While Jurado's records often alternate between vanishing ballads and melancholy pop-rockers, Shadow revolves entirely around the former-- the songs are unstintingly slow, delicate, and sparse to the brink of abstraction.

Normal Happiness is a slightly-above-mediocre release from an artist who never dared to be mediocre; just inconsistent.

What's surprising is that The Tragic Treasury turns out to be the most consistently enjoyable record Merritt has released this century.

McCaughan's confidence, in his talents and his songs, is readily apparent throughout this album, and the result is his best non-Superchunk work to date.

It's a torn and somewhat confused record, but a more decisive one wouldn't have suited them or their subject matter.

Harness doesn't deliver many surprises or follow through on the promise of the debut; it simply refines the sounds they explored and digs its heels in a little deeper.

The Kooks take elements from their up-and-coming peers and a name from Hunky Dory, achieving an adolescent universality that's at once their strongest pitch and greatest failing.

The Akrons' striking group harmonies are at a greater premium here than before, but the grainy, more intimate production retains a sense of communal participation.

Although The Information contains some of his most aware, intriguing lyrical head-scratchers yet, the familiar musical settings are something of a letdown from an artist famous for complete reinvention.

Not fully realizing where their strengths and weaknesses lie makes Sam's Town, despite the drastic makeover, roughly equivalent to Hot Fuss, a mediocre album surrounding a few towering singles.

[Finn] not only has a commanding, rousing voice but he also says something worth hearing, displaying gifts for both scope and depth that are all too rare in contemporary rock-- indie or mainstream.

We know that that the DFA can do dynamic mutation as well as anyone, but Chapter Two reveals that it's their quest to become pioneers of the hypnotic groove that is the more seductive.

The band is, if anything, more confident than ever, but the sound's grandiosity too easily verges on melodrama, a too-bold-to-be-believable misery.

Winsomely balancing frivolity and gravity, the Decemberists assemble an oddball menagerie of the usual rogues and rascals, soldiers and criminals, lovers and baby butchers-- but they've got a lot more tricks up their sleeves than previous albums had hinted.

Olé! Tarantula isn't his best solo record, but it's in the top tier, and after all these years that's certainly something.

Humble and resigned to a fault.

After Run to Ruin, it's difficult to hear Nastasia pull back to a songwriter-with-guitar style.

The chemistry has changed, the music is harder, the frustration's more palable, and you can hear that this is some kind of a make-or-break moment. And this time they made it-- just.

Listening to Joe endlessly bombard the listener with rejiggered cliches and breathless streams of imagery and other examples of his lyrical craft, it sounds less like skillful, effortless writing and more like showy, over-considered craftwork.

Bands like Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Spiritualized, and Slowdive will come to mind, but this is neither pastiche nor homage.

For the kind of soul-caressing folk bobbins Adem aspires to deliver, go with Grizzly Bear.

Most listeners with a soft spot for those early-90s Lemonheads records will get a good spin out of The Lemonheads.

Even more streamlined, pop-minded, and high-spirited than their 2004 self-titled debut, it's as if they're single-mindedly attempting to depose the world's problems with a rigorous dance and good times regimen.

Dreamt for Light Years proves less targeted than 2001's It's a Wonderful Life, but this is a check in the plus column: Linkous sounds best when he's warring with structure and sound, when his songs sound unsettled.

etric's clunky riffage and hi-hat beats are replaced by simple piano figures and subtle adornments (strings, feedback, breathing organ) that draw out Haines' most stirring vocal performances to date, and the muted milieu highlights her natural, sensuous whisper, lending a sympathetic thrust to these broken-down anthems for a thirtysomething girl.

When these scientists hit on the right formula of slow-burning anticipation, the bombast that follows has the profundity of a drug-induced epiphany. Previous Wolf Eyes records have struck that magic balance during individual songs or sides, but none have stretched it over an album's length like Human Animal.

Release Therapy is probably Luda's best album since Back for the First Time, but it's not like that's saying much.

Any live show will inevitably have crests and valleys, but besides these specific performances, Okonokos disappoints on a more general level: It too seldom sounds like an actual live album.

This album should alienate virtually everyone who's ever been a Shadow fan.

Even when Dunckel stays closer to type, here he usually relies on unremarkable downtempo beats to support unfortunate space-hippie mewlings.

There's little here that couldn't have been on previous albums; the difference is what's gone missing: the in-your-face homosexuality of Rough Trade debut The Smell of Our Own, the perverse grandiosity of 2004's Mississauga Goddam.

Most sad sack numbers here wallow in a shallow sense of self-pity.

Unlike Oldham's best work, The Letting Go doesn't pull you into its own emotional world; it doesn't ask much, and you're free to take as much from it as you'd like.

Nuclear Daydream sounds placeless, as if striving for universality. At times the music sounds like it could actually achieve that lofty goal; at times it just sounds blanched, drifting into a kind of anonymity.

Where Fiasco misses classic status is his sonic approach.

Super Extra Gravity is too deft to be too dark, though-- there's joy in its catharsis.

Maybe that's why this album has such an incredible pull: It doesn't make an atmosphere so much as a space to spend time in, and Adebimpe doesn't become a narrator so much as a witness.

Synths lap, strings weep soppingly, ham-fisted fingers tap, time signatures flash, and the amphetamine Beat poetry...is amphetamine Beat poetry.

Crazy Itch Radio isn't a bad album by any means; it just doesn't scream "best album of the year" from the moment you put it on.

So This Is Goodbye isn't just an improbable notch above 2004's Last Exit-- it's also among the best records you'll hear all year.

It's impressive then, that even with this newfound attention to detail, the Rapture still maintain a flailing energy and enthusiasm that most of the other dancepunk bands could only fake.... However, what ultimately makes Pieces a step or three down from Echoes is a drop off in consistency, reflecting a higher percentage of songs that fail to ignite.

It is this excess of ambition over achievement, as opposed to any real consistency, which makes FutureSex/LoveSounds more of an album than Justified was. Songs which sound puzzlingly self-indulgent in isolation-- most obviously, the smirking, tenuously tuneful first single "SexyBack"-- are cloaked in a compelling intensity and purposefulness when played in succession.

Everything they've done well in the past is found on here somewhere.

Despite the Album Leaf's studied textures and buoyant songcraft, there is a crippling lack of tension inherent within Into the Blue Again's careful constructions.

Magic Potion is a record where overwhelming competence meets measured restraint, but for me, sacrilege trumps sincerity, and I'd rather hear tuneful blasphemy than a tasteful snoozer of an album.

This is an impressive record in many respects, and its hooks and patterns only emerge after many plays, but it's also an oddly distant one.

For an album with such a diverse sound palette, it spends too much time in one mode-- sincere, mid-tempo grandeur-- to be more than another solid, perfectly listenable album.

Get Yr Blood Sucked Out is confident, psychedelic, hard-hitting, and the best noise they've made yet.

Their most understated, surprisingly sweetest album to date.

Meadow picks up where his 2004 Merge bow Dents and Shells left off.

If Blood Mountain, their brilliantly upsized and unrelenting third album, doesn't confirm their position as the greatest big-time metal crew on earth, I demand a state-by-state recount.

I'd say Fading Trails is the best Magnolia's done, unless you count the nominally Songs:Ohia-made Magnolia Electric Co., which I do, and which is still the best Molina product out.

Sophisticated as all this is, bits of it still flop, and other bits seem like they've gone overboard on the sophistication.

Taiga is OOIOO's broadest, busiest, and furthest reaching album to date. Strangely, those same characteristics ruin it.

Unfortunately, the frontman's crazed growl dashes any nuanced developments the band has reached in their songwriting, maintaining a grating tone consistently throughout.

B'Day sounds like an entire album of third and fourth singles, which is still better than an album of filler.

Beyond production, Grizzly Bear have stepped up their songwriting in every way, assembling melodies that proceed in a logical fashion but never sound overused or overly familiar. Yellow House is a much better record than we could rightfully have expected from these guys, better, even, than we could have imagined them making.

The album as a whole is moderately enjoyable while it's on, but that's about it.

They've also outgrown the "garage," pushing things into the richer, more sophisticated outdoors.

The biggest disappointment here is that Modern Times is probably Dylan's least-surprising release in decades-- it's the logical continuation of its predecessor, created with the same band he's been touring with for years, fed from familiar influences, and sprinkled with all the droll, anachronistic bits now long-expected.

A streamlined product that die-hards can justly revel in.

Like its predecessors, Three's Co. mixes the sun-soaked power pop proclivities of Teenage Fanclub with the sylvan jangle of Felt, though the Tyde too often seem afraid to really make waves.

It's as if Primal Scream have run completely out of ideas and so they've reverted to the detestable fallbacks of honking harmonicas and bar-band choogles, acting like college freshmen who just discovered blues.

The first seven songs kill, but the album's second half drags on longer than a Def Jam debut.

Initially, it’s thrilling in the way that any spectacle is. You admire the creative largesse, and there’s no doubt a strong 12-song album here. But at 79 minutes, exhaustion sets in by the midway mark, and the whole of the album takes on the feeling of someone trying to cap a broken water main.

They've jettisoned nearly all their Strokes, Television, and other grab bag post-punk propensities, turning instead to adult alternative as a foundation for this late-20s midlife crisis. I guess if ya can't beat 'em, just quit and make soft rock!

Here's the first full-length Broadcast product that pulls back the veil and lets us hear big stretches of what it's like when they're trying sounds out, getting abstract, being well and truly difficult.

Damaged is lovely but dull in spots, lacking the fuck-all adventurousness of previous albums.

So Darnielle doesn't sing about anger; he sings about loss, and in a way the results are as dark and brutal as The Sunset Tree.

With its emphasis on traditional craft and instrumentation instead of brooding experimentation, 1968 finds Pajo fully inhabiting the rootsy folk-rock he's been warily circling for years.

Like every jerk who reads an Orwell or Rand novel and walks around a few days with a chip on his/her shoulder, Starsailor play the self-righteous yet simplistic social critic.

The Body's story is just vague and gruesome enough to be weirdly terrifying, totally Orwellian, and grander, louder, and more electrifying than anything the Thermals have spit out before.

Post-War isn't perfect, but it's all the more listenable for that fact.

Honey's more fleshed-out productions show Millan has the ability to be engaging on her own, but they are too scarce to make this album anything more than a humble footnote.

In spite of its flaws, To the Races charms with its somber atmosphere.

In contrast [to 'Donuts'], The Shining is more of a general audience record, by virtue of its song-length tracks and pervasive vocals from Dilla and his crew. As such, it presents challenges that Donuts didn't.

With the oddball charisma toned down and the lens zooming in on Kelis' melisma-adverse vocals, one is left with the sense that all of these songs could be bigger and more distinct, but it's hard to pinpoint how exactly. This drawback is also ultimately the album's draw: Given time to settle in, many of these songs are among Kelis's most charming, ingratiating themselves with surprising ease.

Like Infiniheart, Skelliconnection is undermined by seemingly random sequencing, still feeling more like a hodgepodge compilation than an album with a purposeful arc... But Skelliconnection still stands as an impressive document of VanGaalen's intuitive and inventive songwriting.

Classics is more varied in texture and tempo and tone than its predecessor. But aside from "Lex", a pretty obvious "Seventeen Years" rehash, and "Wildcat", which samples actual fucking panther roars, there are no curtain raisers, just a whole lot more suggestion.

This quartet's assured sound-and-fury is perplexingly difficult to care about.

When Kill Them With Kindness works it's because of Fein and Wraight's keen attention to melody and the way their voices complement one another and inject these songs with warmth and emotion.

For fans missing the pause-in-the-thunderstorm pregnant solitude of Songs:Ohia, Let Me Go will get you that fix you've been craving, a teasingly short half-hour reminder of his old persona.

For what it's worth, Waterloo goes round-for-round with Doherty's solo vehicle, but too much of its pop luster succumbs to could've/should've-been pathos, both lyrically and musically.

Just like last time around, Avatar is something for the plebes, the purists, the dabblers, and the old heads all at once-- a crossover in the best sense of the word.

One might suppose that solo album(s) from the chief Furnaces songwriter Matthew Friedberger would magnify his flaws/assets, and in the case of Winter Women and Holy Ghost Language School, one would be correct.

Let's just say Tower of Love isn't out to offend or challenge or discomfit anyone. But the album's less simplistic than it comes on, obviously, its snugly melodies decorated with snaking structures and surprising instrumentation.

With its wealth of stellar collaborations, Brooklyn bodes well for the next full-fledged Wu LP, should it ever come to pass.

With a more imaginative compiler--and fewer Big Names whose fame peaked years ago-- Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited could have turned out so much different.

Too much of the album either throws the group into truly unflattering contexts or returns them to the hamster-wheel formalism they’ve been running into the ground for years now.

The idea that a producer of his caliber can’t put together something resembling a likeable LP-- particularly in light of his endlessly amusing Gangsta Grillz mixtape, In My Mind: The Prequel-- is insane. Here, he’s shot himself in the foot. Where the mixtape exploded with enthusiasm and wit, In My Mind the album is corroded and ineffectual. Worse, it’s predictable.

So no shocker then that One Day sounds less the work of punk provocateurs than a Keith Richards solo album: grizzled rock vets backed by a nominally gritty if too-well-rehearsed troupe of young(er) hired guns.

There's an impressive coherence on Derdang Derdang, showing how well ABO has developed an original and guiding aesthetic.

Putting the Days to Bed is a solid effort-- a step in a promising new direction.

I’m beginning to think it’s one of the smartest records-- musically and lyrically-- we’ll hear all year.

Personality is an immediate, alluring, and frequently arresting song cycle that plays to Steele's core strengths-- his dreamily effeminate voice and melancholic melodies-- while wisely abandoning Lovers' half-hearted attempts at mod garage-rock and electro-disco.

Erase Errata might not be as playful as they once were, but they're much better.

As menacing as it is hooky, this is some bracing stuff.

It is beautiful, emotive music, literally and figuratively entrancing.