Friendly and nondescript.

It's sort of campy stuff, but it's gripping in its willful oddity.

The Belbury Tales is stranded somewhere between the abstract work of Jupp's past and the fuller sound of the live instrumentation he is applying, making this feel like his most pleasingly open-ended release so far.

It feels like he's listening harder than ever to feel out new ways to move forward, causing him to quietly cleanse his vision in ever more compelling ways.

But for all of its immediate pleasure, In Ghostlike Fading feels slightly vacant, valuing tribute and stylization above personal expression.

As when the biggest guy in the bar has your back, Vee Vee is filled with extra spittle and bottomless bravado.

My only real complaint is that the physicality of the bass and drums could have been emphasized to an even greater degree-- while your ear is constantly drawn to the rhythm section's permutations, Leaneagh's voice sits perhaps a bit too prominently in the mix, and the exhilarating wildness of the drumming is often suggested rather than truly felt.

A motley assortment of Sonic Youth nods, acoustic entreaties, and cloying pop-rockers, Ranaldo's opportunity to step out of the Sonic Youth shadows and into his own proper spotlight is mostly a miss made of mediocrity.

For a band that's lyrically so devoted to upsetting the order, Goatwhore sound unequivocally content with replaying the past.

With their harmonies and swooning vocals, they're never quite Troggs-level elemental, but these guys clearly know how to wail.

Rossen brings to this EP the meticulous craftsmanship we've come to expect from his work, but in Silent Hour he's created something rare: a rendering of isolation that feels sincere but never maudlin.

One of the most inspired folk records I have heard in a long time.

Eternal Turn of the Wheel is as captivating as most any stretch of black metal you'll hear this year, even if it possesses a lifetime of questions that deserve to be asked.

Port of Morrow doesn't sound like it belongs to any particular decade or style, instead hopping around like some fully loaded AM radio dial that cranks out gem after gem.

Valentina is essentially Gedge and his current sidemen doing a very solid impression of the Wedding Present as they were circa 1990.

After spending 15 minutes sounding like preordained headliners, Tribes trudge through half an hour of perfunctorily composed and performed verses and choruses that are all too deniable.

Frying on This Rock mostly finds White Hills with their freak flags hoisted well above half mast, with any and all overtures toward coherence obscured by billowing clouds of feedback.

It's one of the least distinctive things he's put his name on, a step backward into Southern-rap exercises that point you away from K.R.I.T.'s music and toward his heroes.

Framing Pretty Ugly as a broken-beat album helps account for its pleasures, but can't entirely absolve its pitfalls, perhaps because much of what is true for funky remains true for broken beat, namely, that the flight into syncopation should not be heedless.

Form & Control immediately shows the band's strengths and their weakness: It's a smooth, utterly precise study of the formal elements that make disco and electro-pop tick, but with far too little of the body heat that actually gets that stuff going.

It is a wearying listen, overcrowded and too loud and too harsh, and to engage actively with it is to feel your knuckles whiten with effort.

Between the innocuously rambly music, Fite's toned-down vocal mannerisms, and this pencils-up-the-nose persona, Ain't is a record that's hard to dislike, but nearly impossible to imagine loving.

The record functions as a well-executed sampler of the magnified pain and horror we've come to expect from this band.

The Chap couch this darker subject matter in their sleekest, most elegantly crafted songs to date, wherein the influence of pop's reigning sardonicists, Steely Dan, becomes as much musical as it has always been spiritual.

Music that's both haunting and life-affirming, something to make you dream and think.

We All Raise Our Voices to the Air sounds less like a tour document than a greatest hits, struggling to sum up the band's career and find some new direction forward.

10 tracks of the kind of fierce, instrumental, no-bullshit techno that was as left-field popular in 1988 as 1998 as 2008. It's often witty, with a kind of robots-running-amok charm, and always attention-grabbing, at least in small doses. But friendly it ain't.

Too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory.

After these frontloaded highlights [Andrew in Drag, God Wants Us to Wait], it doesn't take long for Love at the Bottom of the Sea to become a rain-boot-worthy slog through water-logged mid-tempo material.

Tyga isn't a gifted lyricist, but he has a few key things going in his favor: a workmanlike ability to ride a beat, a solid singing voice, and a great ear for melody.

Milk Famous falters by creating an Uncanny Valley effect by adopting the most easily replicable aspects [of Spoon's sound] without maintaining any sort of human element or offering anything that's identifiable as their own.

The Clearing feels lovingly erected, fashioned bit by bit.

The communal, freewheeling looseness is one of the album's greatest assets, as you feel as if you were a party to the making of the record in Eagle Bay, too.

The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons... There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.

Never Ending Nights contains just enough detail to save it from pastiche and in doing so offers a glimpse into Willner's influences.

A Victim of Stars doesn't offer much to anyone already immersed in that world. For everyone else this is an engaging scratch at the surface of a wide-open mind.

Most tracks here make no bones about aiming straight for the radio. Choruses are airy and open, melodies are sticky and straightforward and tend to lodge in your head with or without your approval.

It all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it.

Open Your Heart is smartly sequenced to metabolize genre and morph like a masterful DJ mix, subtly rationing out its true peaks even while seemingly going full-throttle throughout.

In the end, One Second of Love is enjoyable but slight: its stronger moments render the weaker ones particularly forgettable.

Until that last song, fun persists in the album's absurdly infectious hooks without being marred by concepts or meaning.

It's bound to ruffle feathers and turn off old fans, and in a way, going so outright "pop" is one of the gutsiest, risky things a pillar of the scene like Scuba could have done.

This album feels more like a series of genre exercises, a place in which they occasionally work up a palpable tension, but never enough to make this more than an adequate diversion from the resources they're obviously sourcing.

Sounds From Nowheresville makes me want to buy chocolate, try on clothes, take a holiday--anything but listen to this record.

Ghostory is at its best a very pleasurable realization of niche.

This is a record with a handful of standout songs struggling and straining against one another after being crammed into the standard album format.

Corrosion of Conformity does overstay its welcome with a couple of second-rate tracks, but overall, the album manages to both recapture Animosity's feral energy and reach compositional peaks that the 1985 versions of Dean, Weatherman, and Mullin couldn't have accessed.

While the amount of raw material here may be daunting for some, there are plenty of surprising melodic moments to indulge in.

It's not a record that's going to hit you over the head-- it's almost fatally unassuming and more likely to meekly ask if you maybe wanted to spare a few seconds to listen-- but it's one that will offer a surprising amount of replay value if you accept its coy, hesitant invitation.

The lyrical coarseness serves an important function, reinforcing the urgency of O'Connor's performances and creating the impression that she has worked hard and fast to document her emotions at their rawest and wildest.

For a record that sounds like memories of better times, there's a disheartening shortage of hooks or melodies that aren't hitched to lyrics you'd rather forget.

After an iffy start, Toward the Low Sun thankfully picks up a head full of steam in its closing stretch--hopefully, this momentum won't dissipate over another seven-year layoff.

Memoryhouse have a ways to go before they're creating music with as much melodic power or depth of feeling as their dream-pop contemporaries.

They manage to string a staggering number of tightly packed nuggets of melody and texture into 46 minutes.

The music is pretty but still--without many shifts in color or tone, they sit there like flat, two-dimensional objects.

Arnalds' score ultimately isn't as satisfying [Trent Reznor's The Social Network or Cliff Martinez's on Drive], especially in the front half where he's excessively patient and slow to build momentum.

Whereas Too Young to Be in Love was the excited doodles of a crush's name in a notebook, Hairdresser Blues is the discarding of the love letters that came after.

1966 is one more piece to a puzzle that will never be complete--which is of course how Dalton herself would have had it.

For all its violence, Back radiates warmth. Much of the beauty is due to the expanded instrumentation.

More unfortunate are the moments when Schnauss and Peters aim for surprising or affecting and veer straight into kitsch.

All together, it sounds like a poorly organized collection of demos and ideas.

On Man With Potential Pete Swanson's ability to encompass many sounds and moods knows few bounds, if any.

People deserve a two-disc Sparrow comp to bury all other Sparrow comps, but this isn't it (Smithsonian's First Flight, from 2005, is much better, though it falls off before Sparrow hit his prime).

With The Something Rain, Tindersticks provide a wholly convincing reminder that they are, by definition, an incendiary device.

The most disappointing aspect of Go Fly a Kite is that it sounds so satisfied, almost smug, in its complacency.

None of the songs are simple, and they mostly all build to surprising and surprisingly weird heights.

It'd be much easier to love, as opposed to merely like, They!Live's glistening, long-form tech-house soundscapes if there were more bombs and curveballs hidden amongst its lovingly pruned forest glades.

While something like 2007's Cendre benefited greatly from an occasional splash of his cotton-wool electronics, there are very few moments like that here, and frankly, it needs more.

It's to Lambchop's credit that their music avoids comfortable resolutions. Instead, it hangs there, no moral, no judgment.

This album is more of a mood piece, its melodic rewards teased out over time and drenched in the type of steady rain that his home state is known for.

I Am Gemini is Cursive's weakest record by a disheartening margin.

As messy and thoughtful a take on house as we're likely to hear this year.

Sleigh Bells pull off this more sophisticated and nuanced approach without calling attention to their improved craft or maturity.

On Interstellar, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band.

The Russian Wilds strives for timelessness, but sounds temporally adrift.

Compulsively listenable.

The songs on Hadreas' full-length debut are eviscerating and naked, with heartbreaking sentiments and bruised characterizations delivered in a voice that ranges from an ethereal croon to a slightly cracked warble.

Somehow, Dando's nonchalance here--his stoned cadences, fleeting hooks, loose-limbed guitar playing, and generally rumpled demeanor--comes across as a weird but sincere gregariousness.

Animal Joy proves they are still a naturalistically minded band, but in dropping the more arcane conceptual gambits of their self-described "trilogy" ... and speaking in layman's terms both emotionally and sonically, they're taking their best shot at meeting new listeners halfway.

Hastily assembled, thoughtlessly sequenced minutes of vivid beats and incredible rapping.

Never before has his music possessed this much majesty, this much command, this much power.

They've developed a larger musical vocabulary, but the results can be cumbersome.

Here, when everything's as clear as it is on Les Voyages de l'Âme, he feels almost too exposed, and the big climaxes he's reaching for don't arrive. There's no denying the beauty, but it feels weirdly muted-- or perhaps just unsurprising.

It's the most cohesive-- and, possibly, the out-and-out strongest-- Islands record yet.

Despite feeling like the work of a couple laying themselves bare, it's also music to get lost in, to block out the real world.

The struggle between salvation and damnation has rarely sounded so lively or so gloriously conflicted.

This music, so basic on one level, is both warm and cold, blackened by mortality and twinkling with life, somehow evoking the wonder and absurdity of existence itself.

A boilerplate, but immensely satisfying, noise-pop record.

Free All the Monsters simply consists of a set of plaintive songs that draw on all the stylistic cues this band has worked hard to establish in the past (a Byrds-ian jangle, a touch of Velvets-style dissonance) and tightens everything up a touch.

So maybe Mux Mool can't literally do everything--but for the bulk of Planet High School, he's got himself an engaging something.

This version of Earth has simply given Carlson more room and more assistance to explore, well, darkness and light--in his own time, of course.

It's a cushy listen, if not only always distinctive, particularly since the shorter tracks often amount to a cooled, deep-blue gelatin that holds the previously released singles together.

Musically, Tennis have broadened their horizons just the right amount, adding rock'n'roll muscle and a more purely pop clarity.

This is Field Music at their most baroque-- a record of sweetly melodic miniatures that coalesce into form only long enough to tumble into the next meticulously designed song suite.... [Yet] Plumb is a little too fussy. Great hooks rise up, but are quickly abandoned in the rush to the next good idea.

The personalities on this album are so blank the songs may as well be performed by apps, and sung by Siri.

You may not feel pleasure all the way through And They Turned Not When They Went, but if you're drawn to the bizarre, inconstant emotional terrain of late-night wakefulness, you'll find something honest.

On Ten$ions, they replace what made them sometimes intriguing and slightly subversive with tired tropes and lazy lyrics.

The noxious muck on evidence here obscures most of what made his past music so singular.