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.

Pocket Symphony winds up feeling strangely transient, accomplished and genuinely likeable but also forgettable.

Although they've expanded their sound, the Arcade Fire's transition into extroversion isn't always smooth or graceful. Neon Bible is full of clunky lyrics, revealing Butler's tendency to overstate and sensationalize.

Where his solo debut, Yr Atal Genhedlaeth, was a relatively subdued, Welsh-only affair, its successor takes unseriousness as seriously as any official Furries effort.

Where Folkloric Feel opted for cobwebby murk, National Anthem of Nowhere dovetails in bright, tidy corners. It's at once straight-laced and funky in the way that only indie rock can be.

An album that hideously disgraces the band's original work.

A lot of Make Another World doesn't stick the way good guitar pop should.

It sadly turns out to be an unsettling piece of evidence that he's lost without someone else's pre-existing sounds to extrapolate from and transform.

Whether she's giving the rhythm section a cigarette break, trying to approximate the sound of an anesthetized New Pornographers, or adding the same sort of pseudo-dancey Casio flourishes that have colored her work since the first Azure Ray album, Taylor never fails to instill the same sense of inescapable inertia throughout.

In the end, what makes The Foley Room Tobin's best album in seven years is the way his bent for organized chaos manifests as a deft control of every sound that surrounds him: Anything's a beat, everything's a break, and the difference between sound and music is entirely contextual.

That the songs are essentially interchangeable 8-cylinder rawk is one thing; that they begin to clearly resemble the long-forgotten, acid-coated Eastern-revivalists Kula Shaker is something more distressing altogether.

Track by track, the disc's a sweet thing, but as a whole it's about as light and wispy.

Despite all the haunting vibes, woodwinds, and honeyed strings, rock music's guitar/bass/drums dynamic is dominant on Rust; it hovers between the rambunctious clatter of Broken Social Scene (which shares two members with DMST) and the elegant contortions of Jaga Jazzist.

If Dälek didn't have all this discordant float working for them, they'd be one of the most irritating rap groups in history.

A loose, warm, and human-scale record that sounds pretty nice right out of the gate.

Hold it by its edges and the experience of this album suffers––the rocky center is where we find personal truths writ well.

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is the musical equivalent of a late Woody Allen film (possibly a good or bad thing, depending on your temperament): The action unfolds predictably, but the dramatic effect can also be increased by your fondness for and familiarity with the idiom.

Atlantis strives for a patchwork cohesiveness, with equal parts neo-soul, reggae, rap, and rock, bound by a vaguely spiritual message and partially elaborated water-related extended metaphor.

An admirably cocksure debut on which Levi makes like a 21st century T. Rex-- which, our current retro-obsessed rock culture notwithstanding, is not an easy thing to pull off.

While there's nothing wrong with a predictable approach when deployed with expertise, it's disappointing from a band like the Frames.

Much of Numbers feels melancholy-by-numbers, so melodies seem recycled, riffs feel tedious, and the emotional register dampens.

It's an interesting middle ground the band reach here, touching upon many previous bases while not favoring entirely the guitar tomfoolery or the smirking electro-rock.

As good as the record sounds and as capably as he immerses himself in assorted flavors pop, there remains an odd sense of distance to Conn on record.

Swift's merry melodies and uninhibited sensitivity draw equally on the immaculate piano pop of Carole King's Tapestry and the strummy self-awareness of Jackson Browne's early Asylum Records releases, but it's his noticeable theatricality that sets him apart.

The Dark Horse shares [the debut's] deliberate sense of pacing, precious attention to detail and hermetic sound-world atmosphere; the difference here is that almost every song builds to a crucial moment where the Besnards bravely step out of the shadows, and in the process, transform from being a merely good band to a great one.

Aqueduct's most relaxed numbers are the strongest, where guitar, piano, and synth fuse in rare harmony.

My issue with Copia-- the thing that keeps this record from greatness-- is Cooper's approach to piano.

The most enjoyable High Llamas record in over a decade.

With Ash Wednesday, Elvis Perkins has emerged as an assured, fully-formed cosmopolitan able to merge readily recognizable influences with a sense of theatre too often missing from the legion of similarly-intentioned performers.

Unfortunately, In Advance isn't an EP, and things falter a bit past the halfway mark.

Like Mum on a smaller scale, or a lightly medicated, loose-lipped Four Tet, his introspective songs sway hazily from image to metaphor, between yesterday's folk and tomorrow's digitalism.

She spends so much time rambling about her pain that she never bothers even to try to make us feel it.

Tones of Town may lack the swooning immediacy of its predecessor, but it still sounds like a labor of love.

While these [linking tracks] suggest Schneider's appreciation for the short-form work of electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, they stop well short of giving Wonder the thematic consistency it seeks (and needs).

When A Weekend in the City comes bursting out at you with a gaggle of second-album upgrades-- new tricks, new scope, new arrangements-- the bulk of them sound like good ideas: They've been executed by hard-working professionals.

There are building blocks for something fantastic in most of these pieces, but only in two of them have they been used to make more than the sum of their parts.

While Lerche remains a promising young songwriter, Phantom Punch doesn't quite fulfill that promise.

This is comfort music, and comfort never goes out of style. And while the aura of dreamy romantic abstraction is the same, Svanängen distinguishes himself from his peers on the structural level.

Certainly they want to expound upon the past, not to replicate it, which makes Like Love Lust their most adventurous album to date, and in some ways their most calculated and self-conscious.