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.

It's all terribly charming. Too bad lyrics are straight from soporific bio class margin-notes.

There's the potential for something here; as of If Songs Could Be Held, it's yet unrealized.

There are great stand-alone songs here, like the 1960s-at-78-rpm sugar rush of "Eyes", but Apollo Sunshine is best listened to in a full dose and appreciated in all its messy glory.

It's flighty, frustrating, and at times a little frigid, but intelligent and never lacking in momentum.

Coles Corner is unapologetically retro to the max but it works.

Amber Headlights is a step backwards after the lush beats and subdued songs of the Twilight Singers' debut, 2000's Twilight, but it also seems weak following the harrowing Blackberry Belle and even the so-so covers album She Loves You.

The Coral have reverted to a subdued and almost jaded sound-- Invisible Invasion reveals way too many wrinkles and stretch marks for a band barely into their twenties.

In a way, it's comforting to know what you're getting: Four or five songs you'll treasure, four or five you'll tolerate, and a pretty good band sticking to their guns.

Mimicry is one thing, but at least choose wisely. You see, OK Go decide to impersonate post-Pinkerton, post-catchy, fun-by-numbers Weezer, resulting in an Ivy Leaguer Sugar Ray sound.

The sprawling Late Registration is the year's most accomplished rap album, and in turn, he's done something that his heroes-- the Pharcyde and Nas, and father figure Jay-Z-- couldn't do: deliver on a promise the second time around.

After two albums of post-Britpop mediocrity, Manchester trio I Am Kloot kick things up a notch (or think they do), and suffer from bipolarity and an ambition that outstrips their ability.

Cramming together brash rock snottiness with meek country hollers is hardly uncharted territory (not that it matters), but BRMC's particular mash-up still makes for a strangely intriguing party.

If you're striving to restore faith in a world of "prophets, pimps, angels" and "whores," you gotta do better than Sarah McLachlan melodies and a rented Haitian choir.

Menos el Oso ultimately stumbles on its own self-conscious maturity.

With more developed ideas than Mass Romantic and a more cohesive sound than Electric Version, it's their most consistent, confident, and best album to date.

Bright Ideas is more pleasant than kick-ass or inspired. But for an album this deep into his career, at a time when he could start growing aesthetically antsy, McCaughan sticks to a blueprint that works best.

Haas has a problem: Let that cartoon tech-metal ramp up (or camp up) just a step too far, and it turns into something kind of, well, uncool-- crossing the line from lovably brutal Germanic electronics into something sub-Rammstein, a kind of mallrat military-industrial metal that doesn't really square with the guy's skill set.

Where the Rock*A*Teens played an artful, echo-laden take on rockabilly, Tenement Halls takes traditional pop and plays it through a murky wall of sound.

Some might wish this gift for fastidious arrangements would carry over to the lyrics, which feature a bevy of look-it-up references and descriptions that might stymie attempts at easy listening. It doesn't hurt to do a little research or, like, pay attention to lyrics worth a damn.

That's ultimately the sticking point with Infiniheart: VanGaalen's songs tend toward folly, yet it's impossible to discount his commitment to the material.

Veirs is maybe the gazillionth iteration of the quiet voice and plucked guitar, but she serves as a potent reminder how variable and compelling that combination can be.

A mopey bunch of trite sap O.D.-type tales almost as unstomachable as the band's former crapothecary hymns.

A couple of really cool parts, and the rest I don't feel so bad for forgetting.

Inside/Absent is a nice listen, but doesn't hint at anything greater to come-- a frustrating flaw for an album already unexcited with itself.

Songwriting chemistry is a tricky thing, and while having two or three competing voices can push writers to new heights, a group of five here leads to songs that are merely passable.

The album's laissez-faire production fails to anchor its quaint, melody-allergic songs. In turn, Elverum's retiring vocals float to the top, which is a horrible place for them.

May stand as the band's most focused disc to date.

Although there will always be certain comfort in Margo Timmins' voice, her limitations are frustrating.

Hatfield has nothing new to say besides "You don't know what it's like to be perfect," and it might explain her perfect-person tendency toward carelessness-- guitar solos, grating vocals, overdone crabbiness-- all signs that point to thinly veiled midlife crisis rock.

Quit +/or Fight may lack the immediate melodic punch of the band's debut-- it forsakes pristine strums for skewering electric guitar and scrappier arrangements-- but what the record sacrifices in warmth, it makes up for in atmospherics.

It's not quite the masterpiece everyone (at least me) was hoping for... but it does deliver on the hype, which in 2005 is almost the same thing.

When the Shock does muster a strong melody, he makes a synth-pop jam out of it, and those are Maritime's better moments.

Sons & Daughters are far from perfect, but The Repulsion Box is an energetic, sometimes thrilling record by a band slowly but surely carving out a unique niche for themselves.

Expectedly, the longest lost tracks (talking '95, '96) are the most amateurish.

Front Parlour Ballads offers the traditional Thompson mix of lush folk beauty and cruel knife-twisting lyrics.

Early Buck albums had all the professionalism of a late-night weed experiment, but Terfry is growin' up and it shows.

Spelled in Bones, their most polished effort, teeters near soporific. And that's a shame, because it houses some of the band's best songs.

For the most part, Body of Song offers the expected mix of rock tracks and balladry that one would expect from a Bob Mould solo record.

They're pop in perhaps the most literal sense of the word-- their songs POP out at you, glowing bright blue-green like a Nike tracksuit.

Has its inspired moments but ultimately comes off like something of a vanity project.

Marjorie Fair's shiny Beach Boys-meets-Pernice Brothers act suffers primarily from well-intentioned overproduction.

Kinski have the potential, the skill, the other requisite intangibles to be awe-inspiring, but somehow they keep shooting left of the mark.

Belladonna sounds technically flawless-- every marimba strike and fret run has a specific texture that's almost miniaturist in its realistic detail-- but it's all in service to vocal-less songs that are ponderous and dull, whose strict adherence to an overriding motif hems them in.

This is the one that puts them firmly and officially up there in the top tier of the dance-music crossover-album crowd, up with the Daft Punks and, umm, Basement Jaxxes.

As the album progresses... Farrar's lyrics become increasingly stilted and veiled, reverting to the forced wordplay and disconnected evocations of his most obscure songs. In the past, this tendency toward purple opacity could be excused, but on Okemah it hinders Farrar considerably.

Words fail ("I'm dying to be living"). They fail early ("You could say we're changing formats" on opener "Final Broadcast"). They fail often ("Through our cell phones we shout"; "Who are you holding when you're sleeping next to me?"; "Ignorance was so blissful"). They fail spectacularly ("This distance is getting tough"), and best of all they're posted.

La Forêt... backs off dramatically from the pop side of Fabulous Muscles to expand upon its quiet, murky dimension.

Nothing mind-blowing here, just an efficient EP filled with enjoyable music.

Instead of the charming, shaggy stoner vibe that permeates most of the current A&C catalog, Cinematographer shows off a nerdier, bookish quality.

Like an untethered spouse suddenly separated from a longtime love, Elliott seems a bit lost somewhere between her intimidating past and her newfound independence.

TP3 Reloaded is one of those albums where every song sounds like a radio single.

Illinois is huge, a staggering collection of impeccably arranged American tribute songs.

What Wilderness really seem to signify-- and what makes them important-- is a shift back towards the more cerebral end of the rock spectrum.

Yet no amount of reverb-drenched vocals, acid-flashback harmonies or Hammond organs can prevent The Bees from being a bunch of blokes from the Isle of Wight who happen to have better record collections than songwriting abilities.

Listen to Multiply once and you'll be struck by how reverent it is; listen to it three times and you'll start to notice the microscopic digital artifacts and subtle tweaks that give it personality and pop.

The record is consistently, remarkably strong.

The surprise is that it's as cohesive as it is, with remixers and remixes alike plumbing the same lines of soft-edged, computer-processed home-listening lullabies.

If Out-of-State Plates is about as revelatory as your typical garage sale, it's not because these are necessarily bad songs (except for their lamentable cover of "...Baby One More Time")-- it's just that most of them seem somehow defective, one element overpower-popping the others.

This record doesn't intend to blow your hair back; it wants to get under your skin, and with its twinkling arpeggios, morbidly graceful lyrics, and barely there electronics, slowly, it does.

U.S.A. is a good-not-great Southern rap album, overlong and weighted down by too many inept slow tracks but boasting enough furious, kinetic dance tracks to make it worth your money.

When the recycled smoke clears, Little Barrie could use more songwriting help from their patrons (Moz, [Edwyn] Collins) and less hu-huh inspiration from Ocean Colour Scene's lobotomy-trad bong.

The band still wants to rub shoulders with the its moody English influences, but dabbling in styles you're ill-equipped for, weaving unnecessarily recurring themes into the songs, or piling on incidental effects-pedal sounds for atmosphere aren't going to inherently elevate your music.

So it's not the jaw-dropping affirmation of the Posies' non-break-up that we might have hoped for, but Every Kind of Light is ultimately a decent record spiked with a few classic moments of patent posies pop ecstasy.