The band's latest extends their newfound confidence to content as well as delivery, and stands as the finest full-length by Stuart Murdoch and his shifting collaborators since [If You're Feeling Sinister].

This album drops four consecutive hard rock stinkbombs to kick things off... Senor Smoke's saddest aspect, however, is its yearning for another dance-floor single.

Far from perfect-- at times even dull-- these songs balance their heavy despair with genuine, if hesitant, hope.

Gun finds songwriter's songwriter McCaughey slightly stuck in his own unique, nuanced niche.

There isn't much in here that could be considered hip, or that shows technical skill. But there's a total gut-level joy, as if these were tracks made by an ecstatic, well-meaning kid who hadn't yet encountered the complicated concerns of the places people might actually dance to them.

Security Screenings is a marked improvement over last year's directionless Surrounded by Silence.

If this is your first exposure to Clogs, you've picked a fantastic time to become acquainted.

Magnificent City is lazy and inept, devoid of force and inspiration and chemistry.

Idols of Exile is consistently solid; the songs are fully realized and, ultimately, memorable.

The end result is akin to Norman Smith and DJ Shadow sitting in on a RZA-produced session-- spry, voiceless prog-hop by any other name.

It seems particularly odd that for all the time and sweat Stoltz has put into this music, there's no sense of a real person behind these songs, just a tightly wound bundle of ideas borrowed from likely pop sources.

While I'd love to say this is the album that breaks the holding pattern, Last Night holds a palm full of surprises and otherwise stretches the underdog charm a little thin.

There are minor moments when Demo's slight r&b hooks miss and when Sway deviates too far from his good-natured strengths, but the lion's share is ace-- thoughtful but not pedantic, funny but not stupid, sincere but not treacly, realistic but not boring.

Too much of Sexor feels suspiciously like the middle of the road.

The most fully-realized thing-- if not the most exciting one-- the band has released since 1994's Tiger Bay.

Generation is a sonic mess, all weightless synth swish, dull beats, and maybe-ironic midi horns.

Like all Cat Power records, The Greatest is a mostly sad, heartbroken, hopeless, rainy-day affair; it just isn't damaged. For that reason, it's also going to gain her a lot of new fans.

Frequently gorgeous but over-lubed, the album forges soundscapes so lush they're almost narcotic.

Sun, Sun, Sun is a modern pop simulacrum of traditional country, devoid of the electro accents that pocked the last Elected record, pretty delectable as long as you've a strong taste for ham.

On repeated listens, the songwriting makes the album lukewarm.

In short: We all really wish this was better-- less tiring, less dour, less sluggish-- than it actually is.

The most fascinating Bob-project in years.

Unfortunately, bare-bones arrangements, train songs, and good intentions are no shortcut to supposed authenticity, and still less are they a guarantor of overall quality.

The UK trio is hard, fast, and viciously catchy, but above all scary.

While the tight playing and vocal pyrotechnics are impressive, Ditto's narrow lyrical scope gets really redundant.

The Indian Tower rocks in the most literal sense of the word; if that means anything to you, it's really all you need to know.

At times, Film School achieve a foggy, grandiose psychedelia, but their compositions aren't always as shimmering as their production.

What Are You On? bristles with unchecked bitterness that often curdles into condescension.

The biggest hitch is that Electric President seemingly achieve all of their humble goals by mid-album, and so spend almost half their time with pencils down, repeating the day's assignments silently to themselves.

Clearly, these boys can't grasp the concept of "say when."

It's probably the best thing Defever's ever done.

The album does rather muddle the group's ongoing identity, but hopefully future releases can serve to confirm this album as the watershed it now appears to be.

Instead of offering playful, engaging pop music, we get new wave retreads and a couple of rock journeymen and the whole thing comes off like an overgrown episode of MTV's "Making the Band".

Most of these tracks have hooks aimed straight for your jugular, but "Can't Lose" shows the band could go even farther with a little restraint.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the heavy emotional inspiration behind Sia's trebly moans drags on over the course of 50 minutes.

But if the group has grown deadlier and more dynamic in their five years together, singer Julian Casablancas still struggles as a lyricist.

Self-serious and wildly inconsistent (in both ingenuity and style), 29 is hard to swallow without acknowledging and appreciating the record's overarching storyline: getting through your twenties is way hard.

Even for an artist this venerable, a remix record is still a remix record-- generally uneven, part enlightening, and part skippable.

The majority of the tricks, however, come off as cosmetic distractions, attempts to hide that Hawkins' songwriting hasn't grown since Permission to Land.

[It] comes off at first like slight pop-- novelty even. But extended listens reveal a goofy sincerity and romantic insouciance.

As the less ambitious of the two albums, Hypnotize is at once more aggressive and more restrained.

Nothing here feels like soapboxing; instead, the lyrics are subtle and poignant, with as much emphasis on storytelling as dissent.

Stocked with leftovers and ornery jabs at the status quo.

A marvel of pure songcraft.

It's a fittingly strong ending for a band that did almost everything right.

Whether the album achieves its titular synesthesia is debatable, but Bell Orchestre tap into a wide, mesmerizing range of the spectrum.

The album captures an anger and regret intense enough to nearly bruise listeners and attendees, but also manages to preserve the pristine trembles in Oldham's throat.

Despite Price's best efforts to infuse these songs with motion and finesse, Confessions never quite reaches its earlier heights after "I Love New York". When Madonna actually starts confessing, the album loses its delicate balance between pop frivolity and spiritual gravity.

It's a record played in the red, and it's not afraid to have a good time there.

So this is what A Ghost Is Born is supposed to sound like.

His band is tight, but Oberst sounds a bit tense and weighed down on heavily embellished tracks like "At the Bottom of Everything" and Lua B-side "True Blue".

None of the tracks are more noteworthy than anything on Sing "Other People", Angels' latest and straightest LP, and the foreshortened format disables development. But Gira's fatherly measuredness is a nice foil to Akron's hyperkinetic mini-opera.

Far be it from me to criticize happy endings, but in musical terms, a comfortable, even-keeled existence sometimes comes out as isolated and ordinary art.

Not all of Diamond's new songs go awry. Most just go away, their melodies dissipating, their lyrics flimsy even through those tremendous pipes.

Given which songs are chosen and when this is being released, Scab Dates is a neither a concession nor a step forward, revealing inclinations that feel half as indulgent as they should when following a record like Frances the Mute, and about half as interesting to listen to.

The box is scattered, as expected, but the songs collected go a long way to indicate that, contrary to popular belief, Pollard has a measure of control over his songwriting.

Lacking the emotional knack for jaw-dropping singles, the band succeeds in consistently churning out songs that would be solid filler on an amazing album-- a Magical Mystery Tour comprised solely of "Blue Jay Way"'s.

These tracks are botched experiments that can't even function as interesting failures.

A deliriously ambitious record packed with neo-psych lullabies and swooning choruses.

With a penchant for sloppy dance beats and an ear for sonic minutiae, Tom Vek unites skill sets as antipodal as Rapture and Elvrum.

Flimsy replicas of rock history.

On Lookaftering, it comes as a relief to hear not only how pristine Bunyan's delicate vocals remain but that she has retained her understated abilities as a songwriter.

As a think piece, Rehearsing My Choir is enormously engaging, but as a pop record, it's exhausting and fruitless.

In the end, it's hard to decide if Descended Like Vultures is better or worse than Rogue Wave's debut.

Feels is an excellent record, one that, despite a more conventional approach, happens to get better over time.

This feels like a step down from the last two albums.

If you really are the sort of person who's been waiting with bated breath for a new Depeche Mode release, then don't worry: You'll love this. Dear everyone else: It's pretty okay.

It finds the band climbing toward some unknown peak, and while it attains great heights, there's also a now-again sound of wheels spinning, and every reason to believe LB still haven't reached their ultimate destination.

Where 2001's Bright Flight leaned into full-bore country, emphasizing Berman's voice and lyrical content, Tanglewood Numbers is a band-oriented rock record-- crashing, amped-up, aggressively ramshackle.

This album is almost a non-entity.

Cale squanders whatever momentum he accrued on the estimable avant-pop of 2003's HoboSapiens by adorning these new songs with such unflattering, generic alternarock textures that they often render their author unrecognizable at best, and irrelevant at worst.

An album with a sharp ear and a positive, inclusive atmosphere.

Lo-fi veneer aside, Beckett's songs could plausibly receive the same seven-word description as an Art Brut masterpiece-- funny lyrics shouted over basic rock riffage-- but here that's as meh as it sounds.

The slight nods to accessibility and the decreased stylization might disappoint some of the faithful at first, but Strange Geometry grows more appealing with repeated listening.

It's gentler than its predecessors, relying on sweat and unresolved tension rather than a glorious gutter-poet deluge, though the change is more of subtleties than of substance.

It's not as revealing as Doom's other work, and Danger Mouse's big, Technicolor productions here are a little too trivial to be immortal. But for what it attempts-- which is basically a comedy record with no-joke skills-- it exceeds expectations.

By turns jubilant, confused, afraid, angry, sad, relieved, all pretty poignant, yes.

If much of it is merely pretty, this is easily the most diverse and wide-ranging Dirty Three record yet, absolutely the right thing for them to be doing at this time.

By remembering the pop elements of the source material he uses to construct his tracks, and incorporating that FM-dial ear for melody into even his most adventurous collage projects, Forrest takes the mashup form beyond gimmickry into an entirely new, refreshingly listenable, excitingly shameless realm.

Bottom line is that if you've got the old albums and you want to experience Gang of Four again, better to shell out for the actual show than for the disc that approximates it.

Where on the first listen I found it merely okay, it's a record that reveals itself as a work of surprising depth and detail when you give it multiple spins.

There is vintage new wave rawness and goth-inflected bounce all over this thing, and it manages to leave this band in fresh-sounding territory that's somehow miles away from most everything today's "new wave revivalists" and/or "electro-punks" have even thought about trying.

So maybe Pond really is just another ordinary-guy exemplar of the ongoing post-Coldplay adult contemporarization of indie, as his ordinary arrangements and ordinarier songs would attest.

Further into the record, the band invests in smaller details, and when it does the songs overcome the lyrical shortcomings.

Closing In is a classic guitar-driven heavy metal record. It's a throwback to early 80s thrash, the era before speed often became a substitute for creative ideas.

The band sounds something like 4AD's entire catalogue being chopped up and fed through a meat-grinder.

Though they certainly do their fair share of sampling, they tend to use fragments as a means of fleshing out the battling, overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barreling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men.

The songwriting falls a couple of times too many into timid generalities about love and loss; the melodies, though lovely, are sometimes interchangeable.

The officially released version of Extraordinary Machine remains a decent-to-good album, one that showcases Apple's considerable vocal and key-pounding talents.... The shame of it all is that Apple, after six years of silence, could've made a more definitive, progressive statement rather than something familiar and similar-- and we've got the bootlegs to prove it.

This exercise in excess makes the ambitious You Forgot It in People seem positively understated by comparison.

The trick is to cede the idea that Franz Ferdinand are meant to deliver the cohesive, moving, traditional Statement Albums their debut may have misled listeners to expect. Some people-- earnest people, like Bloc Party, Sufjan Stevens, and the Arcade Fire-- will go on trying to fill that niche. Franz Ferdinand, though, aren't going to do that, and good on them: We can only hope they'll go on offering us cheeky, energetic surprises.

The Witching Hour is the most urgent and immediate of their career. The earlier records were sort of toylike and plastic; this not only has a pulse, it has chilled blood in its veins.

So Z abandons the Skynyrdisms of It Still Moves, but that album's lessons remain intact: Compared to those on previous albums, these tracks have more guitar crunch and tighter song structures.

Now this is a terrible Liz Phair record.

At the end of the day, though, I'm a bit puzzled over why the world needed an album of Sinead O'Connor reggae covers.

A grab-bag of a Fall album with brilliant highs and scattered lows.

Elephant Eyelash sounds less crisp and less striking than the folk-plus-beats arrangements of 2003's Oaklandazurasylum, but it brings more heart; where that earlier album's lyrics crackled with the anxiety of beating yourself up after a bad day at school, Elephant Eyelash soars like the last songs on prom night.

Like Blackalicious' recent The Craft, it displays a real hard-earned competency, something a decade of recording together will get you. But the lyrics lack transcendence or resonance.