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.

Kano doesn't just defy the sonic tradition of grime on Home Sweet Home, he defies the tidy boxes MCs are usually plopped in upon their arrival.

Like its predecessors, it's full of sweetly sung melodies and deceptively simple arrangements of originals and lovingly chosen covers.

So, forgive Corgan his infinite lyrical badness, but know that infinity's a lot to forgive.

Their gentle approach is justified by the fact that their songs are quite memorable, written with a sense of grandeur and astral beauty.

Electrified's rife with cardboard power chord progressions that should've been buried with all the other Nirvana aftermath opportunists.

Another Day on Earth is produced to within an inch of its life, with layers of intricate detail and the most ethereal synth washes imaginable.

In Your Honor, like most Foo Fighters records, is sterile and controlled; there is never any threat of dissolution.

For a genre that wants to evoke mysterious, uncharted territories, it's beginning to show signs of predictability, and while Odd Nosdam hews admirable results from it, it's just about time for an increasingly defined border to be pushed outward, into more nebulous territory, again.

Discover a Lovelier you isn't really even a bad album, only unremarkably OK.

The Oranges Band's playing is impressive but never flashy, and the melodies are inviting without being cloying.

Never have they turned in an effort as pretty or economical as Out of Nothing.

This all-star team of Northern European electro-house producers infuses the record with often low, rumbling bass, twitchy synths, and an oddly high-altitude light-headedness-- like floating, high on oxygen, just above a dancefloor.

Like Coldplay's two previous albums, only more so, X&Y is bland but never offensive, listenable but not memorable.

Man-Made ultimately sounds exactly like you'd expect a Teenage Fanclub album to sound, but with just enough extra to make it feel new again.

Even with a generous handful of tracks that easily rank alongside the White Stripes' best work, Get Behind Me Satan remains a confounding record, one that wears its "transitional album" tag like a heavy peppermint-striped crown.

As a career overview Minimum-Maximum far surpasses The Mix. This record's "importance" in the Kraftwerk story is up for debate, but there's no question it's a hell of a lot of fun.

In a sense Turin Brakes do little wrong on Jackinabox aside from the occasional gooey outbursts of gaiety.

She's onto some good shit here, but there's too much learning on the job.

There's nothing as great as "New Generation", "She's Not Dead", or "The 2 of Us" but there doesn't have to be, either, because the Tears have enough natural dynamism of their own to stand alone.

We Are Monster has the depth if you have the time. Yep, here's a fun record that's a work-for-it, in-the-details record, too.

Although not as compelling as his more subversive material, this softening of his sound doesn't carry the negative connotation of an artist losing steam later in his career; Callahan's distinctive baritone and cutting inflection are unchanging and iconic, and show that this sensitive appearance is just one more spin of the kaleidoscope.

There are a lot of reasons this album doesn't gel, not least that Liam Gallagher now sounds like a singing anti-smoking campaign, and the brash, snotty arrogance that once sold "Cigarettes and Alcohol" and "Champagne Supernova" is crushed out by his gruffness.

Everything Ecstatic marks his first slight step backward as a solo artist but it's hardly a failure.

The band's lack of swagger is refreshing amid the hot fussed-over convicts and misogynistic sun kings of the New Wave sphere, but it also hampers the less convincing tracks.

J.A.C. is ultimately a simple record covering well-worn territory that is no less engaging for its familiarity.

Like the Gorillaz's self-titled debut, Demon Days goes the way of most auteur projects, its oversize idea load making for a trip equal parts peak and valley. But also like the debut, Demon Days is better than it has any right to be, featuring singles stronger than anything released under the Blur banner since, you know, that "Woo-hoo" song.

Despite the new song structures, guitar solos, and drum fills, Brownstein's guitar still roars wildly, Weiss's drums still thunder, and Tucker still wails with a primal urgency that is one of the most compelling sounds in rock music today.

[No quote available.]

Behind this happy clash of stylistic preferences is a subtly but surely revivified Malkmus, confident to experiment more deliberately than ever.

The lack of instant-gratification couplets may disappoint at first, but each verse's rewarding intricacies become more evident with multiple listens.

It's a perfect way into the world of Belle and Sebastian, even if the band spends the second half of the disc trying to redecorate that space.

As opposed to the didactic nature of the booklet, the audio portion of No Business tends more toward arch satire of the ongoing debate over fair use in digital media, creating a précis of its contradictions and ideological schisms rather than advancing a particular thesis.

With The Secret Migration, the band completely deserts the peculiarities that distinguished them from both peers and progeny in favor of a dull collection of pastoral fantasias that frequently wander dangerously close to adult contemporary.

Mezmerize's strongest moments are when the band drops the eccentricities and just rocks out.

The taught 12 tracks mark the producer's most diverse and song-based work yet.

The vaguely Brian Wilson-esque harmonies manage to keep the listener grounded as the entertaining gobbledygook passes by.