All told, it may be the best set of songs Rouse has yet to offer.

Heart is a valuable pop record for those of us whose cardiac muscle hasn't stained completely black.

Throughout it's fourteen tracks, there's no doubting The Weakerthans are smart guys who keep up with literature and politics, but over the course of an entire album the band's ambitious literary posturing drowns in the bland songwriting and lack of captivating hooks.

Neither off-putting nor engaging, Client's debut occupies a rather uninteresting place in electropop's soft middle.

These songs highlight the poseur mentality and insincerity that paradoxically plagues and blesses The Dandy Warhols.

When the Neptunes step out of their accepted hip-hop box, they find their greatest success.

Their latest LP may not pack the same fortune-telling punch of their classic records, but it is nevertheless a distinctly engaging, sophisticated experience.

Earthquake Glue meets any GBV album that isn't named Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes.

Though not quite the slap in the face issued by their debut, even this album's very worst song shines a light on what's wrong with our landscape. Find it and follow.

Their bar band approach sounds as if they've taken a book of rock history and, dutifully following along, bookmarked some of the most unremarkable passages.

An enveloping, mysterious record that marries the idealism of "the future of tomorrow today" to the stark reality of the post-millennial present and finds beauty and fascination in the tussle between melody and rhythm.

[Sounds] as much like playful garage-rock as cocky Europop.

I don't think anyone who already has some notion of wanting quebec could possibly be disappointed-- it's the genre-defying psych of The Mollusk and the incongruous irreverence of 12 Golden Country Greats, and some of the madness that is GodWeenSatan, and it's a lot better than the go-nowhere White Pepper.

The downside to this is that she sounds like she’s on her best behavior; the songs stay awfully polite and sprightly for someone who’s so good at sounding sinister. The upside is that underneath that dress, ready to impress strangers, Holly’s still pretty near top form.

If his eccentricity was tamed and the pained attempts to hop genres were avoided, Luke Steele could just produce something close to sublime. As it stands, Lovers is a fairly pleasant application of some charming reference points, but please, let's stop pretending that that's good enough.

Strays lacks what what made the band great in the first place: believable songs and lyrics.

Phantom Power sees the down-to-earth Welsh band moving away from genre-hopping and rough juxtapositions, and beginning to blend their influences into an evenly spread melange that simply sounds like a highly evolved pop band.

Pole has some worrying problems, starting with the tracks featuring Fat Jon.

As ever, Topley-Bird's voice continues to be a strange and beautiful thing, but it's admittedly less strange and less beautiful when framed against this hopelessly warmed over setting.

Between Goias and Fancy's remarkable drop-rolling bass science and the girls' bratty-Brooklynite rhyming, the better singles on here wind up sounding like something unprecedented: a booty-bass record for small children.

To what some chortle is a limited palette, the Clientele adds some new instrumentation-- steel and Spanish guitar, field recordings, violin, chimes-- to create a dense yet rich tapestry of hazy pop, like Felt at their most impressionistic.

From hip-hop to no-wave, jazz-punk disco to house music to electroclash, sleek funk to crusty noise, there's a lot to cover, and Soul Jazz does the job admirably, touring the biggest landmarks and some of the interesting diversions not on the map, but nonetheless co-existing side-by-side.

Sparse without feeling empty, clear without being awkwardly straightforward, Ui can remind even the most jaded of guitar gods that what Mingus (or Mike Watt or Peter Hook) did wasn't a fluke-- the bass doesn't have to be supplementary.

From the first song it sounds rich and original.... It's as major a step as you'd expect-- really, as you'd demand-- from someone like Why?, not only for its sheer inventiveness, but the continuity that turns these lyrical snapshots into moving portraits.

My biggest complaint is that De-Loused in the Comatorium just isn't fun.

There's plenty here to celebrate for consistency's sake-- because for what they've lacked in evolution, Guru and Premier have more than repaid in reliability.

Liz Phair proves so ultimately unnecessary, it might as well not even exist.

The thing that really bothers me the most about this album is how conventional it sounds.

Suffice to say, Menomena are a hugely creative band, and with I Am the Fun Blame Monster, they've managed to make an album that's extremely accessible yet entirely unconventional.

Perhaps the duo is just second-tier to begin with, or perhaps they just let the needle swing too far towards the rock side of the dial, but the peak moments on Scorpio Rising offer little more than enjoyable nostalgia for overhead-projector light shows.

This disc is aural aloe.

By the end of the album, Tricky returns to acting on his worst impulses, stumbling through hackneyed sonics and wincing lyrics.

Yes, it's all fairly predictable.

The Stephen Kings of menacing post-rock, it seems that in absence of Young Team's glorious cacophany their tremendous build-up often comes to nothing. And it sounds as though they've come to terms with that.

The further away from the 'Lab and into a more organic sound the band goes, the more satisfying their music is becoming.

There's not too much here to knock the sprinkles off your ice cream cone, but Twice is an impressively consistent and well- crafted collection.

Waiting for the Moon is just what I needed from Tindersticks: an album that doesn't abandon their recent direction, but breathes new life into it by drawing breath from their noisier past.

At best begs to be a fan-club download, since it offers so little to anyone not Eef's bride or offspring.

While its peaks fall just a whit short of those on its predecessor, Decoration Day's inward journeys nicely balance out Southern Rock Opera's bombastic expansiveness, and further confirm the Drive-By Truckers' status as the most poetic and insightful Southern rockers in existence today.

Deja Entendu, while a football field short of groundbreaking, has an air of substance and maturity.

Despite its obviously short shelf-life, Welcome Interstate Managers is delicious power-pop, unpretentious, loose and perfect for teenagers driving down to Ocean City for the weekend.

Sumday is all glorious, throbbing heart.

For its moments of gravity and excellence, Hail to the Thief is an arrow pointing toward the clearly darker, more frenetic territory the band have up to now only poked at curiously.

What an utter mess.

The big, inescapable problem with O is that, aside from being derivative, Rice's songwriting is also unbearably repetitive-- he stubbornly relies upon time-tested singer/songwriter formulas (quiet acoustic strumming and sober, wavering vocals), and repeats them almost exactly the same way, every time.

Like all Luna family projects, L'Avventura has a sneaky way of getting its claws into you-- background music that gets stuck in your forebrain. But also like most Luna product, this little vacation from the less-talked about half of the band starts to bend under its own uniformity of mood somewhere in the second half, and probably would've been slightly better acclimated to EP length.

Leading with a ten-minute single this outrageously creative, informed and exciting, !!! have a lot to prove on their coming full-length.

A solid set of rock songs that hovers somewhere between the professionalism of Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American and your favorite slice of homegrown emotion.

The most striking improvement is her singing. She's a stronger vocalist, her almost-plain tone rising into higher registers, and her usual range has grown more earthily gorgeous. But more than anything, she demonstrates a new expressiveness.

As he tries to return to the ponderous themes of such vague nonsense as love and hate, Acey weighs the pacing of the game considerably.

Soft, warm, but still interestingly distant.

Paper Monsters succeeds in revealing the "new" Dave Gahan, and that's what makes it a faintly embarrassing listen.

They're no Basement Jaxx, and it's easy to hope for someone with more professional skills to come fill in the Audio Bullys' blueprints.

Musically and lyrically, E is spent-- out of ideas, out of innovation, unable to cough up anything but by-the-numbers pop in the fourteen originals he wrote for this disc.

This record explodes with song after song of endlessly replayable, perfect pop.

Juvenile, simpering, weak, preachy, pointless and accidentally snooty, Dying in Stereo is about as empowering as Legally Blonde 2.

This comp makes one thing perfectly clear: for a host of bands so readily compared to the same tiny stable of influences-- "sounding like a modern-day Gang of Four..."-- there sure is a hell of a lot of diversity between them.

One part Busta-lite, and the rest full-on skater bravado: Gold Chains isn't going to tear up the world of hip-hop, but he's not totally empty handed.

Zoo Psychology's refrains are faster, shorter, and more efficient than ever.

For the first time, it sounds like he sat down in a good studio and carefully assembled a record. That's good, in that Odd Nosdam's production rode out the lo-fi thing for exactly long enough before moving on; but it's also a disappointment, because the new work isn't far off from where he was before-- it recycles a lot of his ideas with none of his usual edginess.

The cache of "weird" songs on Rape Fantasy is better than the tracks collected on Staying Alive.

How the West Was Won serves up their muscle, sweaty heart and golden grandeur in an exhaustingly persuasive light. That, and a hundred of the best riffs you've ever heard.

Each track is fully realized, thoughtfully written, and prudently performed, rolled out with a steadiness that can become a little maddening after a handful of listens.

As good as "Danger! High Voltage" is, the rest of this album is simply not worth it.

Their tendency to temper their noise with surprisingly sugary pop hooks and wormy choruses is what keeps these songs from becoming pretentious or tiresome.

An acceptably underwhelming, state of the art, guitar-centric pop record.

Built on Squares is the fun and catchy work of talented pop musicians, writing terribly interesting songs without compromising pop's essential, visceral lure.

To be fair, there is redemption embedded within, a few genuinely interesting bits wedged between stacks and stacks of gooey piano ballads.

Disturbing, complicated, and enthrallingly strange, The Mess We Made requires patience, and, ideally, an already established taste for Elliott's previous ambient output.

Each of Alter's twelve tracks are structurally slippery, shifting seamlessly from style to style in a way that makes it almost impossible to accurately map their paths. The subsequent mazes can be disorienting, but it's the most thrilling brand of dementia, as well as an acute reminder of the tension and balance true songwriting prowess can build.

He set out to make a mediocre album, and succeeded admirably.

There are so many types of music he's experimenting with on this album, not even from track to track but within each song.

To the familiar, Robin Guthrie has already proven he's better than this; to the uninitiated, Imperial offers a muted exposition of his talents.

Unfortunately, about halfway through the album, the sound wears itself out, as the samey melodies edge towards the too-familiar.

The Gossip sound best when flowing through lo-fi constraints: when they don’t have a hi-hat, and the down-tuned guitar is missing string.

What gives this record its internal order, and makes it stand out over previous laptop explorations of immense record collections, is the simplicity of the other genres that he dabbles and draws upon to flesh out the beat.

Surprisingly personal and emotionally resonant, Ether Teeth is potent inspiration stretched perhaps too thin, but undeniably captivating in its moments of brilliance.

Those expecting the dense, powerful, and insistently upbeat onslaught of Mass Romantic will no doubt react to Electric Version with some degree of initial disappointment. Repeated listens, however, reveal that Electric Version not only displays Carl Newman's brilliant and unique pop sensibility, but allows it enough space to reveal previously obstructed layers of emotional depth.

One Word Extinguisher shows a range of emotional grappling usually foreign to instrumental hip-hop.

It's just straight rock and roll, really, and I mean really straight rock and roll.

From the title on down, the new CD tries hard to conjure an ambiance of languid sin-- opium, absinthe, vintage porn-- but that aesthetic is just a few steps from your average bachelor pad with a zebra throw and ceiling mirrors. In fact, that's where copies of this album will inevitably spin, a soundtrack to excruciatingly banal seduction.

There's something uncomfortably sterile about The Sea and Cake's new, seven-song Glass EP that precludes it from functioning emotionally.

With an open approach to queer sexuality and radical politics, The Smell of Our Own offers an alternative to the saccharine teen spirit we're so used to sniffing. It's a sensual celebration of stinky, real-life sexuality.

Don't just judge it as an album by a band coming off a major line-up change. You won't need to.

Counterfeit 2 correctly presents itself as a box of hobbyish bric-a-brac for friends and completists.

Song in the Air is a far more dynamic and internally cohesive record than any of the band's previous efforts.

The problem here is that, while the guys are definitely on here, they're still nowhere near groundbreaking, and as a result, they rise and fall depending largely on Karen's delivery.

In a bizarre twist, the whole becomes far less than the sum of its parts; less than anything close to a new album, less than even a new EP, and certainly less than Wire has proven themselves capable of.

It's here we enter the world of the tame, a land where Sting is king and Phil Collins is raucous.

I'm Staying Out compensates for its lack of spectacular innovation by showcasing its players' technical prowess and busting out a handful of intensely sincere performances.

This is an interesting first step into new territory, a statement of intent.

The least bullshitting, most accomplished and first consistently great release from Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton.

As with his last two releases, Baby I'm Bored is gutted by under-worked, inconsequential two-minute ideas.

With these production qualities, the band is just comfortably abrasive, snagging against the mix of bent-string guitars and strange, trebly percussive clamor.

Lullaby for Liquid Pig is deceptively potent; in just thirty minutes it divines your most closely held memories, guiding you farther and farther back with endless, heartbreaking choruses.

It's mind-boggling that such sloppily arranged, barely listenable stuff is getting this kind of attention, but that's celebrity for you.

An unfortunate combination of familiar methods, beats and timbres won't overshadow the ultimately uninspiring music.