Slow, sugary, and perhaps a little too safe, this is not quite the return that Cinematic fans will want it to be.

His post-genre American-mythos statement.

An unexpectedly varied and satisfying listen.

As producer, songwriter and persona, Dear has come into his own with Asa Breed, a bootstrapping album that not only reveals the miles walked, but an ambitious road map ahead.

Can't Wait Another Day would be easier to love if it didn't keep accidentally signposting a shortage of fresh songwriting ideas.

Even at their silliest, even when they're treading water, no one else sounds quite like Shellac, and anyone who professes to be a serious music fan without having spent quality time with the band's albums should be forced to familiarize themselves. This just wouldn't be the first record I'd force on them.

In a sense, it seems more apropos to judge Double Up as a comedy record than as a pop record.

Like those on their last album, these songs reveal themselves gradually but surely, building to the inevitable moment when they hit you in the gut. It's the rare album that gives back whatever you put into it.

Mirrored is a breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097, a world where Marshall stacks and micro-processing go hand in hand.

The majority of the record's new tracks need to either be more focused or show more dynamic range.

Toying with sound and rhythm, noise and melody, Square is less minimalist than Hope, more fractured than Second.

As annoying as Endicott's mascara-tainted bellyaching was on the Bravery's debut, his histrionics-for-the-masses commandeer the group's stylistic direction on The Sun and the Moon, cheapening already trite regurgitations of Robert Smith confessionals by bloating them to anthemic proportions.

Boeckner most excels when he works alongside someone who provides a stronger contrast. In Wolf Parade, Spencer Krug helps provide that balance; without Boeckner's typical foil, the results remain impressive, if not quite as compelling.

It's a great debut for a band with an impressive, distinctive sound.

Five Roses reveals Van Pelt as a talented producer who knows his way around summery pop songs.

Such frequent attempts to elevate the banal into the meaningful ultimately keep Release the Stars from achieving any significant momentum and only add weight to the notion that Wainwright's shaky aim-- rather than his lack of talent-- might be his biggest downfall.

An album of unapologetic straightforwardness, Sky Blue Sky nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise.

Its few missteps are well balanced by a handful of blissful, seismic bright pockets.

Gone are the gimmicky fragments and Mcluskyesque scene-jabs. The Beatific Visions is dominated by direly catchy and fully fleshed-out songs that pop like punk, lilt like country, mutter politics, and reek of the garage.

With their new album, Maxïmo Park avoid both utter disaster and absolute success by playing it safe. Nice and safe.

Where even her most divisive albums have managed to push her artistic boundaries, Volta feels limp and strangely empty-- almost unfinished.

God Save the Clientele sounds like the work of the same band, but it shows them in a new, brighter light, broadened in both sound and outlook. In terms of sonics and tunes, these changes are welcome and logical, expanding upon the sound with which they made their name without sacrificing intimacy or risking coming across overcooked.

On No Shouts, No Calls, the Krautrock-esque sonics of the band's last album have been fused with The Power Out's flair for continental pop, but it's the guitars that sing loudest.

That it still sounds mischievous and human through the band's studious chops and omnivorous listening habits is no small feat, as these qualities have eluded them for quite a while.

Mice Parade still finds Pierce working in a distinctive space, less jazzy than fellow post-rock vets the Sea & Cake but more atmospherically nuanced than typical acoustic singer/songwriters, but it's hardly the most appropriate release to bear the Mice Parade name.

Phrases like "rare talent" are thrown around all the time these days, but this compilation makes painfully clear just how unique and valuable this music is.

While the first half of the record is promising, however, the band loses steam toward the end.

The old Francis, the quirky, quipping storyteller, triumphantly returns on Human the Death Dance... to his unique blend of diaristic, down-to-earth meditations, eerie soundscapes, and loopy abstraction.

As big as the heart-swelling hooks get, though, Fields are more memorable when they let their early-1970s folk ghosts creep into the corners of their songs like dusty cobwebs.

These tracks... show an entirely new side of Wolf: one that finally puts impeccable pop songcraft ahead of lachrymose keening.

BRMC is a big, dumb band who writes big, dumb songs.

Beyond, the band's first record as the selfsame trio since 1988's Bug, benefits enormously-- more so even than fellow MA-veterans Mission of Burma or latter-day Sonic Youth-- from the years, experiences, successes, and disappointments elapsed between then and now.

Whereas her last album's smoothed-out eclecticism could be both daunting and empty, The Reminder is equally diverse yet more full-blooded.

Tears of the Valedictorian is Frog Eyes' first substantial advance since 2003's The Golden River.

A stylish but stilted pastiche, 5:55 follows a decade's worth of mostly superior homages, often involving the same artists.

Woke on a Whaleheart is a deceptively easy listen-- steady, lulling, and vehemently organic-- but consequently, it can begin to feel invisible.

The problem with Twelve isn't the staid song selection so much as this dogged insistence on staying faithful to the originals.

If Favourite Worst Nightmare is notably lacking something, it's another song like the debut's standout, "A Certain Romance".

It’s not quite the departure that Point was from Fantasma, but it feels like a natural next step.

I highly recommend that Animal Collective fans seek out the re-reversed copies of Pullhair Rubeye [available illegally on the Internet]. They are enjoyable.... But then there's, you know, the thing that sits on store shelves and costs money. And that version of Pullhair Rubeye is remarkably dull.

While some of the album's songs are terrifically cloying, I can't call it a disappointment; it's more a case of diminishing returns.

VI strips down the prog to an ingestible 2-guitar/drums setup, forgoing many of the spacey, Yes-influenced synths and flare of previous releases and instead narrowing its focus on more immediate hooks and transitions.

As evolutions go, Ode to Ochrasy makes for a particularly awkward adolescent phase, the sound of band that is outgrowing their loud-fast-rules roots but still too timid to sever them completely.

The meat of the album is generally good, with strong vocals and decent songs, but there's enough gristle on this record that it ultimately obscures some of the pleasures of listening to it.

There are a few quality tracks among these 16-- enough for a pretty good EP-- but this is an 80-minute album with at least an hour of stuff on it that sounds at best like studio outtakes.

Low on anthemic hooks and heavy on riotous noise breaks, Year Zero finds Reznor waving his digital hardcore flag high.

On Paths Taken, the Junkies sound like a band battling obsolescence and trying entirely too hard to make an impression as an inventive and therefore relevant band.

Their inability to come up with truly novel material leaves them stuck at indie's Triple AAA level both artistically and commercially.

Grinderman may be intended as a somewhat goofy reassertion of punk vigor and virility, but the disc is no laughing matter.

The political lyrics are the most troublesome.

Somewhere underneath all the high-gloss, ornamental swirlies and lacquered doilies are haphazardly camouflaged well-written songs.

Ghosthorse and Stillborn tends toward lazy, meandering nothings.

Ali's focus on his inner landscape is the rapper's greatest asset and his biggest liability.

Night of the Furies retains the urgency and emotional mobilization of Neighbors, but with a darker edge.

The emotional complexity--or rather, saddled contradictory feelings--aren't all that set her apart from her peers: She also draws on influences from outside folk which, largely due to her finger-style treatment and accompaniment choices, wind up adhering to a folk template.

This stripping down and moving away from easily definable mood makes And Their Refinement of the Decline a bit harder to grasp initially than any previous SOTL record.

Nux Vomica retains its predecessor's flair for the grandiose, but repositions the Veils as purveyors of a gothic Americana, inhabiting desert-stormy vistas that are just expansive enough to house the band's most valuable asset: Andrews' magnetic, outsize persona.

Jarvis is the record of someone losing hope, the sound of dejection turned up to 10.

Traffic and Weather finds them treading water in the worst possible way.

Flirtations with big-sky atmospherics can hardly hold these songs together. What sounds like a hodgepodge of Edgy experiments and raised-Zippo nostalgia is just that: a hodgepodge.

Little Pop Rock's acid-casual serenades... could've featured on any Mary Chain album from Darklands onward. And that's a comment on both the songs' lack of deviation from the JAMC's Sunday-morning-Velvets songbook, and the songs' consistent quality and unhurried charm.

The Endless Not features some of the subtlest songwriting of TG's career, playing that knot of tension for all it's worth and all the more disturbing for how pensive and restrained it feels.

If Willner doesn't hit at least some of your pleasure centers, well, forget your ears-- your nerve endings might actually be dead. Even three months in, it's a safe bet that From Here We Go Sublime will wind up 2007's most luxuriant record.

Steingarten is a nearly perfect album.

As exhilarating as Fourteen Autumns is at its most anthemic, the vividness of the lyrical themes ultimately carries the record over.

Klaxons' lyrical pretensions, alas, can be a reminder why the best house and trance music often emphasizes atmosphere over meaning.

There are moments of clarity when the band sounds fantastic, but they're not enough to save the record from landing in the band's forget pile.

The central flaw of Mob-- and it's a profound one-- is that its attempt to refine Employment's boundless levels of boyish vigor with introspection and intellect comes across as tired and bored.

The record grows soggy with Veirs' over-reliance on nautical themes.

There's virtually zero worth to this album, a combination of zealous experiments with Garage Band and would-be Music and Lyrics soundtrack cuts.

The problem with Buck the World is that it's largely inconsistent. There are 15 producers over 17 tracks. Sometimes it clicks, but other times it feels forced.

The album doesn't have any of the euphorically propulsive standout tracks that held Redman's older albums together.

What it is is the announcement of a stunning and unexpected late-career renaissance; Prodigy is tapping back into the fearsome frustration that once drove him.

On his lonesome Anderson is oppressively unimaginative.

While Pale Young Gentlemen is frontloaded and slightly naïve like a record of this sort should be, there's more than enough reason to anticipate what they're capable of when they decide to get darker, older, and less gentle.

As close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear.

Another solid (if not necessarily great) record.

I doubt Low fans who've held on this long will rebel against these new textures, more the way they're employed-- the band has added an almost disconcerting levity, and subtracted the gentleness.

So despite a pretty high hit/miss ratio, as a big-step-forward record, Living ain't exactly Armed Forces.

Armchair Apocrypha is ultimately another object of strange and unique beauty from this inventive songwriter and performer.

It's a little disappointing that none of the band's stylistic shifts have let them bloom into much more, but as furrows for ploughing go, this one's still pretty fascinating, and still all theirs.

It's a scary, difficult album, but one well suited for our times.

At this point in her career, Thorn shouldn't be courting the middle, and considering the best moments on Out of the Woods, she didn't have to, either.

It's plenty catchy and big, but it's also wildly uncreative and predictable.

The underlying problem here seems to be that Hebden still isn't comfortable in his own skin while improvising, with Reid or otherwise.

You can feel the warmth pouring out of the music.

Ruff Draft still feels like a limited-edition collectors-only curiosity.

The group's size makes the white-robed hordes of Polyphonic Spree an obvious comparison, but I'm From Barcelona's taut songwriting renders their numbers largely incidental-- these songs were meant to be shared by many voices.

The Ponys make good records, and Turn the Lights Out is no exception, but I'm still waiting on the great one I've always felt they'd had in them.

But if this introduction presents a retreat from the heavy metal parking lot, the rest of Western Xterminator returns to the usual spot and sets up a permanent trailer-home in it, with the 70s-Stones sleaze of Herrema's former band all but vanquished for a full-on 80s headbanger's ball pitched halfway between Sunset Strip flash and New Wave of British Heavy Metal thrash.

The brooding mid-mid-tempo pacing and smoky classic-rock guitar grandeur set a table for some serious moping.

With keen observations and piles of swagger tucked away somewhere for the time being, the Rakes could still be the soundtrack to plenty of lives-- or at the very least, daily commutes-- if only they could find the strength to muster a smirk.

Like so many debuts, Hats Off to the Buskers is ultimately a document of a band searching for their own voice in those of others.

Fortunately, Winehouse has been blessed by a brassy voice that can transform even mundane sentiments into powerful statements.

[The] Fratellis aren't so much the sound of young Britain as the sound of dad's old record collection.

Full of the kind of basic strum-alongs and diaristic musings that yield showers of Starbucks praise.

Hammond's solo outing is a spry if unexceptional pop charmer, less supercilious than Is This It or Room on Fire but almost as cool.

No longer experimenting for experimentation's sake, every beat-breaking decision on Myth Takes serves to reinforce the monumental rhythms.