Secret Wars is the first step toward the combination of Oneida's monolithic psych-rock and the numbing riff iteration they've spent so long deriving.

Even as Punk Rock shows that The Mekons have far better musicians today than when they were first fumbling around with Gang of Four's instruments, it also proves they're better songwriters.

Dalley possesses neither heart nor soul as a lead vocalist, and his milk-warm emotional outpouring of tiresome, overwrought subject matter could get lost in a crowd of two.

With Califone's penchant for extemporaneous creation finally being properly indulged, Heron King Blues is an appropriately loose and sprawling record, requiring a bit more patience than some of the band's previous projects.

As a singer, he's remarkable and distinctive, and on Cellar Door, he explores the range and impact of his voice to great effect.

An epic, sweeping cycle of songs that's completely over the top-- usually in the best possible way.

Just as Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" was perfect for the suicide-attempt scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, any song on this album would complement a still-photo montage of a prolonged labor ending in a miscarriage.

Captures a portion of the wispy bedsit magic that used to mark some of The Field Mice's best work and boosts it with the lush, "Hazey Jane II"-like chamber-pop of Belle & Sebastian's first flourishes of glory.

Dizzee's despairing wail, focused anger, and cutting sonics places him on the front lines in the battle against a stultifying Britain, just as Pete Townshend, Johnny Rotten, and Morrissey have been in the past.

A record of overwhelming deconstruction and newly explored territorial demarcation.

The sad fact is, no marketing strategy, no matter how savvy, could conceal this collection's bathetic, overwrought travesties and gruesome failures.

With Tasty, Kelis has left the roller-rink, returned from outer space, and she's back on her own two feet on terra firma-- unfortunately.

He's already recorded such a wealth of great material that no mystique remains, leaving no real reason for anyone-- including the most dedicated fan-- to seek out these poorly produced musical shreds.

Electronic music that genuinely rocks.

It's the album's end-to-end strength that speaks the most-- against hip-hop artists who fail to make solid albums and those rock idiots who say it can't be done.

So perhaps it's about time that we stop calling Cex a wunderkind: He may be barely 25 but with the introspective yet exuberant Maryland Mansions, he's officially grown up, establishing himself as a performer to be taken-- yikes!-- seriously.

Ultimately, Naked is not essential. Unlike scattered moments in the Anthology series, this music (though immaculately presented) doesn't really expand on either the music of Let It Be, or The Beatles' legacy.

Even in falling short of Jay's classics, Reasonable Doubt and 2001's The Blueprint, it manages to eclipse 1999's brilliant Vol. 3: Life and Times of S. Carter as his third-best album-- which in itself still makes it one of the year's best.

Indeed, there are some dull moments on Spokes, but plucking tracks from the record and turning them around under the magnifying glass probably misses what Plaid intended (this one seems meant to be listened to in succession).

The new Magnetic Fields songs will, thankfully, not raise any eyebrows; the enthusiasm and sparkling spontaneity is, like always, pressed into ukuleles and tucked into preposterously addictive Yamaha sound settings circa 1985.

Stubbornly lo-fi and expectedly scrappy, the album is also tremendously listenable, a rhythmic, leg-flailing romp through vintage soul cool, glam boogie, classic rock thrash, and punk bravado.

A collection of preposterously cheerless (and charmless) songs that try much too hard to achieve a poignancy-- or anything, really-- that might hide their complete insignificance.

For the first time, Kozelek has put out an album whose meticulous sequencing yields more than just a random scattershot collection of great songs, but rather a complete cohesive musical statement.

It's not so much that Rock N Roll is incorrigibly written as that the record is unforgivably careless, unwilling to commit to anything including itself.

Overproduced, under-written, swaggering nonsense.

One of the most impressive aspects of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is that it feels constantly in flux, growing and transforming with every note.

The Thrills' external, sometime vaccuous pinching is clearly self-conscious, a carefully premeditated breach of expectation that causes more of a wince than a flash of pleasant surprise.

Thankfully, the band is up to the challenge of turning up the spotlights and the volume, and they crank out a solid batch of insanely catchy, pristine pop songs that'll crawl inside your brain and die there, only to come back and haunt you at the oddest times.

Despite the production and sonic sweep, this is a standard rock band working within an oft-stated, faux-experimental dream-pop realm.

That there's nothing new or innovative to be found here is sure to be a common complaint, though only those who prize evolution over knowing one's strengths will cry fraud.

Anything that keeps this compelling musical in the foreground of popular consciousness is worth something, and if a fan of Hedwig happens to be an indie rocker as well, this compilation is a delightful wedding.

Yo La Tengo are still one of the most talented acts going, and whether they're maturing or simply cooling off these days, they're still evolving.

Ramshackle, jumpy and curiously charming, Dead Man Shake is full of Westerberg's trademark spastic vocals and nimble guitar work, only now determinably fuzzed up and shrouded in Sun Records spunk.

Some of the most propulsive, ferocious music of the year as well as some of the most poignant.

Ultimately, Laika make pleasant music that's difficult to be passionate about.

Throughout Cedars, Clearlake continually find beauty in melancholy and melancholy behind beauty, while raising your hairs in reverence with occasional guitar squalls.

The Stills are what The Posies were in their day, and what The Libertines were a few minutes ago: stuck in a phantom zone called "not there yet," and possibly because the personalities of their influences eclipse any sense of identity they could muster.

Come Feel Me Tremble suffers for its lack of cohesion.

While the record fails at living up to the hyperbolic critical proclamations of London Calling's second coming, it does make for a pretty decent, if somewhat unexpected, sweat-soaked finale for The Clash's legendary golden boy.

They rival The Shins, or The Magnetic Fields, or any of the innumerable indie touchstones, but what truly sets Who Will Cut Our Hair apart is the near-total absence of traditional verse/chorus/verse framework in their songs; to nail beautiful, memorable lines with such remarkable ease is a feat unto itself, but to do so in essentially formless compositions is a different class of achievement entirely.

This perceived, grand-scheme "Importance" of Echoes is irrelevant: what matters is that it wants you to get off your ass and work it, and that you will be thrilled to oblige.

Not simply an excellent album, Chutes Too Narrow is also a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty and expressiveness.

Coral Fang impresses not just by some nebulous "punk" standards, but by the standards of just about anyone who wants to be rocked gently out of sleep by the dulcet tones of thrashing guitars, pogo-friendly love songs, and possibly the most compellingly forceful female punk vocals since Exene Cervenka wailed her way out of the nihilistic abyss that cartographers call "L.A."

Each new direction leads into a wall or dies for lack of momentum.

There's plenty of Minutemen twitch, Dog Faced Herman tick, Bikini Kill bossiness, and a cleverly wrapped polemic that even recalls the Desperate Bicycles' delicious DIY rhetoric.

Yes, it sounds quite a bit like The Books' debut, but it also sounds like nobody else. The Books remain more or less a genre of one.

Though still often warm and tender, Sleep/Holiday lacks the surprise or the diversity of some of their better work.

Some of these remixes are truly excellent, and some of them are disastrous.

It's a brilliant ambient musical experience-- you can tune it out if you choose and it'll still enhance your surroundings, or you can engage yourself fully and allow it to positively hypnotize you.

This is the band's most beautiful record, an expertly arranged blend of their acoustic old school country augmented by pedal steel guitar and bowed saws and sometimes colored by elements of mariachi, gospel, and rural folk.

Swallowed whole, Autumn Was a Lark can seem sonically disjointed, but it's also an apt representation of Portastatic's ever-roaming muse.

Unfortunately, Hold on Love's more serene moments only weaken the lure of their more intricate and involved songs, ultimately underscoring the group's true strengths.

Do Make Say Think have presented us with their best work yet, a varied and unpredictable album capable of imparting the chill of the winter and the warmth of celebratory joy to you without ever presenting you with a human voice.

As could be expected, the production is sharp, and the song structures are tightly wound and delicately unraveled. The problem is that the effort as a whole is too slick, and its charm suffers as a result.

Manages to ignore the essential art-rock flourishes of Sound-Dust, and in fact, [has] done away with anything even remotely interesting or new.

You don't often come across a modern album that sounds so damn old.

In many ways, Some of My Best Friends Are DJs is little more than a brief comedy album, filled with strange samples of eccentric characters pontificating on their record collections and audio systems.

On one hand, Dear Catastrophe Waitress ranks as one of the most delightful surprises of the year, although that's primarily because I'd completely given up on them. On the other hand, it's a very flawed record that at its quirky worst features harmonies so brow-furringly cheery they'd be comfortable amidst a cruise-ship revue or one of Up With People's halftime routines.

Replace crackling vinyl and subwoofer bass with somber piano and mournful cello, and all you're left with is... well, a pretty goddamn miserable woman who happens to have a great voice.

There's an undercurrent of darkness on this record-- particularly in Olsen's on-the-verge voice and lyrics-- that ultimately prevents the band from ever wheeling too far out of reach.

A career low.

We sound like everyone's favorite old rock bands, we have insipid lyrics, we say 'Come On!' and 'Oh Yeah!' every five seconds, we have no discernable identity, and we're from Australia. What could people possibly dislike about us?

Transatlanticism dulls the edges of their usually acute divinations.

The Young Machines will rank among your favorite albums if you're someone's mortifyingly jaded ex, but if you come to it craving electronic vocal-pop keeping pace with anything north of Jimmy Tamborello's shoulders, you'll end up frustrated by the simple and repetitive violin bits that drive the big retro beats.

As a technical achievement and as a piece of pure sound, The Civil War is inarguably Matmos' best record.... [but] there's less of an emotional core here than on previous offerings.

Since LFO hardly need to be innovators to produce a good record, I don't have much problem recommending Sheath, with the caveat that when pleasant, easy-going atmospheres set in, sometimes amiable disinterest on listeners' parts follow shortly.

Though it's no masterpiece, With the Tides is certainly a good record. At the very least it should ease your Britpop jones better than Menswe@r.

A top-heavy album, with his best material-- the more operatic and unconstrained works-- all unfolded within the album's first half hour.

The subject matter here is repetitive, pseudo-intellectual pandering runs rampant, pointless skits and mid-song dialogue sessions interrupt the flow, and most importantly, wasted beats fall at the hands of Slug's newfound penchant for verse-long tracks and poorly realized singsong bridges.

The beats on Fatherfucker are not only frustratingly simplistic, but the energy and surprising rhythmic complexity of the vocals on her debut are noticeably absent, too.

Even if it won't hit you on the first listen, Bazooka Tooth remains a strong outing from one of underground hip-hop's most talented, thanks to its unprecedented wealth of lyrical depth and truly individual production style.

Plays like a big, half-drunken romp through golden-era rock 'n' roll-- airy and thrilling and shifty as hell.

Costello has eschewed all sense of melody and humor in favor of rambling, mock-jazz noodling.

Awkward and poorly realized.

Halstead's knack for stunning arrangements is in top form on Spoon & Rafter, and in this capacity, his music remains compelling, if no more or less than on any of his previous trilogy of Mojave 3 releases.

Big Boi's Speakerboxxx coolly upstages its counterpart: though it, too, provides the world with one earthshaking single, it differs from The Love Below in that it also manages to maintain consistent brilliance and emotional complexity throughout.

Stellastarr's bold, cinematic sprawl demands a certain kind of tolerance, and might require a few listens before you're able to fully adjust to its dramatics, but Christensen is, in the end, an oddly convincing leader, and, if nothing else, you'll at least be stuck to your headphones trying to guess his next move.

Unfortunately, The Fire Theft actually sees the band indulging in ersatz approximations of Yes and Genesis' epic odysseys much more deeply.

Badu keeps the proceedings here buoyant and relaxed with that supple-lipped scat of hers, stretching out scant syllables at her lounging, loopy leisure.

So Team Boo turns out to be a surprisingly respectable junior-year effort-- one that puts Mates of State in the small minority of indie-pop bands that don't fall under the one-album-and-out rule.

What they do well might be best exemplified by "I Believe in a Thing Called Love", which most effectively pairs their sense of theatricality and grandiosity with their penchant for great pop hooks.

This is as close as Bowie has ever come to simply "pretty good" in his storied career.

After forty minutes of two-chord strumming, the band's unique approach becomes exhausting.

They aren't inept, amateurish or even exactly boring, but their parlor music takes a slow and emotionally neutral path that almost fights against engagement.

Stricken by the same backward-looking guitar worship disease that seems to have struck many in the indie community, the relentless string-bending and beer-bottle slides can't help but sound like stale recidivism.

For the most part, the tracks hang together and flow relatively well, orbiting the shimmering dreampop mass that serves as the record's unstated inspiration.

BSP's performance art antics and throwback posturing come with a distinct set of innovations and surprises, and The Decline of British Sea Power proves that BSP have the song-power to back up their bullshit.

Temptation is strong enough to stand with any of Byrne's other solo work, that rare film score that works beautifully as an entirely separate record.

An album by turns beautiful and possessed, by others raucous and fiery.

If you can make it past the album's frustrating layout, Hocus Pocus proves a fine collection of songs by pretty much anyone's standards.

Even in its most inspired moments, Amazing Grace lacks the fiery intensity of any of Pierce's previous outings.

Colin Meloy's songwriting makes them one of the strongest bands working today.

Everything is intricately wrought and calculated, perhaps in an overly accommodating response to fears of linearity. This fashionable awareness lends an almost palpable weight to the sound. It succeeds in adding depth and texture to the album, but sometimes overshoots the mark.

Paling in comparison to the Pixies is expected (and it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise), but Tears isn't even a good Catholics album.

The album exists in that scarcely inhabited rock-and-roll world where technical prowess coexists peacefully with clear and simple songcraft, the former never forgoing the latter.

In trading the adolescent kick of Secaucus for ripened resignation, meticulous refinement for crippling maturation, they have realized their magnum opus.

If you think intelligence in indie lyrics must come at the expense of coherence, take in a couple of these impeccably linear narratives.

Fortunately, there are a handful of transcendent moments to be found, provided you're willing to invest the time it takes to sniff them out-- which you should, since this is one of those records that matures with subsequent spins.