Changing of the Seasons feels like the record where Brun's lack of range catches up to her.

Houdini sounds like an attempt to escape from the predicament of the sophomore album, making more nuanced use of orchestration and sticking with a comfortingly sweet and naïve tone while also expanding its perspective.

Unfortunately, this humanity doesn't translate to the music. The performances are flawless, but overly so.

Stretching the sinews of their sound almost to the breaking point, Religious Knives find a balance between the repetitive rhythmic skeleton of krautrock and the psychedelic keyboard thrusts of early Doors.

Despite it all, Reefer is Thorburn's best album of the year, and it is so successful because it feels tossed off, like he's not trying so hard.

The fact that this dorkiness has enveloped a few usually-on-point guests (MF Doom, Mr. Lif & Akrobatik, DJ Shadow) is unfortunate enough; that it's being perpetrated by two MCs who've been consistently great since the early- to mid-90s just makes it more frustrating.

As a backing mini-orchestra, Elf Power and the Strums may not be as inventive as Lambchop or as dark as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but they give Chesnutt just want he needs: a relaxed and less rehearsed environment.

Civil War shows a band that's matured in some typical ways-- as if anyone was clamoring for "broadened perspective" from these guys-- and some unexpected and not unwelcome ones.

Musically, Nicolay's in his comfort zone, making the sort of album he'd been more or less heading towards since "Connected," an album that, while certainly rooted in hip-hop, knocked like a pillow fight.

It's an intriguing approach that yields a few great songs, but because of the glut of similar material, these standout tracks tend to get lost in a neutralizing fog of sameyness.

It's still a heartily ramshackle affair, with pots and pans for percussion, rudimentary banjo picking, and what sound like first take on every track. The album's clattery rawness is its chief appeal.

In the end, though, Everything Is Borrowed's musical high points aren't enough to save it from its lyric sheet, and that, going forward, constitutes a real problem for Skinner.

for now we're stuck with Dig Out Your Soul, which like every Oasis album from 1997's "Be Here Now" onward, makes cursory gestures toward making the band's mod-rock more modernist, before reverting back to the same ol', same ol'.

Consider OH the "most Lambchop" of Lambchop releases, as it swings through almost every tone in the band's history of influence-collisions, arriving at a soul of its own.

Maggie balks at the chance to make your knees go wobbly, keeping its allure strictly intellectual and technical rather than hot-blooded. That ethos isn't going to win a lot of hugs and kisses from fans or non-fans, but Maggie never asks for more than a firm, professional handshake, the kind of appreciation it more than deserves.

Break Up the Concrete seems a bit uneven: The faster numbers begin to sound the same after a while, and the album hits a slight lull halfway through.

She's never been as in control of her voice, an incredible instrument that is as strong as it is attractive. And on The Living and the Dead, it's found just the right setting.

City of Refuge seems more like a collection of ideas for three or four different albums than one complete work.

Their latest record has more instruments and lyrical or melodic turns than hooks to hold onto, but its problem is more like an excess of ideas than a lack of them.

It's obsessive and choppy. It's playful. It's gleefully oblivious of when to shut up.

Un Día is as warm and welcoming as it is weird, but it's also something of an experiment.

It might seem counterintuitive to call Chemistry a grower: From the first listen, it's both pummeling and riveting.

As violent, plaintive, and ultimately conflicted as anything she's already written ("I know how to kill but I hate how it feels."), many of Powell's lyrical sketches are of the blood red, open-heart-surgery variety, a word set her producer knows well.

Ferndorf as a record isn't something to get you hearing music in a new way or an open up a new world, but it does succeed very nicely for what it is.

Ambitious and complex, it's stuffed with cocooning harmonies and shimmering, sunlight-smacking-the-Pacific melodies--a languid, easy West Coast record (think Randy Newman or SMiLE), infused with classic East Coast anxiety.

We all know a little something about chasing that ideal version of ourselves, and Antony's persistence in the face of futility makes it a joy to run by his side.

On Doomsdayer's Holiday, the haze is even thicker, and the album represents a sort of endpoint to their journey: taking place in utter blackness, it is their most alluring and impenetrable trip yet.

It's an album with its feet on the ground and its head in the clouds, and listening to it is a lot like waiting contentedly in a kind of musical purgatory, happy to be there but still wondering what comes next.

So among Forfeit/Fortune's many misses, Bachmann can't help but hit a few.

XOXO still manages a lonesome, crowded sound. Whether it's the sturdy chord progressions, overstuffed lyrics, or just Bianchi's tendency to avoid with melodies with contours his voice can't match, most of XOXO is likeable, if not a little tough to parse.

The set most vividly captures the Clash's most enduring qualities: the triumphs and tribulations of being populist punks.

Most of all, it's Díaz-Reixa's intuitive feel for rhythm that marks out Alegranza! as such an unusual and enticing listening experience.

He is, to put it bluntly, one of those people who gets it right far more often and in more different ways than your ordinary person really should. Uproot is another one of those instances.

The result is a collection of songs so taut and concisely resonant as to be psalms.

The debut's boring, not awful, but until the band stops sounding like they have a hundred cooler things to do than be in a studio, it's hard to imagine them as anything more than surf muzak.

Though the concept of "growth" can border on illusory, the shady, gnarled Black Forest comes on less strong than Pale Young Gentlemen, but is ultimately a lot harder to shake than its charming, if slightly hammy predecessor.

Catfish Haven and Devastator are so counter "post-modern," counter "indie," deliberately and confidently well-worn, that when the sketches of American rock history lose their way, the band and its songs sounds like supporting players to gorgeous voice and a shared passion for what was.

The quality of the beats easily overcomes the somewhat odd novelty of hearing backpackers in close quarters with hardcore rappers, and with each listen it starts feeling more and more natural to have an all-star CD where M.O.P. and Little Brother both have hot tracks.

Awkward, youthful moments exist, but Women tire of them almost before you do. What's left are the best of post-punk ingredients: curiosity, noise, and sly artifice.

British producer and Transglobal Underground vet Nick Page, aka Dub Colossus, got the ball bouncing with A Town Called Addis, an intriguing conflation of reggae and dub sensibilities with Ethiopian pop. It's an ingenious idea made more interesting by its roundabout mode of composition.

He issues his grievances with a smart-ass certainty, rarely showing empathy or compassion for his characters or admitting that maybe it's his perspective that's skewed.

What ultimately saves Snowflake Midnight from following The Secret Migration up the band's collective keister is the song positioned to serve as its climax, 'Dream of a Young Girl as a Flower.'

Even though 4 has a greater emphasis on instrumental compositions that don't suffer much from the absence of Ejstes' vocals, it's a bit of a disappointment that they only show up in half the songs.

Paper Trail more often succeeds when the positivity sounds more earned than court-ordered.

Murs for President is such a weird album to listen to in a strictly critical sense, where it stands as a more-or-less average release.

Without risking pastiche, the band gets plenty of mileage from its sonic references.

WLIB AM has a better hit-to-miss ratio than just about any radio station you can name anyways.

The end result is a delectable pop record, with Koushik's heavy ambiance and amorphous production combining to nudge his songs to their tingling crescendos.

While 'Bruises' proves that a well-done song that sounds like other songs can make people take brief notice, Inspire mostly proves that recycling isn't the only answer.

With its handsome hard-cover packaging, clear-plastic paper-stock photo galleries, candid liner-note interviews (conducted in early 2007), and ridiculously detailed Pete Frame-drawn family tree poster, the set provides a handy opportunity for newbies to play catch-up on the band's history-- and for anyone who first came into contact with the Mary Chain via the closing credits to "Lost in Translation," only to be scared off by "Psychocandy's" torrential noise.

Geist's contributions to electronica have always seemed fringe--label head, remix specialist, in-demand crate digger--and it's once again nice for him to have something to put his own name on. But after years of waiting, Double Night Time confirms that Geist is most valuable behind the curtain.

Twilight of the Thunder God merely refines these elements, but the tune-up is noticeable. In a discography filled with catchy songs, these are some of Amon Amarth's catchiest.

Luna is enjoyable enough to listen to, and a lot of Beta Band followers will find plenty to enjoy here, but it's ultimately an album I didn't like as much as I wanted to, and one that doesn't really find its footing until it's almost over.

Feed the Animals helps to solidify Gillis' role as the supreme 80s-baby pop synthesizer.

Friendly Fires is teeming with ideas, and although the record's consistent sound can be exhausting--there is no release, no relaxation in tempo--it's encouraging to locate a new band with too much passion, so much that it can hardly execute its ideas on one page.

Hawk makes marginal stylistic advances that it could stand to omit, and it lightly retreads stuff that needs no recapitulation.

Surely, we can do better for the platonic ideal of a rock band than four guys gunning for a spot rightfully inhabited by My Morning Jacket but instead coming up with the best songs 3 Doors Down never wrote.

Yes, this is shit-hot thrilling music. But it's also brainy and ambivalent, and more engaging for it.

But ultimately, Loyalty to Loyalty leaves a weird aftertaste, and it's not just because the penultimate 'Relief' tries to prop itself up on Willett's falsetto harangues and stuttering slap-bass, before 'Cryptomnesia' ends the record collapsing into a rumpled heap.

The problem then is one of staying power--Lewis does such a good job of nailing choice sounds and styles from pop's past that you can't help getting reeled in right away; only upon later reflection do you realize that much of her success lies in evoking something else great rather than achieving a greatness more uniquely her own.

The subtlety of their music, and the underlying confidence that brings it forth, lies at the core of their appeal.

Blitzen Trapper are no longer talented jacks-of-all-trades, but a master of one, and Furr is proof that this already-great band gets even better as they define themselves more specifically.

The farther they wander, the more magnetic they become.

At just over 33 minutes, Earth Junk is a short recording, but even at that length, the limited sonic range and repetitive tricks are ultimately draining.

Cover albums and mixes aside, Radio Retaliation is the pair's fifth studio album, and finds them once again failing to make anything but the most minute adjustments to the polite groove that is their stock, trade and--in 2009--monopoly.

The project still has the feel of an accompanying piece, with titles referencing the dramatization of the Chinese story and plenty of incidental music, but it also works on a satisfying level as an experimental work or as art-pop.

Despite some of the growing pains here, Backwards strongly hints at the sadistic beauticians S-M would be introduced to us as in their debut, and bravely reveals the types of psych/shoegaze pitfalls they'd later learn to avoid.

Unfortunately, too many of the songs highlight Starfucker's shortcomings, leaving them introspective, detached, and even timid. If this three-piece can learn to have as much fun in the studio as they do onstage, these fuckers might actually become stars.

As beautifully assembled as parts of Seaside Rock are, a couple of genre-specific tracks underscore its stopgap nature.

Dr. Dooom 2 isn't Keith's worst album, but it doesn't do a whole lot to break recent trends.

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold only offers fleeting glimpses of potential greatness beneath the ho-hum surface.

Ladyhawke is brimming with ideas whose worst moments quantify this past and whose best build upon it.

The Hungry Saw's temperate approach feels like the work of a band who are grateful for a new lease on life, but not sure exactly what to do with it, proffering brief experiments that amount to little more than amusing curios (the self-explanatory "The Organist Entertains") or instrumentals that sound like guide tracks waiting for a vocal supplement (the tremoloed psychedelic samba of "E Type").

Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, the debut LP by the London folk-pop quartet, bites its best sensitive-indie forebears and then pukes up all the most superficial chunks.

Lyrics like those [in 'Whiteboy'] make up for the clunkers, but more importantly, the music itself sounds shockingly vibrant for a band only recently taken off ice.

In truth Who Killed Amanda Palmer spans a decade of songwriting, and by 'Leeds United' the disc has revealed itself as a broad collection of rich character studies born of Palmer's lyrical acuity, likely laced with personal touches that nudge some of the material toward the at least loosely autobiographical.

The quiet-loud-quiet-loud dynamics and turgid crunch taste and feel just like middle school. And even if that weren't the case, it's safe to say we've heard aches like just these before.

It's actually refreshing, then, to hear a record like Raphael Saadiq's unabashedly retro The Way I See It, which doesn't try to "update" old soul sounds to a hip-hop world and a white singer.

The mercurial three-piece may now be more cohesive, consistent, and focused, but volcano!'s unpredictability is Paperwork's biggest strength.

The overall stylistic consistency that made Listennn unusual now makes for an exhausting hour.

On Talkdemonic's third stab, Eyes at Half Mast, the novelty seems to be thining, and O'Connor and Molinaro finally sound limited by their tools.

Defined as much by its lyrical prism and Angelakos' falsetto (more on that later) as its gooey textures, Chunk of Change walks the line between beat-driven, Hot Chip floor geeking and twee atmospherics.

It's a dense, patient work that could only have been made by someone who's done this before.

The faster stuff is pretty much in line with the key tracks from "Mag Earwhig!," and the lesser of the slow jams could very well be on any of the records after "Do the Collapse."

Whether Wreckless Amy represents a one-off collaboration or the start of an ongoing project for both musicians remains to be seen, but they sound pretty happy together.

The best ones spit in the face of death; this album instead finds aging men trying to reclaim their youth.

His proxies fare a bit better, though there's another problem: There's way too many of them, and none of them stick around long enough to establish themselves.

Ultimately, this is the type of record this band is suited to making, and it richly rewards repeat listening--details and melodies that seem buried or understated eventually come to fore, slowly revealed in a mixture of organic warmth, welcome variety, and subtle complexity.

While not guilty of carrying any true bombs, Lightbulbs does reveal how the band's stand-offish approach can serve as both a safety net and an anchor.

The Stand Ins continues that ambitious musical development [in "The Stage Names"], further roughing up the group's sound while sharpening its attack to an even finer point, and refining some of their old tricks while introducing new ones.

Alphabutt is honest and funny, and manages to sidestep all tired, kid-song tropes.

The record is perhaps a more extreme a transformation than that of Patrick Wolf.

The gradual and hesitant payoffs of these songs give the feeling of standing on a precipice, while their brief but gorgeous outros are like looking out on a limitless horizon. The latter half of the record could have used more of these moments.

It's a nice flourish on an album with more than a few such moments, but they're not enough to make the Donkeys' nostalgia sound like more than a pose, or Living much more than dry and dull.

They cast a powerful spell and sustain it over 11 tracks, yet at times you wish they'd jam, or perform a cover, or do anything to break it up somehow.

But as clear as that opening switch to afterburners rings, much of Heavenly Bender sounds too-worn in at times, hooks still more familiar than barbed.

Drowning pop compositions in jittery polyrhythms is indie rock's move du jour, but the Shaky Hands aren't trendy; they make fine-boned, classic rock'n'roll in the Strokes' vein.

Given the far sunnier cast of the group's debut, it's fair to say Now or Heaven is a document of growing pains.