Breakthrough-- which it is and isn't-- feels like the kind of record his adventurous precedent has made into a familiar signature. It's the album that gets at his recent creative mode most definitively, the one people might figure he had in him rather than the one that changed anybody's minds about him.

Woods' greatest strength has always been songwriting, and sharpening the focus and cleaning up the production has only enhanced the band's welcoming melodies.

Runner shakes out as one of this band's most subtly varied albums, and it can be an immersive listening experience if you give yourself over to it.

A handful of guests aside, though, none of G.O.O.D. Music's personalities do much to justify their newfound prominence. If Cruel Summer is meant to be an argument for the label's other talent, it makes a weak case.

The group's obvious enthusiasm for the project is contagious, and together they add another memorable benchmark to Chasny's formidable body of work, clearly having a fantastic time while doing so.

While there's no question that Grizzly Bear's last two records have sounded gorgeous, critics of the band have wondered if that's enough. Shields, the band's fourth and most compositionally adventurous record, should put those concerns to bed.

The result is an album that never sounds settled or still, defined not by one or another place but by the tumultuous spaces in between.

Serpentine Path is an unapologetically straightforward statement, one that's either going to sound awesomely monolithic or numbingly monotonous depending on the listener's appetite for extreme doom. But on its own terms, the album is highly successful.

Halstead's performing reinvents no wheels but never is anything less than well-done regardless, and the full performances can often find their own impact.

Mostly, Field Report sounds a lot like his old band.

By aiming for so many different styles, settling for subpar-at-best lyrics, and trying to pay the bills with rock'n'roll, they never find a sound that's fully captivating or convincing.

on Tempest, his latest album, Bob Dylan mostly sounds insane. That volatility can yield tremendous rewards-- on the ferocious "Pay in Blood", it clarifies his nihilism, his cruelty-- but it can also be distractingly unruly, inching toward self-mockery, all wild undulation and hairball-retch. Which would be okay-- embraced, even!-- if the rest of Tempest didn't feel so rote.

A song or two here and there might falter a bit, but taken as a whole, Mary's Voice is a minor triumph.

You'll find something to latch onto in every song, but you won't always walk away from Negotiations with its choruses in your head; it's a more consistent record than its predecessor, but more orderly, too, and the highs just aren't quite as high.

If the sheer enormity of Thee Oh Sees' dense discography has proven too forbidding for you to delve into, Putrifiers II is a convenient summary/gateway, opening with a killer shot of the band's patented echo-drenched fuzz-punk delirium ("Wax Face") and closing with a baroque, string-swept lullaby ("Wicked Park"), while traversing all points in between.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the album sounds too comfortable, too familiar: It's so deeply entrenched in their comfort zone that it sounds too easy-- not effortless, but automatic and rote.

As ever, Ragon's lyrics are highly evocative if not outright provocative.

In retrospect, it seems Giant will function less as a career highpoint for either artist, and more as a historical marker of the career trajectories of each participant.

It's a placeholder album from a man who has already written 20 songs that are better than the ones here.

Too many of the other songs feel starved of that love, though.

Too mushy and indistinguishable to wallop you in the gut and too cheesy to be taken seriously, the album feels, at its worst, like a series of power ballads with the choruses ripped out.

[Come of Age] is even more of a dystopian nightmare than Kid A or an El-P record: The Vaccines draw us into a universe that revolves entirely around Young, and if he's got nothing to say, his only possible conclusion is that nobody does.

The most appealing thing about this record is that this band, having created a brilliant and moving sound, returns to it again for another 38 minutes.

This album peaks when it finds room to tilt at larger topics and tinier ones within a few short seconds of one another.

One of the many great things about Liquid Swords is that while it's an unimpeachable work of lyrical mastery, of fierce intellect and sound morals, it's in no way a record for prudes.

Weiss and Takahashi lay out their visions in purely instrumental terms, and the production is sumptuous and beautifully tactile. This is what Teengirl Fantasy do best: They craft immaculate headphones music, full of enveloping small details.

All that is loveable or lamentable in Mungolian Jet Set's music is right here.

Even when he focuses his unflagging talents within fixed bounds, Lekman's still one of the most distinct and observant writers in indie rock today.

The songs are dense and trebly, swirling and mutating but rarely growing, and too often staying way past their welcome. There are plenty of worthwhile ideas, but a seasoned producer could strategically shave 20 minutes off the album while losing little.

As a showcase of a seasoned master in his element, Silver Age's bounty of direct, distorto-pop hits measures up to Mould's gold standard.

Most of the time, they do a pretty good job.

Rather than embalming past glories or forcing a big statement, the Orb sound like they're having fun on these jams, recorded quickly in Berlin, with pioneer Lee "Scratch" Perry.

un doesn't reach the heights (or more accurately, wallow in the depths) of Moon Pix, but more than anything else she's made, it feels like a companion piece to that record, a conversation with an older and wiser voice.

With Centipede Hz, Animal Collective have delivered a cluttered, abrasive album that confirms their naysayers' exaggerated perceptions of the band. But even a patchy Animal Collective album yields several exceptional songs.

A quick, pithy album, with 11 songs lasting just 30 minutes. There are patches of tedium, but the best moments are both surprising and engaging.

Despite the drama in the music, there's no sense of real people in these songs, not as artists in the here and now and not as subjects in the there and then.

There are still hints that Johnson still knows where his talents lie on Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet, but they're the faintest hints.

It unspools pleasantly and unhurriedly, possessing the sort of sparkly glow that often comes with rejuvenation.

One of the joys of Django Django is that even though it's rendered in two basic colors-- natural and synthetic-- the scenarios it conjures are significantly more multifaceted.

Mature Themes is as vital as anything he's ever recorded.

Remember the old Chris Rock bit where he ate broccoli and cheese for the first time as a kid and thought he'd want nothing but that for the rest of his life? Replace "broccoli" with "Jesus" and "cheese" with "Mary Chain" and you're getting close to the charmingly monomaniacal focus Stagnant Pools bring to their debut, Temporary Room.

They're the opening band you actually kinda enjoyed even though you showed up too early by mistake, the album you half remember liking when it was playing in a friend's car.

Believe You Me comes off as a collaboration between two dyed-in-the-wool daydreamers, finding both harmony and intriguing incongruity in their respective visions.

That first half [of the album] proves the less successful, though at the same time the opening three-song run may be the best thing Deacon's ever recorded... It's the second half of America that promises and more or less delivers something great and new for Deacon.

White's gift on Big Inner is taking sounds created by actual southerners and turning them into figments of his musical imagination, which he bends and shapes into bottomless columns of ethereal soul.

Even if it doesn't quite match the heights of Everyone Must Touch the Stove, Enterprising Sidewalks gestures towards the more obscure corners of the band's (and the label's) back catalog.

They click best as a mass of finely tuned parts. And in the latter three tracks... it really comes to the forefront, sounding so second-nature that you take the complex interplay in the underlying grooves for granted.

Despite his chart success with Drake, many of 2 Chainz' pop maneuvers feel tone-deaf.

As likeable as the album is, there's no saying it won't get out-maneuvered by the next garage band that bashes out a half-hour of blue-denim melodies.

Produced by Rancid's Tim Armstrong, the music here is predominantly a pitch-perfect versioning of 1970s reggae.

If there's anything wrong with Positive Force, it's that it's better suited as background music than bearing up to intense listening; while the guitar lines on most of the songs here are deliciously difficult to whistle, they're all essentially fairly similar.

Aside from the loose DOOM-in-England motif, there's not enough of an overarching theme that Jarel's serviceable-but-indistinct production can pull together.

Even with its generous supply of candy-coated riffs and easy-flowing melodies, Hot Cakes still goes down like lukewarm Eggo waffles: comfort-food familiar, but sapped of the frisson that made The Darkness special.

The split between Perry and Gerrard's singing parts remains distinct not only vocally, but for the different subjects each explores. That could be a stumbling block in other hands, but always seems to bring out the best where these two are concerned.

This Time mostly serves as a reminder of why he's troubled more than why he's great.

It's ultimately debatable whether or not Four is the "real" Bloc Party, but revisionist history isn't supposed to be a duller version of the real thing.

For 30 years Swans have challenged the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, music and noise, catharsis and abuse.... The Seer is the album that transcends them.

As a front-to-back experience, but album doesn't exactly stay with you.

Poor Moon turns out to be a wisp of a record, intentionally light and certainly promising but also oddly--and perhaps ironically--weightless.

A Thing Called Divine Fits might seem the Platonic ideal of indie rock collaboration, but the most memorable moments have Boeckner's signature.

It may actually be best to just pretend that H.N.I.C. 3 ends after the 10th song, because up to that point it's a pretty good, if slightly uninspiring, mixtape.

You could reasonably argue that this is Fake's most well-rounded record to date; the bigger question is whether such small refinements to such an established, well-trodden genre should merit attention from anyone other than diehards at this stage in the game.

Throwing discordant elements into the mix to see what comes out is firmly in keeping with the spirit of the times, but the desire to create another fork in the road, to not just slavishly replicate what came before, is what makes this album (and post-punk as a genre) such a consistently fascinating area to re-explore.

Bubu music is ancient; En Yay Sah offers a powerfully modern, cosmopolitan introduction to its complex and vibrant rhythms.

Listening to Grace & Lies can be taxing; it feels at moments like succumbing slowly to emotional frostbite. But Krans and Ollsin stir in a few furtive warm pockets to keep their record from freezing over.

A complex, even contradictory record, not just the Black Swans' best but one of the most incisive and moving mediations on life and the loss of it in recent memory.

Redd Kross sound tighter and more energetic, even though their guitar tones have mellowed a little.

Devotion marries her natural gift with throbbing instrumentation that breathes life into every single turn of phrase or sensitive vocal embellishment.

The elements of pastiche are woven smoothly into her sound, which dances gracefully on the edges of past and present, of waking life and dreams.

Fragrant World is curiously thin.

Sun God is an unapologetic, all-or-nothing proposal.

Foxygen haven't so much produced memorable songs as much as cool, disembodied sonic layers that might one day coalesce into memorable songs in your head if you listen to it enough.

Sure, maybe Eremita is sometimes awkward, chintzy, or melodramatic, but for 52 minutes, Ihsahn mostly allows the listener to have a blast, if occasionally and arguably at his own expense.

The original is a seduction; this [album] is food-court flirtation.

There will be an audience for bands like Jukebox the Ghost, who at least do this unoffensive brand of power-pap serviceably. But if you're too much of a realist to believe in trick lighting, happy endings or choreographed emotion, Safe Travels will probably leave you wishing for riskier terrain.

Raw Money Raps is immaculately constructed as identity crises go, and there's an uncontrived honesty that feels more like someone working through a multifaceted outlook on life than testing his options for which crowd to play to.

There's something about the visceral, elemental nature of Niki and the Dove's production that takes you right there, shivering and pulling the collar of your coat close as wind whips under the viaduct.

The fundamental Gatekeeper template has been stretched and tweaked, putting one tentative foot forward into the future while the other remains firmly rooted in the past.

Compelling... [Yet] Forever So's resolutely overcast vibe grows a touch dreary around the three-quarter mark; Husky's tempos tend toward the deliberate, and they're most comfortable hanging out in a minor key, but after nine or 10 fairly maudlin affairs in a row, you may find yourself longing for a little respite.

Way's most compelling moments on Sorry are those in which she's particularly hellish, strong, and lyrically bold.

What hits quickest yet lasts longest are his more wistful, sentimental tunes.

C.A.R. is an excellent, devastating record, a chronicle of the amiable pessimism and occasional nihilism of a rapping Bukowski who can't seem to find a way out of the condition in which he finds himself.

The seven songs on In Motion #1 were commissioned as alternate scores to seven short avant-garde films, and without those inspirations unspooling in front of the listener, there's a strange incompleteness to most of them.

Though often disjointed, when some of these fragments manage to really connect, it's hard not to imagine Supreme Cuts as being able to hit a decent stride in the future.

Even when they're digging into the grit of a country's flaws or society's problems, the synth-driven hooks can be outright jovial.

[Graceland] was unique in its total, and totally natural, synthesis of musical strains that turned out to be not nearly as different from each other as its listeners might have expected, and the result resonated strongly around the world and across generations.

It's nice to see that a band can organically develop its sound while still maintaining a home-grown sensibility.

When they wanted, Múm could already do abstractly affecting without also tipping into cloying sentimentality. But since the bulk of the compilation is so second-rate and saccharine, an obvious learning experience put on tape, Early Birds is inessential.

For its breadth and complexity, [Blur 21] actually tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well.

[The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL] are a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend [Bob Mould], starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.

There is still some great music on God Forgives, but it is somewhat overshadowed by higher-profile misfires.

Instead of justifying or summarizing two decades of work, Tyler and McDonnell set them aside and come up with a concise, lovely album that, like a gentle tourist, takes only pictures, leaves only footprints.

The paradox about them is this: With two people, Om sounded expansive; with more, they sound comparatively weak. The music is unmistakably theirs, but the intensity of it feels lost in the arrangements.

Hints of humor are often symbolized in Scholefield's artworks, but here they have an unbalancing effect, only serving to detract from the portentous musical renderings of the uneasy symbiosis between digital glitch and the natural world.

Country Funk re-creates this shift smartly, compiling songs by white artists playing with black sounds and black artists playing with white sounds, all without drawing neat parallels between these musical traditions.

If in the past [Fallon] managed to transform similar icons [Ginsberg, Van Morrison] into a communal mythology, here it too often sounds like regurgitation, as though the reference were an end in itself.

Even if this is an album that defies obvious lineage and needs a roadmap to uncover the specific sources from Joe Barrite's archive, there's an inescapable sense of emotional impact here.

Their self-titled debut EP for Warp and LuckyMe spans 16 minutes of some of the year's most brazen, positively huge hip-hop sounds.