Things just ain't the same for quasi-mad scientist/ghetto philosopher/sexual dynamo superheroes.

Early highlights aside (particularly the bone-rattling 'Paul Revere'), much of the album could be written off as cruise-controlled and that feel definitely resonates.

Swain seems eminently capable of empathy, but most of his time is spent chewing on deeply personal concerns, with the result being that the record can feel a bit hermetic at times. Lucky for him, then, that his personality is sufficiently engaging and his music sufficiently buoyant that we don't mind following him down his private rabbit holes.

I prefer to think of Lookout Mountain as an album of pretty-good songs from a guy who has written some unbelievably great ones, and will, more than likely, write some more of that quality down the road.

The record's violent, revolution-themed artwork is misleading. Viva is more like a bloodless coup--shrewd and inconspicuous in its progressive impulses.

Even after a six-year siesta, the Notwist's approach to pop music-- exploiting both its formal properties and endless possibilities-- is no less captivating and visionary than before.

At Mount Zoomer is fractured and spastic, and at times, the band's ambition eclipses its strengths. Still, there's something about Wolf Parade's fragility that's profoundly relatable, and the sense that the entire operation could fall apart at any second--that we're all tottering on the brink of total dissolution--is as thrilling as it terrifying.

Frustratingly, what should be the album's best song isn't on the album.... A creative chameleon with endless wells of technical skill, Worden stuffs Shark's Teeth with studied know-how.

It's also a meditation on a complex world, one devoid of the nostalgic innocence preached by the Mike Love-fronted Beach Boys of late, and its remastered, 2xCD Legacy Recordings release- the first CD release of the album since 1991--is astoundingly refreshing.

Despite the evolution of their sound, Tilly and the Wall haven't forgotten about what made them appealing in the first place: bright co-ed harmonies, rousing choruses, and their overall open-hearted good nature.

With J Robbins producing and the vastly improved sonics, you have a much clearer idea of what everyone is doing. Little things are important with this band, and here, you can actually make them out.

Strength in Numbers is far from unlistenable--I don't know if your free time is spent sorting through stacks and stacks of charmless indie rock CDs that have the nerve to call themselves "pop," but when the chorus of the title track hits with the subtlety of a latter-day Nas album title, it's damn refreshing to hear a group bound for glory as shamelessly as the Music.

Diamond Hoo Ha does seem like an apt description of the glittery nonsense contained within.

It's difficult to determine whether You Cross My Path is a victim of the times or its own merits; it's the sort of thing that's so competent that it's more likely to be defined by its failures than its success.

Wainwright does lean pretty heavily on this formula of mild, occasionally rocky folk-pop doused with generous measures of vocal swooping and diving.

There are few fiery guitar freakouts, folk-influenced melodies, soaring space-rock bridges, or psychedelic flourishes here; instead, the empty space is mostly filled with serviceable falsetto funk and glassy-eyed yacht-pop.

Although Business ultimately ranks as yet another less-than-legendary offering from a living indie legend, its shortcomings are much more nuanced than typical Pollard releases.

Instead of hiding his bootleg-bred quirks in anticipation of the big-budget spotlight, he distills the myriad metaphors, convulsing flows, and vein-splitting emotions into a commercially gratifying package that's as weird as it wants to be; he eventually finds his guitar but keeps the strumming in check.

The Fratellis have comfortably nestled themselves among the ranks of British rock's most besotted, but even relative to their contemporaries they still manage to come off sounding bored, tired, and downright silly.

Like its unexpected stylistic kin My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges, Seeing Sounds finds its creators partaking in the subversively phallocentric narcissism of staring at their CD collections, confusing music listening with music understanding rather than enjoyment.

It starts strong (with the pensive 'Honor Wishes'), and ends on a high note (with the title track leading into 'To America,' Wasser's duet with Wainwright). Unfortunately, the middle of the album, burdened with turgid low points.

Ultimately, this particular dream is less one of flight or past glories, and more one of going to work and finding you've forgotten your trousers.

Even those accustomed to Sloan's effortlessness will find the first half of Parallel Play almost flawless. There's still little in the way of artifice or innovation, but it's still easy to admire the architecture.

With its accomplished fusion of debris and warmth in a place somewhere between b-boy head-nod and laptopper experimentalism, Los Angeles is a big step forward for a still-young career, an album well worth revisiting years from now--preferably on vinyl, where the pops and clicks can only multiply.

Dead Deer is druggy and sexy and arty and pretty, but never pretentious.

Virtually every song enunciates its central joke, then repeats it and repeats it and repeats it. And repeats it. And repeats it. And so on, with the repeating. (And repeating.)

The brio of an amateur would almost have to be preferably to the overzealous professionalism of Beautiful Lie, whose frilly "classicist" pop gets all dressed up to go absolutely nowhere.

Maybe once the Ting Tings stop trying so hard to convince everyone they're having a good time and start actually having a good time, these cute little ballads will no longer be their sole redeeming quality.

His evident love of his source material and the material's alternative-era continuity make Takes a vanity project that's much better and more universally appealing than what we usually mean by the term.

While neither as frenetic as the group's debut or as stylistically curious as Tributes, World boasts smart pop sensibilities all the same.

The album boasts the most opaque lyrics in Subtle's catalog. But put the record and the website together, and the big themes become clear.

Even with a somewhat diminished speaker-filling capability and a couple of songs that seem to have less actual energy than they should, Velocifero's subtlety will eventually reward further listens.

Like the YouTube culture the "Pork and Beans" video depicts so well, the song--and this album--relies on a high quantity of short-lived pretty good ideas to distract from a shortage of great ones.

What follows is surprisingly full and wide ranging, almost as much as the Bruegel painting that graces the album's cover.

As impressive and uniformly gorgeous a record as Rook is, the band's best work is likely still to come.

Watershed has friction, and friction brings heat. Those left cold by metal's po-faced tendencies might well warm up to it.

The Bake Sale is the first commercially available product from a group that's built its rep via MySpace and live shows, and most of these tracks have been floating around the internet for a long minute. But it makes for a great little introduction to two guys who know exactly what they're doing and who do it well.

Following their first two crunching and careening albums, it may seem as if the M's have lowered the bar for themselves, but through all the detours they've made an album that sounds more like themselves than any previous work.

The best executed Harvey Milk album to date, and one of the most accomplished metal records you'll hear this year.

This Is Alphabeat feels labored, sacrificing identity in its endless eagerness to please.

Yes, it's a pleasure to hear Green articulate romantic satisfaction, and good for him if he's satisfied. But the grain and pull of his voice is all about longing for both flesh and spirit, and it doesn't quite fit here.

Songs in A&E is certainly Spiritualized's best work in 10 years.

The kicker is that, without their live/electronic shtick to distinguish them, Midnight Juggernauts don't seem to be anything other than gifted mimics.

Never merely meager, this project delivers, both when you're waving your orgy-snorkel all blotto on-the-town, and for a soundtrack to serious rumination at your midday desk of harsh reality.

It's hard to actually consider Welcome a bad album, mostly because it has this inexplicable likability: It's bizarrely comic without coming across as cheap irony, and it's pretty clear Pants lays down these semi-instrumental jams because he wants to have fun and make noise with some once-expensive, now-dated (and, subsequently, currently underheard) musical machinery.

Nothing to Fear might be the surprise highlight of this collection, even accounting for all the classic stuff on the first disc.

What the title describes is just as ineffable as their sound: you can see it coming down, but somehow it fails to leave any tangible impression.

What All the Saints lack in rhythmic variation, they make up for with absorbing atmosphere--their sound truly is subterranean, a dimly lit, cavernous rumble that gets more suffocating as the album progresses.

Their sources are varied, yet the pleasure isn't recognizing the different sonic elements, but in relishing their almost supernatural co-exist

On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess.

No envelopes are pushed on the quartet's latest, The Lucky Ones. But there's an increase in firepower that makes it their best effort in a while.

These songs may be less immediately catchy, but all of them have a moment in which they break away from their straightforward guitar-rock underpinning and allow strange, spacious moments to burble up from within.

II Trill is a solid and occasionally great record, an album more directed toward car-stereo utility than bedroom contemplation.

In a way, they don't even try to [reconcile their spotlight-swallowing energy], and that makes No, Virginia... an album on par with the Dolls' two fully conceived LPs.

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of opportunities to get caught in that lovely crossfire on Re-Arrange Us, a record that, for all its lush bells and whistles, finds the pair sounding as bare-boned and sparse as you'd expect a two-person band to be.

Freedom Wind includes three of the four songs on the Explorers Club's original EP, and it partly fulfills that record's promise.

Lie Down may be Oldham's most country record of new songs in years, and it's also one of his most accessible and least academic records.

El Rey has its share of surprises, mostly in the vein of its particular subject, which is the cruelty older men visit on younger women, and vice versa. But mostly it's merely another Wedding Present record: witty, randy, guitar-heavy, and not quite satisfied.

Trading layers of mood and melody and meaning for layers of Pro Tooled artifice, French Kicks have razored off the bullshit, leaving a core of beguilingly honest tunes.

Unfortunately, Inherit tries to give the listener both of these great tastes at once, resulting in a combination that's less like chocolate and peanut butter, and more like toothpaste and orange juice.

As far as mainstream pop-rock records go, Brain Thrust Mastery occasionally gets the job done.

At times, the maturation feels forced; the more adventurous moments here are experimental only for such a high-profile group, and they don't play to Gibbard's sentimental, word-weighing strengths.

Thing of the Past is a perfectly pleasant, well-produced album that offers an authorized version of what Vetiver fans already unofficially know about the band.

If you isolate any random 45 seconds of Directions to See a Ghost's 70 minutes, you'll definitely be compelled to listen for another few minutes--after which time you'll probably start waiting for a solo or a shift in tone that might not even come.

For what is in essence the ultimate expression of inadequacy, self-loathing, failure, and impotence, 12 Angry Months is a tough little thing.

Throughout the album, glimmers of invention and humor are allowed to shine through.

With their frantic, rushed rhymes, and beats which are a bit too eager to please, the Kidz may be popular. But if they want to any cred they're going to have to learn to be themselves.

Way is a humble first step in what sounds like a glorious new trip, where the really well played guitar becomes something else entirely.

What it lacks in a unified style it makes up for in a referential (and reverential) enthusiasm that anyone with a subscription to Wax Poetics should recognize as an individualized, well-crafted love letter to funk gone by--and funk yet to come.

The good news is that the band's official debut (following the 2007 collection "Wind And The Swell") is still a solid art-pop album at its core, and importantly, more "American Gangster" than "The Crane Wife."

On a lyric sheet, Titus Andronicus may appear to espouse the sort of wrist-cutting histrionics emo's typically lambasted for, but the magic lies in the band's oddly enthusiastic grass roots delivery.

In an attempt to be taken seriously, they've sacrificed too much of their effervescent appeal--after all, enthusiasm and artfulness need not be mutually exclusive.

So obviously the biggest difference between the Last Shadow Puppets and Turner's main gig is in the lyrics. Though less immediately noticeable than the majestic production, the change in the scale of Turner's songwriting is ultimately more profound.

Nouns is so cacophonous, so fertile, and so ripe with sound that parsing out the samples and effects and various layers of guitar is nearly impossible; besides, it's way more satisfying to just close your eyes and just enjoy it.

In the end, those appearances [by Keith Fullerton Whitman, Jay Lesser, and Sun Ra Arkestra's Marshall Allen] point to the album's only downside, which is the nagging sense that there's too much straight homage/pastiche and not enough of Matmos' considerable cleverness on display. Ultimately, though, it's a minor quibble.

While Water Curses is plenty enjoyable on its own, it also sets you dreaming about where Animal Collective will go next.

At four songs, Ringer is economical, but the diversity within its half-hour run time makes it surprisingly robust as well.

Post-rock's forte is letting instruments speak for vocals. Russian Circles speak articulately, but could stand to roar a bit.

Lambency's lack of contrast and its vacuum of irresolution are only symptomatic of the record's holistic problem: there's not much memorable to grab onto.

Shine's lingering impression is that of several talented cooks crammed into a tiny kitchen, each crafting something delicious with little regard for the meal as a whole.

Released today, it instead feels like a staggering transformation and a return to form that was never lost, an ideal adaptation by a group that many people didn't know they needed to hear again.

Their jangly melodies claw their way inside your brain just the same, making them latest in a long line of Glasgow bands to effortlessly combine celebratory sonics and miserablist lyrics into something singular.

No doubt that the best halves of this and "Tournament of Hearts" would equal a breakthrough album for the group, but taken as a whole, Kensington Heights sounds like a decisive break in the band's stride.

This is an album by an artist getting comfortable with his softer side. It's another welcome surprise.

Her pop fun is a bit knowing-- she's 26 after all. But trust the Swedes. They know what they're doing with this sort of thing.

Timbaland's productions are the weaker links on this frustratingly ordinary album.

Santogold might try to separate formula and art, but her album catches fire when she blasts that distinction into irrelevance.

Rising Down isn't always an easy listen, but it's an exciting one, and its abrasiveness never gets in the way of a good throw-your-hands-up beat or a well-crafted lyric.

Smile is their exquisite-corpse sequel, a near-automatic exercise in drawing inspiration from anybody but themselves.

It's not fair to Forster, of course, who rose to the occasion with his warmest and most welcoming solo album. But even beyond the imherant emotional baggage, songs such as 'Did She Overtake You' or the slightly bombastic 'Don't Touch Anything' still sound like they could have used a pass through someone else's filter.

After the Balls Drop manages to make the most of these potential shortcomings, offering listeners a charming, warts-and-all portrait of the group.

But even with 9th's craftsmanship, the melodies, like Buckshot's lyrics are vacuum-sealed. There's a pianissimo modesty that positively sucks the album dry.

While Imperial Wax Solvent has all the buzzy, crunchy sonic hallmarks of great Fall, it also doesn't quite rank with their highest highs, an admittedly tall order when that includes albums recorded twenty-five years ago by a completely different set of musicians.

The rest of The Colourful Life is, ahem, less colorful. Most of the blame shouldn't go to Butler, but to these not-so-ragin' non-Cajuns.

The ebb and flow of the disc feels like it's advancing some unknowable plot, always the sign of a well sequenced disc but also the bridge between songs like the lovely 'Mirrorball' and the bluesy (in the get-the-Led-out sense) 'Grounds for Divorce.'

But with only two weak tracks and some deletable skits outweighed by a dozen good-to-great cuts, Everywhere at Once is one of the best albums to come from a Solesides alumnus in a long time.

Mr. Love & Justice isn't exactly the musical equivalent of dropping flowers down the barrels of rifles, but there is a certain passivity to the disc, a characteristic magnified by the rootsy approach of Bragg's trusty band the Blokes, who channel the bucolic bent of the Band rather than the edge of the Clash.

After nailing the rapid-fire EP format with tracks that constantly threatened to disintegrate themselves from the inside-out, TPC psyche themselves out on their first full-length, over-cooking songs made from otherwise spectacular ingredients.