It's tempting to call it one of the most messily brilliant things we'll see all year, but it can't, in good faith, be recommended to everyone: if the duo's buzzy neurosis was enough to drive some people nuts before, the raw jumping and nagging of Anxiety Always will sound to many like the shoddiest, most amusical sham to be held up as a masterpiece in many of our lives.

Fruit Bats seem to be further embracing modernity and sounding great doing it.

Though it may not quite reach the peaks of 1997's The Nature of Sap, its polish and expert production make it Portastatic's most diverse and accomplished work to date.

Summer Sun is pleasant, if nothing else, but that's such a loaded word for an album that clearly aspires to (and ought to be) so much more than it accomplishes.

Because Up in Flames is so focused on big moments and aural candy, it's wise that Snaith decided to keep the record under 40 minutes. He blows you out and then packs it up.

Thickfreakness isn't quite their debut, but it's still a powerhouse, even exceeding its ancestor in total spectacle. Raw rock grandeur as so frequently conjured up on this album is hard to come by in any capacity; if that means having to overlook a few minor flaws, it's worth it.

It's the sound of innocence, like night-long basement parties spent listening to cheesy 80s rock records: derivative in a naïve tributary fashion, while still glimmering with songwriting promise.

If Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid has that lovable ten-solid-songs consistency, it's less a matter of lacking filler and more a matter of writing a lot of inoffensive but uninspiring tracks that all wander down the same avenues.

The record is experimental in the truest sense, each of its tracks signifying a possible point of departure.

Therein lies the contradiction of The White Stripes. How do you combine the shit-hot with the "twee?" Elephant's shortcomings suggests the enterprise is futile.

[An] album that, like its predecessors, is as accomplished as it is stunted, waddling wadlessly towards its intentional exile on Cute Island.

Though their minimalism might sometimes sound like straight distillation, the tunes still hit, and hurt.

No peaks, no gorges, just a steady oscillation between adequate and inspired.

At best, this record is Suicide resurrected as a novelty act; at worst it could pass for an extreme deodorant commercial with swearing.

The problem with Fear Yourself is not that it sounds big, rather that it sounds condescending to the man it's supposed to be all about, and more importantly, by.

Looking like Michael J. Fox clones decked out in garage rock gear, The D4 present aural amnesia with the lyrical complexity of an even less non-ironic Andrew WK.

The album starts to wear thin by the homestretch.

The Listener is ultimately such a strange record that it's hard to really classify; Giant Sand fans are going to love it, naturally (all twelve of them likely already own it), but people new to Gelb and his accomplices might be left scratching their heads.

I just always felt comfortable in my thinking that one Toad The Wet Sprocket was more than enough to fulfill a specific emotional and intellectual niche. Am I wrong?

The sparse and largely unobtrusive music, and Jurado’s wanting vocal range place the emphasis on storytelling, one his strongest assets. The results, however, are a mixed bag.

It's as much the arrival of The Jicks as it is the rebirth of Stephen Malkmus: The band has become a grounding force he can push and pull from, a safety net allowing him to take risks.

All eleven tracks on Bad Timing are gems that balance a knack for brain-lodging choruses with the grime and stylistic drift of Exile on Main Street, begging a record collection's worth of comparisons with nary an instance of outright thievery.

They've still got angst to spare, but their wit has been ground down by 'maturity,' or whatever you want to call it, into a bitter thing that saps a lot of that reckless energy.

The songs, interludes, pacing and sequencing are all as they should be, helping to make Quicksand/Cradlesnakes Califone's best record.

Though Mull Historical Society is an act one could easily file under "pleasant-enough pop," at 13 tracks (plus a bonus disc!), MacIntyre's strictly 80bpm velvet-lined melancholia will test the patience of any Anglophile.

In short, if your favorite bands aren't played between Audioslave and Foo Fighters on modern rock radio, Cave In probably isn't one of them.

Burn, Piano Island, Burn balances so perfectly between commercial appeal and untainted creativity that it's as if the band have been digitally inserted atop a mountain no man could conceivably climb.

Like The Clash before them, The Libertines draw primarily from decades of rock tradition-- blues, dub, a healthy whiff of the English countryside, and a few gorgeous rock riffs straight from the brainstem of Chuck Berry-- and fuse them into an unruly and triumphant monster of an album.

Skimskitta isn't particularly strong or potent, but it's relaxed and smooth enough to induce a very mellow, mild buzz.

With a bloated 60+ minute runtime and some truly misguided dabblings with e-bows and saxophones, Log 22 presents Bettie Serveert at their most self-indulgent. And it's not pretty.

It's an unrefined, poorly calculated mess.

Awful as it might be, Oskar is not easy to dismiss because awfulness has always been a part of Momus' gambit.

Diamonds on the Inside's breathless Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock whirlwind is tiring, at best.

Beans twirls and stretches his language, depicting the life of a poet-rapper, heavy on non-traditional boasts and battle rhymes. But he lacks the gulping, deep tone of former APC cohorts Priest and Sayyid, which means the beats usually usurp his rhymes.

The band's new sound is nothing short of painfully, achingly banal.

Her voice, raspy and harsh against the gently ringing acoustic guitar, makes you expect a gloomy, even maudlin disc. But that can distract from what makes it great: its ambiguity, the way she expresses herself in such strangely personal terms yet never settles on an emotional tone.

The songs are frustratingly stagnant-- albeit beautiful-- exercises in lap-pop textures.

Wonderful Rainbow delivers what Ride the Skies most lacked: Musical diversity.

Fans of the mid-1970s lineup should find the most to enjoy on Power to Believe, as it not only finds King Crimson playing with muscular aggression similar to that period, but also revisiting the group improvisation that set them so far apart from other 70s prog bands.

It takes a colossal effort to back Molina's candor, and given what a departure this record is for the band, it's not surprising that some of the songs get bogged down here and there. It's also not much of a problem.

Throwing Muses are the counterpart-- or maybe the antidote-- to the driven, enraptured solitude of [Hersh's] solo material; they deliver a release and an excitement that's been missing from her work for years.

Unfortunately, the album is too top-heavy to be seaworthy, the back end full of Fugazi knockoffs and half a song stretched out to ten minutes in a forced attempt at a showstopping finale.

There's definitely a lot to like throughout this disc; the band has boatloads of talent, and the eclectic spread gels much better than you'd expect.

Down with Wilco shouldn't be purchased simply on the desire to hear new Wilco material, but would almost certainly appeal to fans of the Summerteeth era.

#1 is a mixture of sounds already available on many Human League, 808 State and Heaven 17 records, arranged by amateurs exploring their self-obsessed, nerdy sexuality.

Hiding below layers of dated synth noise, dinky drum machines and expensive effects is, surprise surprise, a solo bedroom recording. 50 minutes of structured wankery, as performed by a lone Brit with the questionable talent to put a chorus to a verse, employing a thin, laddish vocal and rudimentary guitar skills.

A decade into their career, the Notwist have created a masterpiece by pulling the same trick they pulled on Shrink: mixing things that might not seem to fit together into a beautiful, seamless whole.

Sounds overproduced and underdeveloped.

The musical arrangements are just right, consisting of his usual assortment of electronic instruments and percussion that sound like broken toys. Hearing these tools applied in the service of well-written pop songs would be divine, but the melodies, as performed by the speech synthesizer, just aren't moving.

The lack of freshness is most apparent on the disc's instrumental tracks, most of which sound like hand-me-down versions of the micro-carols on Mum's Finally We Are No One.

Though all the elements that make their music great are still present, never do they crystallize and come together quite like they have in the past.

While this is a step forward for Shipp, for APC, it's a side-step from their gleamingly tricked-out, beat-tweaked and freaky Arrhythmia.

The core tension between Tamborello's complex, almost impossibly dense production and Gibbard's cutting voice makes Give Up a pretty damned strong record, and one with enough transcendent moments to forgive it its few substandard tracks and some ungodly lyrical blunders.

Calexico have created their first genuinely masterful full-length, crammed with immediate songcraft, shifting moods and open-ended exploration.

Revelatory, if somehow pompous.

If The Datsuns serve any purpose, it's to remind us that 70s glam/garage-rock was largely accountable for the abomination that was 80s hair-metal.

You Are Free is full of arresting, serene beauty, but as an album-- as that quantifiable object-- it has composite failings. Sans a handful of lesser inclusions and tributes, the imaginary, shorter version of You Are Free is flawless.

It's pure fun-- insanely, immediately likable, and ingenious in how much it achieves.

They have a knack for hitting the melody where some more experimental outfits might opt for a diverse array of craziness.

On the one hand, there's an abundance of energy and some great songwriting; on the other, there's less focus here than on either of their previous two releases.

Despite sagging a bit in the middle, Unrest skillfully skirts the myriad ways this kind of variety project could go wrong.

But with two (admittedly gigantic) exceptions, Nocturama reneges on its promise-- something's still missing from most of these tracks.

Eschewing pretentious unpretentiousness for unguarded passion, strict 77-82 influences for the classic rock stop on the FM dial, calculated instrumental inadequacy for guitar solos that are less technical flaunting (looking at you, Malkmus) than skillful, noisy exorcisms, Ted Leo makes a sound filled with so much authentic abandon, the British mags probably can't handle it.

For all the flaws in 50 Cent's persona, Get Rich or Die Tryin' isn't without its redeeming qualities.

Positively pillaging Oasis and The Stone Roses (whom Oasis pillaged in the first place), Johnny Marr + The Healers' mediocre debut is a defeated regurgitation of danceable Britpop and Madchester traditions that, in its best moments, recalls a second-rate... Soup Dragons.

A mellow, slightly sub-decent album delivered at the wrong time.

Let Go's only plausible use is to forcibly expose us to mid-90s alt-rock in the context of today so that we might come to grips with just how damn crappy it sounds.

Fans of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will no doubt find Loose Fur an indispensable companion piece, as much of the music found here occupies roughly the same static-frosted moonscape as "Radio Cure".

These lush arrangements seem content to simply drift by, never truly engaging the listener, and making it difficult to fully appreciate the album if you aren't in the mood to be put under.

The problem lies with the songs themselves, which simply lack outstanding or memorable hooks: Most are content to meander behind a curtain of big rock guitars and bigger rock cliches, infinitely repeating themselves or, in some cases, never saying much of anything at all.

This album is as much of a baffling nadir as Metal Machine Music, with nowhere near the stoned bravado.

Master and Everyone is a solid collection of rather thin songs that never quite sound intimate; songs that meant something profound to someone-- but always, it seems, someone else.

An above-average production of reasonable merit.

Unsurprising, and not much of a main course, but a tasty and satisfying side dish nonetheless.

But instead of pushing the electronics and making a funkier, nastier successor to his hit [Nu-Bop], this new disc feels like nothing so much as the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Ultimately, it's the unbearable triteness of the lyrics that does Long Knives Drawn in.

The album's not a step forward so much as a squirm in quicksand.

Overtly aping Mogwai, Jessamine and the entirely mediocre Bardo Pond, Kinski's aimless, ten-minute jams fail to deliver sonically or structurally, content to wallow in self-satisfied discovery, using distortion pedals to mask their junior varsity musicianship.

Holopaw's cover art and Depression-era script logo might be indie-folk standard issue, but the music contained within is a refreshing, effective new use of the boundaries: a wood-paneled Powerbook.

Do some of the more standard-issue runs seem a bit labored? They do.... But the emotion buzzing out of these songs keeps a great number of them stunning, like indie-friendly versions of scores from period epics or superhero movies.

One Bedroom... signals a return to the half-on/half-off inconsistency that marred all Sea and Cake albums except Nassau and Oui, as a handful of misfires trip up the flow.

This is a massive artistic statement from The Microphones, and though it may be cryptic-- even overwhelming at times-- it remains warm and open, thanks to the stunning intimacy that has consistently been the group's hallmark.

The misstep here is the addition of something altogether basic: Vocals.

In many ways, God's Son is lyrically superior to Illmatic. Nas has created an album that is at once mournful and resilient, street-savvy and academic.

Com comes off as alternately uncomfortable and downright lazy, half-speaking-- or worse, singing-- new-age revelations to the masses.

The biggest detractor here is the band's lack of focus. The record is downright messy at times, even if the thick, murky quality does, in some instances, work to considerable effect.

In a sense, these thirty-six minutes show that the duo has basically been stuck in neutral since 1995.

Phrenology completely realizes The Roots' talents and potential, maintaining its cohesiveness despite its many disparate elements.

For all the album's lovely sounds, the bulk of the actual songs on Writers Without Homes are not particularly memorable.

One starts to wonder if all the Jesus & Mary Chain comparisons flying around The Raveonettes aren't due to their J&MC-like tendency to write the same song over and over again, as well as their ability to kick up a right good wall of white noise.

Out Hud also back up their flash with remarkable substance, setting their music apart from anything as one-dimensional as standard club offerings or moody trance cuts.

The bulk of Machine Says Yes draws heavily on the rhythms and studio techniques of FC Kahuna's big beat roots, and garnishes them vigorously with the robotic female vocals and canned electro beats of Ladytron or Peaches; it gets old faster than Wesley Willis.

While Quality may lack the basement charms of [departed producer DJ Hi-]Tek's finest, it more than compensates by employing a funkier and more upbeat sound palate to further draw out the nuances of what is already one of the most rounded and complete rap personas in the game.

At its worst, this project is just plain retarded.

Riot Act meanders from one song to the next with an overwhelming insipidness.

A good record with some incredibly sick production work.

Where others in this vein opt for a hazy, nebulous cloud of half-remembered dreams, Manitoba's music is direct and unassuming while still remaining evocative.

Chat and Business won't bring you down, nor will it kick your ass. It's the kind of album that's never better than its last single.