There's a wealth of great material here... all diminished, to various degrees, by genre affectations.

Back to Me is a bolder album [than Failer], with Edwards figuring more prominently and actively in the more personal songs.

There's nothing terribly new to the electro-psych sound he's worked up for himself-- it actually throws back quite a bit to the Roses-- but here he has a clutch of great melodies for him to hang his honey-dipped voice on, and he delivers those nicely.

The album's one redeeming element is the band itself, who-- over the course of one EP and two albums-- have improved tenfold.

The most satisfying and sheerly transfixing work of the twosome's career.

Regrettably, no other song here has a lyric nearly as compelling as "Andalucia"-- a major flaw for what is essentially a pedal steel-enhanced singer/songwriter album.

This one is just a little tiny bit less perfectly imperfect than [Transfiguration of Vincent], but it's still got all the warmth and gentle disorganization of its predecessor-- with a few more oomphy tracks standing in for Tranfiguration's most introspective meditations.

Green's self-consciously dweeby vocals hang his off-kilter lyrics like a doomed curveball.

End of Love isn't Barzalay's best collection of songs, and the production tends to gloss over the instruments so songs like "Collapse" and "When We Become" sound subdued and blandly unobtrusive.

Can't remember many bands whose B-sides/rarities comp things I liked as much as their full-lengths, but here's one.

What Garnier can lack in feeling, he makes up for with years of technical know-how, on The Cloud Making Machine as before.

If Ida's sound is like a river, the emotions the band conveys are simply stagnant.

Like a washed-up athlete, Lee's stuck reliving his glory years.

Their most focused and captivating work to date.

Woman King will provide eager Iron & Wine fans a welcome holdover between proper albums, but the EP also serves a larger developmental purpose, marking one more evolutionary hop for Sam Beam, and christening a new genre-- post-basement.

He typically sounds like David Allan Grier with amyl nitrate in the air. Our man raps in an "ohmygawd this is sooo ridiculous" tone that can make you either think he is a jackass or a jester. My instincts say it's the latter.

Bottom line is that Mogwai are an insanely powerful live band, and these sharp recordings play like a unified set rather than a scraped-together compendium of disparate sessions.

Feathers may not have the heft of Dead Meadow's other albums, but it's easily its most listenable and satisfying from end to end.

As with past Rouse efforts, Nashville is always pleasant, if unexceptional.

With the quality and effort put into this release, Def Jux and Aesop Rock have done what every EP should do, provide something of unique value and create anticipation for future releases.

Most of Tree City sounds lifted from Britt Daniel's songbook. By that, I don't mean it sounds somewhat like it. I mean, it sounds like they stole the tapes from Britt's house and scribbled their name over his.

The album loses a little of its steam toward the end, when too many songs play up the rap side of the equation over the rock, but on the whole A Gun Called Tension is surprisingly balanced and beholden to no preconceptions of how these two styles should mix.

Plenty of good-not-great stuff, and a tad unfocused.

The result is a lot like Elvis Costello's periodic returns to rock territory: snappy genre exercises from a reliable songwriter, but not much more.

What's remarkable is that instead of sounding autumnal and frigid, the bulk of this album has a warmth, an emotional weight, and a sense of underlying motion that competes damn well against the occasional fireworks. Some of these pleasures may be subtle or take time to grasp, but the sinking-in is gorgeous and worth the wait.

Its best moments are stellar and exhilarating.

His style has finally caught up with his intellect, and while his beats are passable but unexceptional, his voice locks onto and scans over them so ferociously they're almost obliterated.

The high points of the album are the tracks that feature Todd by herself either on guitar or piano, filling the song with the trembling strength of her singing.

Burn the Maps often sounds like simplicity transformed into bloat in an attempt to sound interesting.

The Mysterious Production of Eggs might wrestle with unsavory topics, but it does so with a shrug of the shoulders, a wry smile, and a heart full of awe-inspiring song.

Out of Breach is less suited for a fucked-up dance party than just for being fucked up.

The ultimate draw is Antony's voice, and within the first two seconds of the album, it should be very clear to even the most unaware newbies that Antony has an amazing Nina Simone/Brian Ferry/Jimmy Scott vibrato, a multi-octave siren that would sound painfully lovely no matter what he was saying. Lucky for us, he fills that promise with worthy syllables.

Exploring the vacated ghosts of stale forms, Coxon has breathed new life into some of rock's most bankable clichés.

This may not be a perfect album, but it is affecting and haunting.

Worlds Apart is an aspiration, an apology, the sound of confusion.

While this new batch of songs is pleasant and often charming, they're not as memorable or passionate as Barlow's best.

Digital Ash has the claustrophobic feel of a singer locked up with a computer, and it's distractingly chipper, like Rilo Kiley in their own Dntel homages; not every Bright Eyes record has to be an emotional epic, but Digital Ash feels like a practice run.

I'm Wide Awake weaves the personal and the political more fluidly than most singers even care to try, and the consummate tunefulness just strengthens those moments where he pinches a nerve.

The Chemical Brothers tend to find the best results when they focus on atmospheric, buzzing instrumentals.

If this album is indeed the beginning of a long, arduous journey of rediscovery and rebirth and other fun ponderous stuff, here's hoping the rest of the trip is more enjoyable than this initial misstep.

This is a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls, darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor.

The consistency of Wilderness' eleven songs is almost overwhelming.

'64-'95 succeeds when Lemon Jelly stick to their bread and butter: pleasant and facile ambience.

Filled with shimmering waves of pedal steel and slide guitar, these spare, gritty reenactments will surely please fans of his 2003 urban-folk platter Talkin' Honky Blues.... Underground hip-hop enthusiasts, however, might be put off by Buck's near-complete disregard for the rippling, sample-laden funk of his youth.

Its flimsiness usually finds a way to sound purposeful, and that makes Aqueduct's personal, cerebral pop worth coming back to.

Soft and subtle, Superwolf is the kind of record that unwinds slowly, and is best enjoyed over multiple listens and, unsurprisingly, many glasses of wine.

It reveals a manic, uncommon glint in their inventive fires, the unmistakable fervid gleam which accompanies artists who know exactly what they're doing, even if the rest of us don't.

Their songs burst open upon inspection; you must first shrink to their size, but once you do, you'll probably want to stick around for awhile.

Another goddamn home run.

This isn't a revolutionary album for Tobin but it's a lot of fun, and works surprisingly well on its own, given the stringent requirements it had to meet.

Ultimately comes out a very solid if not revelatory record.

His strongest, most satisfying effort to date.

This album, even more than their others, is like a cheap pinata: A lot of candies come out, and a few of them are bound to be stale yellowish things that don't taste like butterscotch.

All Harm Ends Here is hushed and apocryphal, but at times it sounds almost as half-hearted as it is heavy-hearted.

Magnolia Electric Co. is no Crazy Horse, and Molina's vocabulary on the guitar doesn't yet have the presence to carry such extended interpretations of his material.

The end result is a rich, triumphant sonic tapestry; you can hear every dollar that went into it.

Black Mountain are about as referential as they come. But despite the obvious touchstones-- which, incidentally, fucking rule-- the band are affable and idiosyncratic enough to win over those who passed on recent retrofits like Comets on Fire's Blue Cathedral or My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves, and make those records' admirers practically cream themselves.

It's well-recorded, well-mixed, well-performed-- hell, it's even well-packaged-- but it has little spark and a bad habit of insisting on five-minute songs.

Cam's flow is a thing of beauty.

Nothing's Lost is a well-meaning record that just got its priorities mixed up. These tech'd-up tearjerkers can out bench press anyone in terms of sonic fodder, but the album is whiny, transparent, and a colossal hodgepodge.

Yes, it's "sprawling," "massive," "has lots of filler," "should have been one disc," etc.-- but guess what: It's cocksure and it works.

Brash, grungy, and loud... a tiny handful of outstanding tracks and a whole mess of schmaltzy filler.

LAMB has one mega-hit, one okay song, three stillborns, and seven full-fledged embarrassments.

Those hoping for a trove of overlooked gems will be disappointed, as too much of With the Lights Out sounds like nothing so much as a dull-edged instrument lifting flakes of material from the bottom of a barrel. Simply put, there's enough good stuff here for a solid single disc.

If Mm..Food? feels merely good or somewhat inconsequential, it's because it is that way by design.

Watching such an undeniably talented artist blindly follow such an errant muse can be endlessly compelling, and the failure of these two albums to capture his visions and ambitions with any adequacy possesses the pull of true tragedy.

R&G has a unified sound, rare in hip-hop albums, but it's a sound based on tinkly pianos and noodly guitars and windchimes. It sounds something like The Black Eyed Peas if they tried to make a Barry White album, but with more falsetto warbling.

Encore is a fourth fascinating record from Eminem, but it's also easily his weakest and, in many ways, tamest album to date.

White People, for all its ambitions, fails to coalesce.

Case is a singer first and a songwriter second, and The Tigers Have Spoken is afflicted with the same malady as Blacklisted: Many of its songs are too short, clocking in under two minutes.

Joji sounds like a record made by mountains.

Replaces the cheap sounds of their earlier records with more traditional sonics, which leave the often-clever lyrics feeling like an afterthought.

One of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.

Sure, greater dynamic variety and some selective risktaking would be nice, but these precocious upstarts already got the tough part pinned down: subtlety. Psapp have laid themselves a remarkably self-assured template for subsequent outings.

Cohen's towering presence and deft songwriting breathe life into the lite-jazz arrangements.

Unfortunately, when they could have stopped it at 12 tracks and had a pretty good party on their hands... they kept right on going, and it stops being fun after a certain point.

By turning the rock knob down a notch, DFA79 have kept You're a Woman loud and nasty and ensured a cohesion and unusual degree of listenability.

The new musicians forgo the gauzy, playful dilettantism of Euphemystic in favor of expansive pop marathons.

It would be foolish, however, to think that you could get through a Nick Cave project this ambitious without a few clunkers. At least here Cave's missteps occur when his reach exceeds his grasp, and the songs that fail manage to do so dramatically rather than boringly. [average of scores of 78 for 'Abattoir' and 74 for 'Orpheus']

Far from being either vindicating or enthralling.

A worthy if not exactly earth-moving capstone to the band's career.

On Gold Medal, even when they fail, it seems as if that failure is a result of The Donnas trying to carve their own identity rather than just being a cute cover band that ran out of ideas.

The Futureheads rely on actual chops and the kind of melodic astuteness usually associated with piano-pop balladeers, and in doing so, they exhibit complete control over their music and intertwining vocal deliveries.

At nearly every turn of their flaccid debut, Up All Night, Razorlight squander the ideas they've snatched up from other, more talented acts, then somehow find even more ways to ruin already perfectly uninteresting songs.

Young, earnest, eerie, and overzealous, Von is a unique, almost belligerently unaffiliated piece of music that unsubtly blazons its idiosyncrasies.

The most Chisel-sounding record he's released as a solo artist, returning to stripped-down arrangements and, on "The Angel's Share" and "Little Dawn", his fascination with repetition.

Futures is like a rotten onion, revealing layer upon layer of foulness.

If This Island failed musically but still got Le Tigre's message out, it could be counted as a minor success. But at this critical juncture in their career, Le Tigre seem tame.

Maverick has a more consistent tone than either of Beans' previous records, but it also lacks the stand-outs of its predecessors, settling into bland production strokes that recede behind his always fascinating rhymes.

They have general technical proficiency and a knack for a good riff, but listening to them is nevertheless a chore-- and a boring, repetitive one at that.

The most disheartening thing about From a Basement on the Hill is its plainness-- it's neither a perfect record (and not one of Smith's best) nor the kind of colossal disaster that could be angrily pinned on money-hungry handlers and desperate fans.

Who Killed...the Zutons is an unexpectedly impressive start, consistently showcasing off the band's dynamic songwriting and penchant for weird, sprawling throwdowns.

You don't judge a compilation by its hits alone, and it doesn't take long to find the set's weakness: sequencing.

Dents and Shells is Buckner in top form, using a broad brush to manifest his enigmatic poetics, hallucinatory atmospheres, and melodies that appear and evaporate like breath exhaled onto cold glass.

Yes, the Brothers still overuse lyrical gore the way the Evil Dead series did Kero syrup, but their sonic pace and intensity has somewhat slowed.

Here, as on previous albums, Arthur demonstrates his gift for emotionally direct songwriting, but the specifics often escape his attention.

Dangerous Dreams is plagued by a pervasive feeling of been there/done that, and the album ultimately sounds like the same two or three tracks on repeat.

Despite the strength of "Music Is My Boyfriend" and lush single "The Fear Is On", I continually find myself humming songs from the debut instead.