The mediocre filler that rounds out Half Smiles' lineup is, sadly, par for the band's late-era course.

Via a confluence of experience, ambition and glossy production, Engine Down have arrived at a palatable music that, with a little more refinement and promotional support, could cement their place in the mainstream cultural canon.

One can't shake the feeling that formula is what's really at the heart of the record, and in light of the promise shown by their debut, that lack of fervor and off-the-cuff adventurousness is a difficult shortcoming to ignore.

Business Casual is fierce and competent, and evinces the rippling of powerful musical muscles. But its affectations are so grating that it's tough to make it through it all in a single listen.

She Loves You treats each song differently while still being carefully sequenced so that its tracks cohere into a narrative of love and loss, resulting in a record that manages to sound as if its tracks were the product of one mind.

The Finns' latest is glossy, emotional, and sure to satisfy longtime listeners-- as well as any Stereophonics or Aqualung fans paying their respects.

The album's saving grace is the surrounding music, which almost, but not quite, makes up for Kinsella's constant barrage of tiresome non-sequiturs.

Good as some of these songs are... they're not quite enough to foment a revolution

The Dirty South is more consistent and cohesive song-for-song, its wide scope more public than personal.

Merritt has a long way to go before she runs the risk of being mistaken for A-league stars like Emmylou Harris and Dusty Springfield. But that we can speculate about her one day achieving that status is itself a tremendous compliment.

Green Imagination does awkwardly stumble into some redeeming moments, but never without a slog through the banal first.

Lewis' crisp alto shines on every track... Unfortunately, the songs (and especially the lyrics) don't give Lewis the support she deserves.

Well-played post-rock was always the bedrock of Windsor's sound, but they've added angst, a flayed post-punk edge, and new-wave organ loops to their ambition, creating a sound that should be familiar to Yo La Tengo fans, yet remains distinctly this band's own.

The result is both the best career-spanning snapshot of and single-purchase introduction to Talking Heads-- odd accolades for a live record-- and a treat for longtime fans.

In a way, the album simply highlights many of the reasons why Orbital have been so beloved for the past decade-and-a-half.

Unfortunately, Fire in the Hole fails to invoke any effective nostalgia as it phlegmatically wanders through 12 solid but unexciting tracks.

While the J-Kwons and Juveniles enjoy the fruits of paradise and their Lexus helicopters, Shyne reminds us of the ones who didn't make it: the legions of his fellow Clinton inmates fighting to keep afloat under prison's psychic burden.

The songs are instantly welcoming, flickering with enough hope and tenacity to outlast Kasher's heartbreak.

The seamy din generated by this revolving ensemble provides a well-matched backdrop for the relentless parade of petty violence, drug deals gone sour, and squalid love affairs portrayed in these songs.

Unfortunately, A Long Hot Summer starts slowly. In fact, when you cop this album, do yourself a favor and skip the first five tracks.

The disc feels more like an Insomniac Records sampler featuring Viktor Vaughn than a proper Vaughn release.

Ultimately, The Equatorial Stars is direct, engaging and modestly unsettling.

There's something admirable about a record that proves it's possible to remove grit from adult contemporary pop.

Whiskey Tango Ghosts stays satisfied, to the point of sounding undifferentiated.

But Homesongs is not simply a procession of trembling troubadour tunes. For each turn of boxwood fragility, there's also one of bold and confident songwriting.

With their staid textures, the songs tend to blend into one another, sounding at best like a spiritless hodgepodge of About a Boy's weaker moments.

While the fragments themselves are never short on energy, they are short on substance-- Terrorbird simply doesn't equal the sum of its parts.

Sometimes bludgeoning, always regal, Blue Cathedral is a calcified, hippified holy place.

Marks the first time the band's sound has taken a step backwards.

In its punchy production and eagerness to mix hard rock with boppy little guitar leads and cheeky catchy choruses, Kiss & Tell is a direct throwback to that fertile crossroads between thickheaded 70s AOR and the pop/new-wave nexus of the early 1980s.

Simply put, this album sounds absolutely huge, its relentless attention to detail eclipsed only by the stunning emotional power it conveys.

Kings of Convenience would do well to assimilate more of Øye's electronic leanings into their original sound, rather than merely mining sad troubadours past for inspiration and leaving these tracks as sparse source material for the obligatory remix album.

With one part arched eyebrows and droll wit, and one part melancholia and sharp social observation, the Sisters' debut is bursting with golden moments.

As much as Ladd continually references the past, from Dr. Livingston and Picasso to Minor Threat, Funkadelic, and De La Soul, he moves the air with a beat that's entirely his own, the sum of too many parts to reflect any one too prominently.

It's not innovative, but it's deliberate and economic, with no filler and an inviting dose of Sly Stone-derived soul.

One could hardly expect a three-disc set of Low's castoffs, demos and flipsides to dazzle.

DEP is still struggling to re-establish a unified and compelling sound, and their newfound penchant for melodic exploration seems out of place amid the album's most inspired thrash moments.

An extremely listenable, laughable album, a futuristic freakshow of deep, stirring melodies and innovative beat arrangements.

The exuberant overload of Blueberry Boat will thrill and transport you with the ineluctable force of a great children's story, one whose execution matches its imagination.

The band's sound benefits greatly from DeLaughter's realization that not every instrument always needs to be playing at once.

A batch of songs guaranteed to be huge hits as soon as we're all sucked into a giant time warp and plunked back down in 1974.

Not a bad album, yet contains too many mediocre tracks to be comforting.

The bicoastal milieu of Out of the Shadow is apparent: It reflects both a lush, sunny "California Dreamin'" temperament, and Gotham's grimy, melancholic disposition.

Its majority carelessly regurgitates the painful cliches of "enlightened" hip-hop's critical and commercial darlings, while the band falls back on their organic hip-hop sound as a gimmick and piles on guest appearances to disguise their lack of creativity.

Doesn't extend the sound of the band's debut so much as inflate it.

Invoking Disintegration is ridiculous, but The Cure is remarkably more thrilling a listen than the band's most recent guitar-heavy predecessors.

It's essentially a one-trick sound, but here, they do a better job of adapting it to their post-dated needs than they did on previous albums.

What For Stars lack in originality they overcompensate for in emotionality.

Spacesettings is liquidated, hookless, and entirely flaccid.

The tracks on The Concretes are easily their most accomplished, fluid statement to date.

As another impressive portion of his potent '04 output, Will to Death's immediacy and quality should quiet the critics-- particularly those who pegged his early solo records as the work of a narcotics pain-train washout.

In the end, the ambitious misfires and pre-coffee drowsiness of A Ghost Is Born don't ruin the album entirely-- they only serve as distractions that make it much more difficult to excavate the band's strengths from the surrounding detritus.

Detractors will be sure to note that In a Safe Place can feel numbingly repetitive at moments, but all that expansive diddling contributes equally to the record's allure: Like rolling past the North Pole or through West Texas, this record plays with its own redundancies, building an entire universe from strange, barren pieces.

No doubt, Chilltown consistently delivers solid hip-hop cuts. But in comparison to his 2002 release React, Sermon's well of creativity might be running dry.

One of this year's most interesting records.

The album's ambition is rich musical diversity, but it sounds less adventurously eclectic than simply scattershot, less assertive than merely restless, eager to try anything but not always sure what works and what doesn't.

An exceedingly triumphant psych-pop oddity.... I doubt 2004 will birth a more blissful sonic encounter than Ta Det Lugnt.

Unlike all previous Beastie Boys albums (with the possible exception of Licensed to Ill), To The 5 Boroughs sounds homogenous and singular in purpose-- dark, steel, and dirty like that incomplete Times Square station.

as brittle, volatile and consistently riveting as any band out there, and even though no one could possibly take Smith seriously anymore, it insinuates that there's still enough justification here to warrant following The Fall's devious discography into one more decade.

This Is for Real has its moments, but it's not the sex-punk triumph these Sheffield-based narcissistic debaucherists seem to believe it is.

So, it's plain that The Killers have made a record more concerned with artifice than artistry. If the intent is to place their album's principal teases on the next Now That's What I Call Music compilation, then bravo.

While Sonic Nurse isn't quite as strong as its predecessor, it's equally as imbued with instrumental dexterity and impressively coherent ideas.

Winds Take No Shape seems to be the response to critics who called for more depth and less of the wide-eyed cuteness rampant on their self-titled debut. Their music is still lighter-than-air, but a newfound strain of wistfulness brings it closer to earth.

Too often, the new record substitutes weighty, Biblical language for true heft.

Albums like this, while often appealing to the hardcore Farrar fan (redundant, I know), don't add much to his overall cache.

There's also the fact that you won't hear another record like it this year, possibly ever-- all the comparisons that can be made to Tom Waits, Lambchop, Grandaddy and Vic Chesnutt will only tell a small part of the story.

One of its most charged and inspired records in years.

These are soulful sing-alongs with grit, pop nuggets that hold up to hours of repeat play in humid bumper-to-bumper traffic, and ultimately, the sound of a great songwriter hitting his stride.

If you take it as a whole, Uh Huh Her is deeply engrossing: Harvey has never explored the minimal-verging-on-primitive side of her music so thoroughly, or captured so exactly the sound of a mood swing.

Brother Is to Son is weird, but it's neither incomprehensible nor didactic.

Sometimes erstwhile obsessiveness can lead to revelation, but beyond the fancy engineering, I don't see much of that here.

Love and Distance is fucking cheesy.

So the production is great, the songbook is varied, and the band is tighter and more ambitious than ever-- the only problem with Louden Up Now is the unfortunate paucity of ideas within the songs themselves.

The contrasting styles don't always sit comfortably, but individual tracks sparkle with creativity and the newfound dark side is a surprisingly pleasant fit.

If there's any difference between this album and von Bohlen's lackluster recent output, it's that this collection somehow manages to be even more tepid.

Masta Killa has delivered one the most urgent, straightforward Wu releases since the group's debut over a decade ago.

Now, More Than Ever is both hushed and sprawling, serene and agitated, jumpy and constant.

Unfortunately, some of Kittin's lyrical deficits undercut her production.

Despite its eclecticism and relatively Dadaist leanings, Sung Tongs is a romantic album; romantic in its celebration of innocence and nonsensical shared knowledge, and the sweet, trusted idea that everything will be fine-- as if it hadn't always been.

Felix da Housecat appears to have approached this record in the same manner as other pop craftsmen like Stephen Merritt or Elvis Costello might: as a tireless effort to mine sub-styles and hooks that populate his detail-oriented visions of the perfect song. While that might translate into a record that fails to sit totally comfortably in either the pop or dance section of the CD shop, it's hardly lacking in compositional substance or high-toned flash.

Frankly, it could be much worse.

Whether it's the lack of plot, insight, or collaborators, Achilles Heel also finds Bazan's music stuck in a room with no exits, with one loping distortion-pedal crawler after another.

Coldplaya-hatas will loathe Keane; most others will just be insulted.

Their slickest and most formulaic pop constructions to date.

La Increíble Aventura doesn't quite equal the sheer power and range of the band's best albums (2001's Arde, in particular), but it's a powerful statement nonetheless, capturing one of Spain's greatest exports at their darkest and most ferocious.

Hotel Morgen may be beautifully produced, but despite its expert attention to detail, few of these tracks truly engage in the way they seem meant to.

It's all about finding the friendly turtles at the end of the druggy rainbow, yet, since no one's in a hurry to get there, the songs loop along with space between the beats and guitarists who still seem to be learning their craft.

Whatever excitement this album lends is, for the most part, borrowed by its pre-existing audience, and it's clear the Kadanes aren't going to challenge us.

Ultimately, The Catheters are big on style, and troublingly low on ideas.

Hatfield's finest work in a decade.

Unfortunately, "She Will Only Bring You Happiness" isn't a single, and there a dozen other tracks to account for, none of which live up to that song's pop splendor, and few of which even come close.

Despite some strong ideas and a few memorable songs, Faded Seaside Glamour remains notable mostly for the vocals: the album's ups and downs follow Gilbert's voice almost exactly, best when he's hitting high notes, mundane when he's not.

Unfortunately, few of these tracks wield the same impact as his tried-and-true hip-hop productions, and more often than not, feel like attempts at being everything to everyone.

Elk-Lake is a benign, restful listen, showing a once-unwieldy, always-vibrant creative mind having found a peaceful medium. While it's easy to appreciate the man's development, this blunted songwriting is somewhat less resonant-- and seems somehow less Hayden.

The Secret Machines create songs that are just as spacey and concept-heavy, if not quite as quirky, as those on Yoshimi and The Sophtware Slump.

So Split the Difference is an opportunity missed, with Gomez settling into a safe, well-worn ocean colour scene at a time when an adventurous indie/jamband hybrid might've clicked with Lollapaloozers.

Fuckin A is as stupidly (and gloriously) irreverent as its title, all adolescent three-chord slams and snotty, self-championing chants, a seamless extension of the urgency introduced on More Parts Per Million.

Kesto works, though, because Pan Sonic, through intelligent sequencing and a burst of inspiration, are essentially offering four separate, complete, and internally consistent albums.