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.

An encouraging but ultimately disappointing contemplation of time's ceaselessness, love's promise, and Harvest-era Neil Young.

Unfortunately, as with music that draws from familiar musical influences, White Whale occasionally lapse into more predictable territory.

Whatever subtlety Germano's voice and lyrics might lack is buttressed by the deceptive simplicity of her music.

Another Fine Day offsets some of what it lacks in freshness with aw heck poker-night camaraderie.

For all the improved minutiae, French Kicks simply can't shed the "boring" tag.

Keeler succeeds in meticulously reconstructing the electronic music he clearly has a taste for, but without stirring in any of his own personality the songs do little more than run in place, joylessly hitting the marks without changing the rules in any meaningful or attention-grabbing way.

What matters most is, with Monochrome, Helmet is back to doing what they do best.

When they stop arching their eyebrows and put some work into doing time-tested pop stuff, they can be great.

This is the band's most autopiloted effort yet, a hacked-up last-gen rehash of said space jams, only now with greater emphasis on glitz and glam. Somehow Muse, always loveably lame, have managed to take a turn for the lamer.

There's no unifying principal here-- just songs that are kinda psychedelic, kinda groove-oriented, and kinda long. While not exactly a disappointment, Happy New Year is a whole lot of "kinda," a record built around hesitancy that clutches the payoff tight in its arms.

Impeach My Bush is without a doubt her most competent record yet... But it also seems not to trust itself, always returning to the obvious tricks, making things right rather than keeping them as disorientingly rough-edged as her debut.

It's hard not to compare the two albums and find this one wanting; even the best songs, which are quite good, wouldn't bump anything off of Illinois.

Where The Eraser sags is in the middle, with tracks 3-5 falling particularly flat. Like too many of Radiohead's new songs, they contain a single weak idea dragged on interminably.

An album of tepid and stylistically muddled techno.

The dull patches are particularly depressing when you realize how much work went into them for so little payoff.

Through the Windowpane is at times a last-dance hallelujah, at other times an open wound, but it's never meager, and hardly ever mundane.

It's a satisfying and often moving final chapter to Cash's life and career, one that rejects self-pity and remorse in favor of hopefulness and even celebration.

It's a huge headfirst leap into the unknown for Kidwell, and more often than not, he sounds pretty lost. But it's an encouraging kind of lost, and the scenery is often breathtaking when it's not so jarring.

Much of it seems strangely blank, neither great nor at all sub-par.

The Return is supposedly a Kool Keith album, but four of the 14 tracks are skits, two mangle his vocals so the producers can show off their DJing, and one is a Princess Superstar song with Keith on the hook.

Plan B manages to milk his biographical plight without resorting to the childhood-trauma-as-pissing-contest tactics of most memoirists.

There is a very good album here-- you just have to work for it.

The strangest thing about Loose isn't its irregularity, but the simple fact that this doesn't sound like Nelly Furtado at all.

Iron Sea is filled with the sort of greeting-card poetry that would even give Bono pause.

As a solo record, it's no declaration of independence, but by sticking to what he does best, Staples makes it ring with sadness and sophistication.

The word "Hypnotic"'s overused, but the band's spatial know-how and rigorously muted flourishes are more than deserving of the accolade. It's well-deep, blossoming ambiance.

The Divine Comedy's constants are a Wildean wit with an apposite sense of style, and they persist on extravagant ninth album Victory for the Comic Muse.

While less exuberant and love-me-or-else desperate than the debut, News and Tributes is energizing in its own right, full of asymmetrical hooks and surprise detours.

An uneven album that unfortunately contains several such missed opportunities.

As far as improvements go, The Warning isn't so much a triumph as it is a reach in the right direction.

None of these are musical or artistic epiphanies, but it's Lif's realization that his problems are commonplace that makes Mo' Mega more interesting than his other stuff.

A treacherous, crashing disaster.

If you've ever been intrigued by the sound of the sun imploding, this should be your cup of hemlock.

Doused with sleek and slippery riffs, the album's early succession of propulsive, three-minute art-pop songs is especially strong.

On the whole her performance throughout Begin to Hope exhibits new levels of control and direction, reaching a point where the song and the singing are inseparable.

That the least interesting material falls to the back is unfortunate, because most of the album is engaging.

Close attention reveals an album of highly varied moods and textures.