Parallax feels like a more complete work than any other Atlas Sound record, with the differences between the songs less distinct and everything flowing together more naturally.

Admittedly, the album's moves are exceedingly well-worn, yet like fellow 21st century synth-poppers Junior Boys, Pallers' precise craftsmanship means they're also able to elicit many of the same deeply affecting moods and sensations as their forbears.

His gleeful love of words not only elevates some pretty heavy subject matter; it also helps distinguish XXX as one of the most compelling indie rap releases in an already strong year.

After a point this lightless gloom can get a tad oppressive, but Evangelista are able to leaven the mood somewhat through consistently inventive instrumentation.

The Vision seems to be exactly what Joker wants: UK pop R&B of the vainest and most vacuous possible variety.

Everything is fast-moving, breezily entertaining, and patently ridiculous.

And yet all these reworks and revisions stay in the general vicinity of the original album's tone of massive yet starkly open spaces, adding a few new facets but always staying close to the fine line Waiting for You treaded between bleak and euphoric.

Instead of Lungs' largely charming yet discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from a repetitiveness that's akin to looking at a skyline filled with 100-story behemoths lined-up one after the other, blocking out everything but their own size.

What's here is brilliant, beautiful, and, most importantly, finally able to stand tall on its own.

Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result, its few interesting ideas are stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission.

This isn't the sound of a band closing up shop so much as tidying up the workbench before stepping out for a while.

A Very She & Him stands guilty not of being oppressively adorkable, but of being not nearly adorkable enough.

Deer Tick try to score points simply by sounding like they could drink all those bands under the table, and the self-absorbed and even downright hateful Divine Providence ends up drinking at you, not with you.

Apokalypsis turns out to be a kind of book completely different from what its cover promises.

If Bruiser's more straightforward rock turns mostly disappoint (one notable exception: the late-game adrenaline shot "Everybody's Under Your Spell"), the album does find the band showcasing its dynamic range in new and intriguing ways.

While so many bands at their status revert to bloated contentment or some vague idea of rockist salvation, Mylo Xyloto finds Coldplay successfully continuing to explore the tension of wanting to be one of the best bands in the world and having to settle for being one of the biggest.

Cloudy and labyrinthine at times, airy and placid elsewhere, People cuts a pretty wide swath, an approach that feels a bit more mature and confident than the bending over backwards he sometimes had to do to reach the disparate genres on his earlier solo records.

They spent all their daring on concept, with little to spare for execution. Even for a duo as image-conscious and savvy as these guys, there is little style in their reduction.

No particular melodies, images, or moods really stick out from the vast, dreamy atmosphere that washes over you while you're listening.

The songs here are shorter, less cluttered, and just generally easier to listen to than Bitte Orca, which will disappoint you only if you love Dirty Projectors because of their relentless complexity.

Tarot Classics' popcraft proves well beyond promising, and these songs are certainly sturdy enough to handle their lusher productions and knottier sentiments.

For all his indulgences, Waits never lingers too long; these tracks are concise and expertly edited, and Bad as Me feels as new as it does ancient.

When you're operating on such a grand scale, and the exultant, openhearted Enemy/Lover is rarely outpaced by its lofty ambitions.

Kinshasa One Two is worthwhile both as a cause (all proceeds from sales go to Oxfam) and as an experiment, albeit one that requires some judicious editing to extract the tracks that really count.

While it often lacks the moodier, polyrhythmic highs of Great Lengths and the character that came with it, Martyn's efforts to make it back through no-nonsense propulsion nearly make up for it.

There's a sharp contrast between the twin peaks of Coracle and the rest of its material, especially when they try to pointlessly channel Spacemen 3 circa "Honey" and shackle that sound to some perfunctory beats on "Ecstatic Truth".

Class Actress still sound a little too weird to truly break through (and if they toned that weirdness down, this record just wouldn't be as interesting).

Gauntlet Hair lasts only nine songs. But they're all potential singles in their own right, all different.

Taking the long view, the fact that WAND feels a bit overstuffed is more exciting than it is disappointing.

In a couple of decades, when you're looking for an instant hit of what electronic pop felt like in 2011, you'll be able to throw on Glass Swords and get a dose of that feeling in its purest form.

It's another merely fine, expectation-meeting entry into Boratto's discography, a stopgap until the next knockout single comes along.

Frustratingly, Trust Now doesn't advance on the better ideas from Shadow Temple, particularly the elements of dance music that occasionally surfaced.

All Things Will Unwind, both suffers and succeeds in relation to its scope.

At its heart, jazz thrives on bold, sensitive interaction in the moment, and Live in Europe 1967 represents the pinnacle of that practice.

Forever a slave to rock history, Gallagher feels like he's biding his time for the third act reunion rather than breaking from the well-trod path.

Real Estate have such a knack for classic-sounding melody that every song quickly engages on a musical gut level.

Keeping listeners on their toes while also mimicking the way this music was often heard by fans-- it's an odd but effective approach, especially considering the usual keep-the-party-going Fabriclive style.

Where Living With Yourself found McGuire sticking to moody, simple melodies, Get Lost inches up the volume a little.

It is a bit ephemeral, but not quite as music to relax to--more like music to be bewildered by.

Above all else, it's the best M83 record yet.

The Great Escape Artist's intricate, heavily lacquered production--courtesy of Muse-man Rich Costey--has the effect of making Jane's Addiction sound like an anonymous assemblage of oversaturated recording tracks.

h parties click together because they're willing to let genre be an afterthought, yet they still avoid succumbing to a rootless, stylistically overreaching identity crisis.

It's not quite hype enough to be pure party music and lacks the cohesive point of view that fosters a more personal connection with a record.

On his eponymous debut, Mikal Cronin proves he can hold his own.

Red finds the band operating in a much cleaner, dreamier mode and mostly pulling it off.

"Hey Ray" is a sore-thumb irritant on an EP that otherwise carefully mediates between Cale's populist and deviant tendencies.

For a group who traded so well in whimsy, who got off to such a kaleidoscopic start, Original Colors can feel unusually drab.

As an innovator, she's as vibrant as ever, but as a songwriter, she sounds tired.

Breakers effectively conjures a space unto itself, but it's one that lacks an easy entry point.

Here, with one exception, they sound as though they're in soundtrack mode.

While the songs are wildly improved, I still can't say there's much of a discernible identity.

Breaks' lyrical thumbnails of lost opportunities and forgotten friends can seem a touch too pathos-addled on paper, but drawn through Bachmann's lungs, they leave their mark.

That sense of connectedness lends these songs a reassuring familiarity, as though they were new corners of a strange world whose boundaries grow larger and whose scenery grows more inviting with every Oldham release.

Despite its reduced scope, Life Sux is actually pretty versatile depending on where you stand with Wavves--take it as further confirmation of his permanent immaturity, or a sign that rattling off rudimentary but undeniably hooky punk-pop comes fairly easy to him.

Blake is fighting the respectable fight on Enough Thunder, though the EP's totally bass-less tracks show that he needs dubstep as much as dubstep needs him.

Adams evokes the goodwill of his masterpiece as a singer, anyway, even if the songwriting doesn't come close.

Though treading familiar sonic and thematic waters at the start, On the Water really comes alive midway through.

A far greater number of these remixes flatten out the complexity of TKOL's grooves in favor of commonplace arrangements.

Ultimately, the album's song-oriented material is the most memorable.

Re: ECM stands out not just for its depth but for its variety, for the sheer number of musics it incorporates.

A project conceived in noble intentions but hobbled by confused, muddled execution.

Its only commitment is to a subtle antagonism, and it ignores pretty much any worthwhile development in pop, rock, electronic, or hip-hop music since the turn of the century.

For all the sonic strides Svanangen takes on Hall Music, he sometimes seems stuck singing the same sad song.

He's brought all his skill to bear on Looping, as composer and arranger and texturologist, in order to build something this simultaneously sweeping and subtle, deep and immediate.

It's lively in its drowsiness, which may be the album's most compelling and distinguishing contrast.

As a full-length listening experience, Violent Hearts is a little much-- it runs just under a lean half-hour, but the relative lack of stylistic breadth covered makes a front-to-back spin feel longer.

You may not love all the moves Orcutt makes, but together they quicken your pulse and pressurize the atmosphere, much as a good horror film makes even calm moments seem one second away from shock.

Though some may miss the rough and raw approach of her last two EPs, it's refreshing and exciting to hear music that relies on bone-hard essence rather than gauzy trimmings to create an aura of mystery.

With the Freaking Out EP, Bundick moves from vaguely funky 1980s-tinged makeout jams to more explicitly funky 80s-tinged dancefloor jams-- think Chromeo. The change isn't as successful as his best work, but it still makes for a plenty rewarding between-albums EP.

As a piece of music, it eschews the richness and lushness of those albums, a sound that's felt on the verge of becoming stale. 1977 could be called a palate cleanser, but it's way too torn-up to be that.

What's interesting about the sound they've hit on isn't so much what the two musicians bring to each other's styles, as it is what each sacrifices from his own.

Though Thompson's plaintive wails and the brawny playing of the rhythm section give the impression of relentless and differentiable activity, they're holding patterns all the same.

The album may be scattershot, but perhaps that doesn't matter so much when it's delivered out the barrel of a 12-gauge.

Metals is a vivid evocation of a place that touches on fittingly vast themes about nature, love, and life itself.

The edge that sparked Spank Rock's best moments back in the day either isn't there or flails around without direction.

I do miss the grit, heavy-lifting, and larger excavations of their earlier work--nothing merits tossing around the word "epic" here--but what they do, and what they've become, is fascinating.

It doesn't help that Cole brings the least-flavorful bars of his career to his debut, aiming, most likely, for something more universal than his diaristic mixtapes. The few glints we get of his personal life are intriguing.

While Black Rainbows may represent more of a flickering flame than a raging inferno, it at least yields some evidence that Anderson's once-fiery persona has not been completely extinguished.

This album features perfectly serviceable and perfectly competent, middle-of-the-road punk rock music that probably sounds much better live than it ever could in a recording studio.

The record mixes feelings of protection and safety with the tug of adventure and wraps it in compulsively listenable music that explodes at just the right moments.

Appealing and in tune with admirable influences but ultimately lacking the sort of unpredictability or drama that can make these the songs that saved your life rather than reminiscent of ones that can.

Despite how much better-left-forgotten material is being offered up here as essential, there's still more life in the real Nevermind than anything that's attempted to replicate its attack since.

There's nothing especially bad here, but once the smoke clears from their bland, bassed-out ambiance, HTRK are another band without a sound to call their own.

The result is something that sounds like three session players and lacks the presence of somebody to step up and take this beyond being merely a decent, functional collection of songs.

Scintilli is a disappointingly static record from a duo of born tinkerers.

Only in Dreams isn't a perfect record, but a little while down the line it might end up looking like the beginning of something--the first steps forward for the band, or perhaps a raising of the bar for this entire revival.

Zig Zaj feels like he's straining a little too hard to make every song different from the last, where he's actually become pinned down by the "eclectic" reputation he's accrued, forcing him to make unwise decisions just to keep a certain degree of diversity afloat in his work.

It's a pretty, well-thought out collection--but for all the ideas and layers, Heritage feels somewhat empty.

In the end, what's really impressive is that the mousey quality of their music doesn't work against these nimble, cosmopolitan arrangements. If anything, it makes the songs richer, gives them more of a backstory.

So the weird, winsome Whole Love is certainly Wilco's least consistent LP in a while, but inconsistency has its own rewards.

Celestial Lineage feels like the contemporary American scene's defining statement after San Francisco group Weakling's seminal 2000 offering Dead As Dreams.

There's a striking physicality to these songs, and Guy Fixsen and Ash Workman's production makes every tambourine beat hit with the clarity of a shattering window.

Lekman's new An Argument with Myself EP is a compact gem.

Considering how he and White have a past history of collaborating, you'd think that Guilty Simpson and White would be firing on all cylinders by now; instead, the Detroit hardhead unfurls cliché after cliché and drops vague, autobiographical teases that don't reveal much in particular.

In the end, the record is a disjointed listen--there are some really beautiful and even moving stretches but too many missed opportunities to truly bring together Ring's love of pop with his natural gift for beats.

It's an accomplished sound, one that may not immediately dispense with the comparisons that have dogged the band, but one that does suggest a group more than capable of outgrowing the associations.

Ultimately, the trip they're taking us on isn't into America, but into the past, and they show too much reverence for their forebears.