Off/On is a solid record that thrives on the idea of possibility and hedged optimism.

Pillowfight is technically flawless but thoroughly unexciting.

The samples and some of the lyrics feel a little too controlled, on-message, and conceptual, which is unusual since her songs often tease out the dark emotion in mundane, everyday moments. As a result, No Elephants often feels hermetic and occasionally impenetrably austere.

Taken apart from the high expectations set by their debut, Waiting is another strong collection of guitar pop gems from a band quickly proving itself to be a better, more elusive quantity than any easy genre tag might suggest.

Like Total Life Forever, Holy Fire threatens greatness, and whatever disappointment comes from missing the mark is mitigated by its scope: A bomb needs to be operational more than it needs to be accurate.

With previous releases, he's earned his heroic acclaim in the tough, tried-and-trusted lanes of contemporary jazz. With No Beginning No End, he's built his own road out.

Had Cult of Luna attempted to make the same record six times during the last decade, maybe they would have condensed it into a tight 30 minutes by now. That would be neither captivating nor interesting, though, and Vertikal is quite often both.

The cartoonish brutality of the music is fun as hell, and since Korvette is most often mocking himself during Honeys, it doesn't come off as hectoring.

Fall's worst moments are queasy and charmless.

Even with fewer hands playing fewer instruments, the songs nevertheless sound leaden, ponderous, drowsy. Still, there are some inspired flourishes.

Setting aside the occasional meandering instrumental break, there are enough genuinely charming and well-crafted songs here that you can sort of understand what they're aiming at.

It may not be an extreme reworking of song forms or a sudden return to action, perhaps simply another chapter in the various indulgences he enjoys, but in numerous ways, The Jazz Age is Ferry's most radical work yet.

The precise ecstasy of the production buoys the record through its few sluggish patches.

It's a real trove, and not just because this lineup is relatively obscure.

There's room for Smoke to grow into this new guise, but Wraetlic is too satisfied with its own dissatisfaction to serve as anything more than comfort food for those predisposed to melancholia.

You get lost in it, and if you're wired a certain way that mixture of desire and confusion is easy to map on to the wider world. For 22 years, the only way to get there was through Loveless and its associated EPs; now there's another path, one many of us never expected to find.

In a lot of ways, Country Sleep delivers while still making you feel like it's playing on your vulnerability.

Taken for what it is--a fluffy, animated unicorn flying joyfully to college-rock Pleasure Town--Out of View is a nice 40-minute respite from reality.

When it really hits, as it often does here, the music of Grouper creates a feeling that can only be defined as awe, an uncanny mixture of wonder and dread that nobody does better.

When II is truly on, it's proof that great albums aren't the sole measure of a great band, a subtle advance that puts Unknown Mortal Orchestra right back where they started: something of a mystery, but one that will certainly be interesting going forward.

We the Common's best songs are its most dynamic.

Good as these guys are at mashing up genres on the fly, there's no denying the straighter, fist-pumpier stuff here works best.

While addressing the same themes he's been tweaking for more than a decade now, James adds a new trick to his ever-expanding repertoire: transforming the boundless possibilities of solo creativity into a cohesive one-man show.

Juul's vocals and production are emotive and permeable, always trying to convey something without any sort of coercion as to what that feeling's supposed to be.

While the best work of the Clientele created worlds, The House at Sea charmingly aspires to being a photo album, something to inspire your own travels rather than serve as a substitute for them.

These aren't songs meant to jump out at you, but spend some time with them and little illuminations flicker to life.

The lack of technique gives Reasons to Live an unfinished quality that suggests there's either more depth than there appears to be, or an underlying emptiness deriving from too much feral energy and not enough songwriting.

The guitars are buzzy and loud, the rhythms are quick, the drums crash, the lyrics are densely packed into a short span of time, and Boyer spits them out with punk rock confidence

Yeah Right has its charms, but they're echoes of a band Bleeding Rainbow used to be under a slightly different name.

Overall, General Dome's rewards are equal to its considerable demands, proving that there's more to Buke and Gase than a good story.

It's despairing and unfriendly, but it opens up an entire new world for Sweet to explore, and is richest and most surprising Boduf release yet.

More often than not, however, Mice Parade pushes these songs down paths that don't fit.

So really, it doesn't turn out all that different from the most recent Earlimart, Beachwood Sparks, or Jason Lytle records: perfectly okay, not pushy enough to be even remotely unpleasant, and in a way you're hoping it's better.

The relatively sumptuous presentation of The Flower Lane successfully separates it from the rest of Ducktails' discography. Unfortunately, a familiar emptiness remains.

The Roxette and Cyndi Lauper-referencing, soaring keyboard pop of Heartthrob is a welcome stylistic reconciliation, if one that sacrifices their sonic weirdness.

With Hummingbird, Local Natives have made a thoughtful, lovely album with small gestures that provide great rewards.

There are flashes of coherence and grace in all the furious noodling, but overall, you probably had to be there, bathed in the glory of mortal combat.

True Hallucinations is ultimately a triumph of focus and discipline.

Home is an ace of a second album, one which maintains the most important elements of Chung's painstakingly crafted sound while progressing nicely into a friendlier arena.

They've operated as FIDLAR since 2009, and released a couple of EPs prior to this collection. That time was spent honing a brand of hopped up, surfy garage punk that comes with more variety than you might expect.

The Joy Formidable might not have the most plausible ambitions for a 21st century rock band. But Wolf's Law offers enough thrills to suspend your disbelief.

The Ruby Suns quickly lose their nerve and hooks about halfway through Christopher, and it simply becomes a brighter, albeit favorable, take on Fight Softly's mushier innards.

while other young UK-based electronic experimentalists like Floating Points make it onto the mix, Thomson's heavy label love is a reminder that he's constantly one step ahead of the game.

Though it makes left turns and constantly tweaks its formulas, In Focus? is admirably coherent and cohesive, with each little pile-up of ideas finding its place in the big pile-up of ideas that comprises the album.

It's not perfect, but it's closer than you'd expect from someone who just a few years ago was a member of a C-list girl group.

Nightlands have created something that's utterly self-contained.

Without a singular narrative to tie it all together besides Hamilton's lovely but noncommital exhalations, it's a little too easy to lose interest.

Even if La Costa Perdida isn't a great Camper Van Beethoven record, it does illustrate how unique this band still is, 30 years after it formed.

The more time you spend with Ambassadors, the more clearly that commitment and joy comes through.

Ra Ra Riot are best when they stick with what they wanted to get away from.

Wash the Sins is not a logical, concrete progression from Violet Cries and the Hexagons EP, but a competent if ultimately unmemorable reiteration of a message that wasn't particularly strong in the first place.

Centralia is less severe than The Seer, but it's executed with the same unyielding desire to move and to feel.

For now, the musically and emotionally rewarding Anything in Return evokes the feeling of being young with options and in no hurry to figure it all out.

The Black Rock succeeds on occasion, but the weight of McCombs' past is a tough load to bear in situations like this.

Roberts' voice sounds in fine fettle as well, and his reedy, keening brogue is the type of immediately distinctive instrument that is virtually impossible to imagine any listener accidentally mistaking for someone else's.

The album simply flickers out like a candle, with the faint promise of another visit to this setting.

As an album, Lost Sirens isn't at all an embarrassment: it's a document of a band whose range and reach, rather than power, are what has been diminished.

The way that Everything Everything play against the macho, aggressive posturing of contemporaries who could care less about caring should be their strongest calling card.

Love Sign's belief in the righteousness of its intentionally big, dumb songs being big, dumb and nothing else ultimately sets Free Energy up to fail.

Django is perhaps the first Tarantino soundtrack that feels, uncharacteristically, a little too nail-on-the-head.

On Fog, Arbouretum does well by both parties [his songwriting influences: singer Will Oldham, with whom he toured as a backing guitarist, and Baltimore punk-rock-Gnostics, Lungfish].

There's plenty to love on Mystical Weapons, but it's not a casual listen, and it's best not to expect one.

A narrative concept album that runs a mere 29 minutes and is both more musically ornate yet somehow also slighter than anything Girls attempted, a deeply personal work whose arch presentation serves to keep you at an emotional distance.

To its credit, {Awayland} rarely comes across as false, but O'Brien's affinity for cleverness over clarity ensures it rarely comes across in any real way.

Light Up Gold finds Parquet Courts looking to breakout through any available means: intense reflection, resin hits, or rock'n'roll.

It may not herald another big day coming, but Fade is a thoroughly immersive dusk-to-dawn soundtrack to a dark night's passing.

["All Natural" is] the one song on the spotty, often comatose Selling My Soul that sounds like it needed to be made.

They still have the riffs, but without the snap of a snare drum to keep things in line, the chiming guitars become repetitive and amorphous.

If you've liked anything Toth has done in the past, whether that's the tunes he's written or the textures he's conjured, Blood Oaths offers both, perhaps better than ever before. If you've dismissed him, though, this is the sound of one musician's prolific and mercurial path, reaching delightful new highs.

Here, there's a sense of picking at a strand of inspiration and seeing how it flows toward a form of endgame, albeit one that still prickles with possibility.

Loyal is a hypnotic record, siphoning in and out of repeated, textured loops that soothingly chafe against each other like fingers performing a head massage.

LP is efficient, prickly, and noticeable, or not much like modern techno at all. That he is operating like this at the same time many others are is a boon, for us, so long as he keeps his blinders on.

Although Everything Touching is post-rock at its most winsome, and rarely unpleasant to listen to, closer "Murmurations" might be the key to understanding why several years of triumphant live shows hasn't translated into the ultimate debut album.

Trouble Man's scattershot approach makes it the realest album the guy could make in 2012, but that doesn't make it any good.

LongLiveA$AP delivers on and even exceeds the promise of LiveLoveA$AP. Like that mixtape, the album is a triumph of craft and curation, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound

Muhly seems at home in this world, and part of the enjoyment of Drones is in how it seems to observe, from Muhly's serene remove, how others are not.

Explore suggests that while Park can produce listenable songs that do right by their influences, he's still an inexperienced talent in the process of finding his own voice.

What prevents Berberian Sound Studio from being a genre exercise is the care taken to paper over the cracks, to find some common ground between droney, Popol Vuh-type material ("Valeria's Burial (Under the Fort)") and more visceral horror soundtrack work (the positively seething "The Game's Up").

Like a lot of free internet mixtapes, The Narcissist II is compelling but ultimately shallow, and shallow is a fault, even if that's what Blunt was aiming for.

The broader fault of Ten is that it isn't the ABBA Gold-caliber wonder that Girls Aloud deserves as a greatest hits collection.

There are no extras, outtakes or re-anythinged. But taking these 10 records in a row, chronologically, it is a striking reminder no single artist has had a run like Joni,

The worst I can say about Dedication 4 is that there isn't one moment where I wouldn't rather be listening to the often mediocre originals. There are a dozen or so good punch lines scattered on D4, enough to make it fun enough for one listen

Finally Rich benefits from some professional tweaks in the mix, but otherwise leaves Keef's sound untouched. And in addition to succeeding on its own terms, it proves that Keef has a lot of potential-- much more than his detractors might have hoped.

Peter Buck is likely a fans-only effort, but one that showcases a low-stakes spontaneity and a renewed sense of possibility.

It sounds uninviting on paper, but there's frustrating murk and there's haunting murk, and Growing Seeds is the second kind.

Nocturne is a richer, comparatively luxurious listening experience, but it doesn't sound flashy or ostentatious.

Staying on just this side of a Corona beer commercial, it sounds like a continuation of Bergsman's realizations carried over from East of Eden, in that a change in latitude brings about a change in attitude.

At the risk of overstating the case, Life Is People--the work of a 69-year-old family man, and the work of a lifetime--confirms its maker's own thesis.

A compact reminder of the overwhelming force carried by Antony's best music.

This is some outlandish stuff, to be sure, but in a sense-of-adventure kind of way that feels in keeping with the vague, in-title-only themes of futurism and space travel that Orbits centers around.

In open air, Sigha's systems are chaotic and threatening, but they have a habit of choking one another off over the course of an album. Ghosts still proves, though, over and over, that Sigha has a single, awesome skill--tunneling, perverse techno.

Much of this material is short and fragmented, creating moments that flicker into life then vanish before achieving full impact.

Parklive showcases Blur in top form, but live albums are about a little more than a band; they document a moment too.

O.N.I.F.C., his second major label album, is a resounding misstep, and it's the first sign that Khalifa's unwavering focus may be getting swallowed up by the haze.

Where Desertshore and The Final Report connect is through a fascination with reaching the point where beauty gets tangled up with ugliness.

It's more focused than he's been in awhile, and while you couldn't call an album featuring 2Chainz, Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne (twice), Future, Young Jeezy, Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Jamie Foxx, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and more "lean," Jesus Piece is less all-over-the-place than The R.E.D. Album.

On Diamond in the Ruff, he sounds more than ever like he's the ultimate good soldier, one desperately in need of a general.

The versions of Winehouse's repertoire that turn up on At the BBC's audio disc, though, are almost all sloppier than their studio counterparts, and she rarely manages to reveal anything we didn't already know about her songs.