough "Behind the Music." If not every track on the set is a winner, neither are there any outright stinkers.

The production of The Bridge sounds like it came out of an extended catch-up session, the work of a man best accustomed to the breakbeat era's techniques trying his hand at the last ten years' worth of club-rap digitalism.

Fans of mid-fi one-man indie bands and anyone who loved Elbogen's when he was still Say Hi To Your Mom will undoubtedly find things to like about it, but Oohs & Ahs is ultimately a decent record that's weighed down a bit by some puzzling sonics.

No amount of boulder-sized low-end can disguise the fact that, even when these tracks work, they usually feel like they're missing something major. And that something is a vocalist.

One gets the sense, however, that in acknowledging where his inspirations came from and figuring out where his compositions will go on Take My Breath Away, he's misplaced the present tense and the once-present tension.

We get his best on How to Get to Heaven From Scotland, an album any Arab Strap fan could love.

Unfortunately, this big-tent spirit also occasionally dilutes some of the elements that made K'naan's debut so striking.

On disc, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a bland, bluesy celebration you can afford to miss.

On 200 Million Thousand, Black Lips sidestep expectations and make a record less approachable than its predecessor.

There is a resigned quality to Hungry Bird that stands in sharp contrast with the sprightly, slightly goofy tack the band took on 2001's career highlight The Ghost of Fashion.

There are, almost out of obligation, some unimaginative pairings....Other pairings are much less obvious and either more satisfying or more puzzling.

Only swatches of the lyrics are intelligible ("Look at me," "Feast your eyes," "All is yours") but that's part of the enchantment of magic: A fleeting glimpse of something that might have been transcendent, leaving our minds to fill in what we didn't quite see.

White Bird Release, while not as conceptual as For Waiting, For Chasing, almost by default flows as a sort of suite, with each track named after a fragment of this quotation.

The album's production and Vermue's economical, buttoned-down songwriting offer plenty of tonal and genre variation, but everything still feels like it's hitting the same mark.

Once producing dense, complex music that rewards each additional listen, Dissolver's content as comfort food for rockists, too quickly sating the listener.

Rather than re-tracing the path that made him popular, he has hacked into the wilderness of his new inspirations, no matter how divergent, and emerged triumphant.

Hold Time is an enjoyable, well-constructed album, and as good a place as any for newcomers to start--it just doesn't hold many surprises.

A Morrissey record you can dig into without caring much about the man's lyrics.

The Century of Self turns out to be every bit as stubborn as its predecessors, even as it goes a certain way towards justifying them.

Many of the songs on Isbell's sophomore release don't necessarily aim for (or achieve) such profundity, yet they still compel through sheer verve and Isbell's unwillingness to let an unhip sound or idea discourage him.

It is a work that shows a band still struggling to come to terms with itself, discovering on record the music it wants to make, and settling for a safe middle ground in the end.

These clusterfuck all-the-cooks experiments, more often than not, add up to way, way less than the sum of their parts.

With their boundaries and ambitions by now well established, on Tight Knit Cabic and company largely succeed in luring the listener hazily back in time and into Vetiver's comfort zone.

One gets the feeling that with a little more ruthlessness about what makes the final cut, Goodnight Oslo could offer more hits than misses. As it is, it falls just a little short.

Havilah broadens the Drones' sonic palette and continues to carve out a sound that is uniquely theirs, and in that sense it's an accomplishment, but wrestling with the record's dark subject matter makes it a difficult listen.

Their catchier material that front-loads the record is so distinct and stunning, however, that it's hard not to be left wanting more after those opening tracks.

Working with material hog-tied to the past and performed with traditional trappings puts Diane at some risk for creative stagnation and worse--the kind of anonymity and irrelevance enjoyed by vast swathes of the contemporary folk universe. To Be Still avoids these traps thanks to Diane's spectacular voice and, well, the little, mostly indescribable things.

Sometimes it feels like they're playing two different songs, working from two different ideas. There's no steady view of the horizon anymore. It's disorienting, but charming, to hear their parts blend, settle, and separate over and over again.

Dark Was the Night comes off as a gray, monotone look at the current indie landscape and, as a result, works best in small batches.

For an album mostly preoccupied with cataloguing past relationships and the mistakes that did them in, it follows that Feel. Love. Thinking. Of. would manifest those feelings with nostalgic sounds, some welcome, others less so.

Ferree obviously loves his source material, and the way he weaves in the references throughout is ingenious. But something about the pleasure he takes in his obsession cloisters it away - he can't quite make his subject matter in a way that transcends Bobby Driscoll's life and death.

Choral sometimes feels staid and a little postcard-y: a pretty gesture that fails to eclipse the experience of actually going somewhere.

At times the songs can sound cold, as though they want to keep their distance, refusing to shed any armor. Although this could be a handicap on other albums, it only serves to makes Carboniferous more intriguing.

Watersports sounds terrific.

The album falls short of a diamond-in-the-rough-caliber discovery, but considering these seven songs are the remains of an aborted 12-song full-length-from a band that reinvented itself every three or four years, For the Whole World holds up well alongside, say, concurrent Blue Oyster Cult or New York Dolls albums.

When Bafus isn't pushing from the back, everything falls slack, and the album blurs into gray. Individual moments stand out, but Sholi isn't an album you immerse yourself in as much as notice from time to time.

Tapscott's specific words can get muffled, but more often than not that only helps to add a welcome sense of mystery to The Blue Depths, as for the first time it seems Odawas know precisely where they want to go and how they plan to get there.

Crafting art-house meanderings that rock turns out to be the easy part. It's sticking the landing that's hard, and no matter how much D. Rider twists, turns and tumbles in midair, they're just not there yet.

Psapp are certainly getting closer to achieving a perfect balance in their sound, and The Camel's Back is certainly lounge jazz of a higher proof than most, but save perhaps 'I Want That,' 'Screws' is the one number here that'd make you put down your drink.

As good as "Cable TV" and "Winter, That's All" sound, John Shade's main weakness was supposed to be its strength-- during the points where the tempo dies down and the songwriting hues closer to traditional forms, there's not enough personality or character in the vocals to compensate, leading to stretches of indie promo-pile filler.

So Far Gone still scans as one of the most compulsively listenable mixtapes of a great year for mixtapes.

Even if the new album can be cheaply on-the-nose and opportunistic at times, it's hard to root against Lily Allen.

As it is, the more Auerbach changes things, the more they stay the same.

Like their best, "SNL"-aired material, these songs get better as they go on, mostly because of the way the lyrics carry the joke to its logical and grotesque endpoint.

Houck's impressive effort nonetheless inevitably sends you back to Nelson's originals, only illuminating their brilliance.

Like most remix comps, Decent Work is ultimately a grab-bag.

Where their earlier records thrived on the tension between Stollsteimer's gut-spilling confessions and the band's raucous, raw-powered attack, on Love, Hate and Then There's You, we get all the pleading, but without the violent, cathartic release.

Yet unlike the more cohesive albums from those aforementioned acts, Immolate is a one-step forward, one-step back proposition, marching in place to an internal setting somewhere between chilly background mood and something more melodic and engaging.

While I certainly can't hold it against Kweller for trying something different and playing dress-up with a Nudie suit, Changing Horses nonetheless finds his half-assed over-countrification and half-assed under-countrification to be equally ineffectual.

If you can look past these cringe-inducing moments, The Good Feeling Music occasionally lives up to its title.

With The Mountain, Heartless Bastards have shown that they have the tools and the talent to take at least tentative steps forward into a more ambitious and diverse sound. But it's surprising that they sound so introspective here when they could, and occasionally do, sound world-beating.

From front to back, the album's an acquired taste, and even if it's not the big paradox that an album mixing punk ethics with rap virtuosity might risk becoming, it doesn't have a universal appeal, especially for heads leery of anything that might approach the misnomer of "emo rap."

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart simply made a slyly confident debut that mixes sparkling melodies with an undercurrent of sad bastard mopery.

The album's bluesy tenor does wonders to mitigate its shortcomings, something that the debut's spacious environs couldn't do. With Fool, the problems mostly reside in the words that Bones sings.

Ladyfinger (ne) are obviously a talented bunch, but they're trying to crack open the rock'n'roll firmament with ball-peen hammers, chiseling grooves without making any real breakthroughs.

More so than stoking the band's current commercial prospects, Tonight is an exciting record for what it could potentially spell for Franz Ferdinand's future.

Neil Young set the template, but Tillman puts his stamp on every note, wringing bare-bones poetry from evocative couplets.

Working on a Dream works hard on sound, but sleeps on actual songs.

Like a Mojave Desert mirage shimmering tantalizingly before disappearing, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future is ultimately left little more than a string of sweet nothings, there for your fleeting pleasure. It's a pop tease.

The opening Wright sample is a hard look back at a year most people would already rather forget, but it's a perfect intro for Gutter Tactics, an album that draws much of its strength from the same well of outrage and disaffection.

It's Svanangen's record in miniature: It preserves what was fleetingly great about Loney, Noir while proving that Svanangen has more tricks in his bag than most people thought possible.

It also probably means that we'll be getting something new from Nau the next time around. Switching between musical characters is obviously Nau's default setting, and for all of its pleasantness, Paranoid Cocoon, in the context of his career thus far, feels like transition music over a costume change.

Time of the Assassins could have used a few more trips to the Rolodex to bring in a ringer of a singer or two, since Fraiture doesn't seem up to the task, or necessarily even into it.

There's that unmistakable "side project" air surrounding this record, the sense that this is just an enjoyable way to wile away time during hiatuses in other endeavors.

It's of the moment and feels new, but it's also striking in its immediacy and comes across as friendly and welcoming.

Simultaneously sparse and rich, The Crying Light mines maximum intensity from a relatively minimal mix of basic melodies, pithy lyrics, and understated arrangements.

Like Wonder, Guilty has its share of up-tempo tracks, yet its real pleasures are idiosyncratic, revealing themselves the more attentively and often you listen.

The sometimes drifting song structures, frequent tonal shifts, odd lyrics, and interludes presented a stuffed canvas full of interesting sounds that didn't seem to have a focal point, didn't seem to have a place where you were supposed to enter the composition. Eventually, however, everything fell into place.

Luckily, Grand features not only some of the band's most personal lyrics, but also some of its most universal.

Blood Bank certainly dispels concerns that Vernon's accomplishment was somehow environmental--that "For Emma's" poetic circumstances, and not its contents, were responsible for its success.

Mercer's able to fill cavern-like spaces with the might of his many soliloquies. Easy listening or not at all, it's why Skin of Evil--here and gone in just 30 minutes--remains so gripping: Some turns are capable of provoking a physical reaction.

Never has that rift between Pollard the songwriter and Tobias the arranger been more transparent-- and more problematic-- than on the formless, often dull The Crawling Distance, a particularly blank batch of Pollard tunes dressed to the nines in Tobias' perfunctory sheen.

In their slightly glib mastery of pop-song forms, and their apparent belief that great pop music can be forged through sheer force of will, Cut Off Your Hands sometimes recall Bloc Party. The difference, thankfully, is that Nick Johnston seems far more appraochable and grounded.

Drone Trailer arrives--after numerous CD-Rs and tapes of cross-cultural, relentlessly unconventional music to stargaze by--bearing principally unthreatening, old-fashioned rock'n'roll.

Not everything here fails in such catastrophic fashion, but because the band noodles its way through Mirror Eye's druggy, sitar-laced exercises without any thought towards coherence (or completion), even its few promising tracks feel slapdash and unfinished.

The collection is a timely, if at times exhaustive, introduction to the Six Organs origin myth.

At its best moments, the debut sounds like an A.V. club president's wet dream, unabashedly nerdy and technically proficient. Sadly though, the record is peppered with aesthetically dubious nu-rave moments, making LOTP sound less like sympathetic revenging nerds and more like party-crazed dude-bros who just happen to own synths.

Apart from those ['Hey Dad!,' 'World/Inferno vs. the End of the Evening,' 'Dead Sailors'] and the relatively slight 'Do We Not Live in Dreams?,' though, Major General hits some massive highs and nary a single crushing low.

In their rush to be the UK's most important band, they seem to have ignored restraint, charisma, and charm--the qualities that made them Next Big Thing candidates in the first place.

Haymaker! is a typically witty, rambunctious album that shuffles up the band members like a deck of cards.

Every synth setting and drum sound and vocal technique on I Think We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat is a pastiche of a sort of thing you've heard before.

The rest of the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack consists of Rahman's evocative score, which meshes pounding technoid percussive-heavy pieces (such as "Riots" or "Mausam And Escape") and slightly less forceful cues (such as "Ringa Ringa"), some of which seem designed to bring to mind specific moments in the film, some to evoke more general emotions.

Anyone who buys this without owning Ironman, Supreme Clientele or Fishscale is going to miss the bigger picture, and anyone who buys it while already owning those albums isn't gaining much at all.

Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be--which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like.

A Cross the Universe isn't close to anyone's definitive idea of what a document of a live Justice show should be, but it's a diverting, sometimes-bizarre look into the first phase of fame for an aughts-era cult pop phenomenon.

Her own versions aim at some druggily evocative conception of 60s soul, which makes them pale next to the originals.

If Brighten the Corners signaled a turn to the serious, the 32 outtakes and radio-session cuts compiled here give Pavement plenty of room to, as one B-side aptly puts it, "fuck around."

The guests regularly outshine the hosts, but each has a variation on the sort of rugged, gruff flow that doesn't leave Erick or Parrish gasping.

And yet, that Emeritus often seems more righteous than cynical or hopeless (the latter two are a bit soft) is a testament to Scarface strengthening his flow in age.

It's an enjoyable listen in the here and now, which is all an album has to be, even when created by giants.

Forget the technicalities and call it what it is: a messy, glorious, and cohesive artistic document of internet café-era indie life that sounds best when sung by heart.

Electric Arguments holds onto an original Fireman ideal: to make Paul McCartney sound less like Paul McCartney. That it does so within more traditional pop-song presentations-- while steering clear of McCartney's usual preferences for piano-pounded rockers and string-sweetened ballads-- is the ultimate testament to its success.