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.

Live It Out is stymied by lame riffing and unqualified wonkage.

[A] crushing bore of a detour.

It's hard to get out of Suckfish once it's on.

Fans of handclaps, who don't mind that Berlin sings as many lines about doing lines as he does protest lines, marching lines and battle lines, will have fun pretending to be epic along with these Velvet Ramones.

Unfortunately, the lengthy center of this record is a brick of brooding, mid-tempo dullness.

Jacksonville City Nights is a well-lit snapshot of a talented mythmaker modeling his best honky-tonk garb-- and this time, holy shtick, the tailoring is almost impeccable.

In Space would be a decent Posies album, and there's enough for a passable Chilton solo joint, but as a Big Star release, it's inescapably disappointing.

Fans of the group's previous work-- and of Solesides/Quannum-related material in general-- will find treats within The Craft's many folds, but its irregular terrain will likely prevent consensus about which tracks represent the peaks and which the troughs.

A goofy, sloppy mini-album, cramming familiar Weezer fuzz, stoned piano ballads, playful analogue synths, and misguided Bad Company references into a little more than half an hour.

Bianchi's not much for such subtleties, emotional or rhetorical, which may suggest he'll have as much lovelorn electro-symphonic melodrama to recount on future albums as on those past and present.

Try as you might, searching for vestiges of the ol' Morcheeba is futile.

Unfortunately, Supergrass doesn't really ever harness any of the momentum they create on individual songs to make a truly great LP.

On paper this all could sound average, but Wolf Parade's true talent is transforming the everyday into the unprecedented.

Young's music is so rooted in the past, specifically the spirit of the 60s, that his stabs at contemporary relevance sound awkward and even curmudgeonly.

In its best moments, Collisions has an edge that's grittier and more emphatic than its predecessor.

The Naked Truth may be better than 80% of the other rap albums to be released in 2005, but that don't make it another Ready to Die.

With a Cape and a Cane sounds merely like a solid indie rock record on a passing listen; give it a few more spins and you will be rewarded.

It's among the most fascinating music I've heard and deserves a listen by anyone with even the remotest interest in the possibilities of sound.

Set Free is ultimately just another American Analog Set album-- and probably the least essential at that.

What you have with Tender Buttons is a Broadcast album that listeners might need to spend more time with than expected. That said, this is still a Broadcast album, meaning it's one of the better things you'll put in your ear this year.

If nothing else, Siberia proves McCulloch and Sergeant still have their songwriting craft in good working order, but it's hard to recommend an album on strength of craft alone-- it has to have a little verve, and unfortunately it's lacking.

Even where Certified doesn't entirely congeal, Banner gets by on personality and an ever-sharpening focus.

By culling from early releases and rescuing tracks from last year's tepid Drag It Up, the band showcases a surprisingly deep and ridiculously rich canon of loser anthems ("Wish the Worst"), dark ballads ("Salome"), odes to romantic doubt and suspicion ("The Other Shoe"), cowboy calls ("West Texas Teardrops"), and frenzied barnstormers ("Doreen")-- all written and played with generous humor and genuine exhilaration.

Not to malign their previous catalog, which certainly trumps most of today's post-punk regurgitates, but Family Myth proves fewer studio tricks lead to tighter songwriting.

Cripple Crow is undoubtedly impressive, vastly singular but entirely accessible, and an inspired listening experience where Banhart again proves himself one of the more talented and charismatic forces in modern folk.

Give Blood falls squarely in the "pleasant surprise" camp; a gift to short attention spans everywhere.

One of the most annoying records you're liable to remember.

Only the truly earless would mistake this assortment of bloated in-jokes and interminable, sub-song drones for some kind of masterpiece.

Whether or not Iron & Wine and Calexico ever choose to follow this up with another collaboration (fingers crossed), it's clear that both acts are stronger for having worked with the other.

The tendency to descend into new age goo is still present, and Takk, like all of Sigur Rós' discography, is not for the viscerally-minded. Regardless, the record is more than just meaningless wisps.

Harmonies for the Haunted seems as familiar as Stellastarr*'s 2003 debut, and that's at once its chief cincher and problem.

A utopian epic, a sweeping musical argument for love in the time of Fallujah.

These periodic lapses of over-constraint are especially disappointing given the group's obvious talent for making spontaneous mid-air adjustments to their sound; but there's enough evidence here to be optimistic that one day soon the group will gain the swagger necessary to more consistently abandon themselves to their wilder sonic impulses.

Time has allowed Nada Surf to uncover the truth in the trite, but it has also eroded some of the band's personality.

With Herbert, I've always been happy to consider the political content of the records to be a clever bonus, while the music as a purely sonic experience is allowed to stand on its own. I listened to Plat du Jour five or six times without paying attention to the song titles and not having read the online methodological descriptions, and this one didn't hold up quite so well.

We're Animals still has haywire guitars, bushwhacking rhythms, and those homemade synthesizers we're always hearing about, but the real story is the band's conflicted strategy for melody.

A dark, disconcerting record that derives its power from restraint. It's Southern gothic through the filter of Ernest Hemingway, with the frightening stuff left off the page but seeping between the lines.