In the place of anthems, though, are carefully constructed gems making up a sequencing run so solid it takes a few listens to pick out the exact drop-off point.

While they've made great use of deconstructive syntax, repetition, gibberish, and in-jokes in the past, too much of Relax simply feels like dead air.

Megafaun may be their most immediately ingratiating, rewarding LP yet, as well-suited for a night strapped into headphones as it is a lazy Sunday morning, dancing around the bedroom, munching casually on a pasta breakfast.

The Night is a record uncomfortable with all the trappings of the corporeal world--time, words, its own skin--and occasionally, improbably, it actually breaks free of them all.

The disappointment is in how it sounds like their years apart have needlessly chastened them into fast-forwarding through the idiosyncratic streak they showed on Some Loud Thunder instead of embracing it, coming out of the wilderness only to end up smack dab in the middle of the road.

This is a far more serious record than its predecessor, but Palomo isn't always as assured in rendering the darker material.

For all the ideological intent fuelling the Wild Flag mission, the band rarely sacrifices the rock'n'roll fun-- they no doubt deliver that elusive black-and-blue, but it's a hit that feels like a kiss.

Gravity the Seducer is a transitional album bearing the growing pains and separation anxiety that we usually associate with bands that are in between periods of true inspiration.

Marling may spend the majority of these songs and several others struggling to find wisdom and peace in the face of trials brought on by lust, money, and death, but she almost always sounds like she already has all the answers.

The result is disarmingly tender, adding a few heartfelt minutes of warmth and personal connection, something lacking in the rest of Dreams' gloss.

Here, Clark's role-playing is grounded in emotions that are as cryptic as they are genuine and affecting. And when her voice can't bear it, her guitar does the screaming.

This lyrical simplicity shouldn't obscure the fact that these are sharply constructed songs that take unusual turns. One of Girls' specialities is their willingness to go completely over the top but somehow keep us right there with them.

Mountaintops is the first of their records to grapple with the everyday tribulations and banality of spending your entire adult life in a band-- with your Mate, nonetheless.

It's business as usual: spastic pounding, warp-speed scalar runs, and various math-rock feats of strength.

The songs on Hollow are modest--there's no closing epic, and the choruses are catchy but don't aim to be anthems--but the band seems to have found its true strength here in a sound that's pretty far removed from the implied violence of its name.

Often when an artist gets stronger, the music becomes more universal, and reference points become easier to hear. It may sound paradoxical, but these evocations help make Glacial Glow distinct.

Their experiments don't always yield useful results-- the downcast, acoustic-guitar-powered "Partners in Crime" comes awkwardly decorated with free-form piano rolls that trip up rather than propel the song's momentum. But there are moments when CSS find a way to successfully evolve without alienating their base.

While Why There Are Mountains reminded me of what those records [Perfect From Now On or The Moon and Antarctica] sounded like, Lenses Alien does something more difficult by reminding what it felt like once they were over and you were left to wonder if you just stumbled upon a cosmic, philosophical treatise disguised as an indie rock record.

The confidence in their new record is clear, if only because their vocals sound more boisterous than ever, but for the most part, the experimentation is the problem.

The band's personal choices--to abandon rock iconography for smaller, more fulfilling family units--will be Grace's fate as well: a record without broader narratives, meant for those who grew up with the Rapture, or want to.

Really, though, its the earlier track "Lost in Time" that best sums up the record's appeal--on one level, it's about the dancefloor as an escape, while on another, it winks at the group's time travels.

More than anything, Glazin's sneer'n'strut is just too much of a pretty good thing: One or two at a time, these songs work wonders, but over half an hour, the Boys' retrograde sneer and strut proves a bit too safe and samey.

Like his fusion heroes, Bruner wants it all: the future shock of electronics, the tightly edited pleasures of pop, the love-sick opulence of quiet-storm soul, and the show-stopper instrumental breaks of jazz. The fact that he's mostly pulled it off, with a record that's serious in intent while playful in execution, is pretty astounding.

Obscurities itself is over in less than 40 minutes: It's understated, personal, insular, oddball, and often gorgeous, an unexpectedly coherent collection from an important band.

I'm With You's hip thrusts and gyrations simply go through the motions, the work of a band with all kinds of capital to blow but no incentive to do anything differently.

This is functional music that highlights the simple pleasure of artfully arranged sound, the kind of gorgeous and evocative record that fills up the room and shifts your perception for 37 minutes and then brings you gently back to the surface.

Mostly there's a strong sense of discovery, of someone attempting to make sense of their surroundings, with Brooks cast as a voyager trampling through vast stretches of the British countryside, crisp leaves crinkling underfoot as he expertly funnels everything he sees and feels into song.

From the first beat drop, Fever Dream is obviously informed by the vaporized, off-kilter instrumentals of Flying Lotus and likeminded contemporaries: beats shuffle and scatter, bass hits low and leaves space in its wake, samples hiss and dissipate like the air is being sucked out of them, synth lines falter and wobble.

Ghost is nowhere near his best, most consistent, or most durable album, but that's ultimately not even the right way to measure its modest accomplishment. Instead, it's a surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs.

If Romans is something of a lateral move where innovation's concerned, it's by no means a step down in quality. In the last couple years, Stallones continues to carve out what feels like uncharted territory; hard to blame him for wanting to survey the scenery a little while longer.

For Smith's first four albums, Outside Society is an abridgement that doesn't really do her justice.

It's still perfectly effective fuzz-metal, but it's coming from a group of guys who have done seriously indelible work with the same ingredients, so it comes off a bit too slight.

Although the outgoing sonics of Endless Now represent a considerable leap in sound, it's those same qualities that could very well repel those drawn in by the burnt-ends glory of Nothing Hurts-- not because that previous record is necessarily better, though.

While Tha Carter IV isn't the first indication that Wayne's finest verses are behind him, it is the most glaring.

Though there's less breathing space on Thursday, and fewer melodic hooks, it still feels of a piece with House of Balloons.

The Ornament's expansiveness owes a fair bit to Olsen's voice, which sounds like it's been given an emotional B12 shot. His lyrics are prettily--albeit somewhat emptily-- evocative, richly textured, and his tonal pronunciation (the "PO-lice cars" of "Hanging Window") adds temporal sentimentality to his words.

Tassili is a very different album from any Tinariwen have recorded before, and they're proving to be a band of considerable range as they build a catalog of varied and excellent albums.

The R.E.D. Album will likely fade into obscurity immediately upon arrival, but if it doesn't raise some eyebrows around major label offices, then this is a failure of not just one person, but also of an entire industry.

The sounds he pursues here as Blood Orange might be more hip than his work as Lightspeed Champion, but the end results are less satisfying.

Taken together, You Are All I See still can't help but feel like an old cathedral--easy to admire in awe, but somehow cold and remote; hard to really make your own.

It's music you might hear in a CB2 furniture store-- languorous and luxurious in tempos and tone, but without any sort of sentiment outside of the swooning used to implant the idea in your brain that you might have sex or do drugs on that reasonably priced but fashionable couch.

Though they could still stand to pull back on the vocal fanfares, brushing away some of the gunk that mottled up their earlier records and doubling down on melody each open up new avenues in their sound, and Still Living finds Ganglians delivering on their early promise while stepping confidently toward whatever's next.

Even with its increased focus on classic-rock virtues, the album isn't really a collection of riffs and wails and choruses; it's more a muscular sort of vibe-out-- badass ambient music, if you will.

The economical use of space makes Widowspeak feel like a chance meeting with a pining stranger, one who spills their guts then vanishes from sight just as they're beginning to make an impression.

Really, no one would ever accuse Islands or Man Man of lacking character and presence, but once Thorburn and Kattner return to their bands after this dalliance, you'll be excused for thinking they'll sound a little bit incomplete without one another.

This odd and intermittently pleasurable artifact just kinda sits there, an unintentional rebuke to the artist that orphaned this poor thing.

If it's possible to go through the motions while still mostly shouting, Ferrari Boyz would be a prime example.

Like a lot of indie-pop albums, Program 91 is relatively quick and dirty. But despite its brevity, the album's second side drags a bit, as the skanked rhythms begin to bleed into each other with a lack of individual distinction.

The really amazing thing about the album is how anthemic and affirming it feels despite the near total absence of proper sing-along choruses.

The only problem is that Johnson's tales aren't all that hooky. At least, not enough to buoy Tripper's soft and moody music.

Love Has Made Me Stronger's rough-around-the-edges imperfections only allow Kleyn to convey her spirited optimism all the more forcefully. That sort of music boldness never goes out of style.

Neither the melody nor the ambience overwhelms the other. It's easy to hear the silky, billowy tones through the dying-battery distortion, but hard to picture what they'd sound like without it.

Mirror Traffic tickles that nostalgia without sacrificing maturity, discovering that "playfully relaxed" is a valid third route between "slacker" and "manic."

Watch Me Dance doesn't reconcile the clash between retro and modernism, but at least it does the past a decent amount of justice.

In other words, Fool's Gold made a Foreign Born record.

The problem with it, beyond a handful of unflattering genre excursions, is a slight but persistent thinness of imagination.

His antiquated fantasies still very much belong to him, but it's still a joy to peer inside them--even if the canvases they're displayed on have shrunk ever so slightly.

Instead of exploring their sound and growing more dexterous over time, Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter have backed themselves into a creative corner on Marble Son--with a sound so austere it becomes tedious instead of heady, tentative instead of revelatory.

It's softer feel also illustrates the dynamic range Cohen has as a songwriter on his first solo outing, one that isn't especially revelatory or inventive, but does offer a solid starting point for the second chapter of his career.

This year, we've seen Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day, and the Get Up Kids attempting to play catch up with themselves, but here Braid bafflingly jettison the goodwill of their past: the palm-muted verses and squeaky choruses, the one-sided conversations of the lyrics, the antiseptic production -- I'll say it could come from anyone because you probably don't remember who the Pinehurst Kids are.

The music's measured rhythm and plaintive chords may belie those bright sentiments, but if everything lined up perfectly, this wouldn't be Richard Youngs.

This is rock music that has come almost completely unstuck from the blues, with a sleek, relentless drive subbing in for swing.

The EP's lackluster tracklist leaves iTunes Session seeming clunky and unrepresentative--like it's not a full set, but an excerpt from a larger show.

The album's use of analogue synths isn't a regression, but an attempt to find a new way forward.

On Watch the Throne, they push each other and have fun doing it, and the result is a stadium-sized event-rap spectacle that still sounds like two insanely talented guys' idiosyncratic vision. That's worth celebrating.

The element that makes Family of Love sound like the work of an almost entirely different band is the massive leap in production value.

These songs store well more than a half-hour of reward and intrigue-- appropriate enough for a record that had to be made three times.

Native To is packed with well-executed, hummable stuff, but it wears thin quickly.

Lateness never does much to prove Clare and his producers were on the same page (let alone reading from the same book).

This self-fulfilling fatalism is at the heart of innumerable rock songs by innumerable bitter young men, but it is rarely expressed with the introspective clarity that Bachmann displays throughout Icky Mettle.

Many of the album's best songs seem to inspire comparisons with dancing: There is a connection to the idea of dance as liberation here, as Lloyd's blushing sincerity builds up potential energy, the nimble performance acts as a release valve.

Let It Beard's structure, its scope, its knowing nods to an earlier era's excess.

Unlike Dedication 2 or Da Drought 3, Sorry 4 the Wait sounds like the work of a mortal human being. Happily, that mortal human being still happens to be very good at rapping.

The EP's 17-minute run time feels too brief. Luckily, Satin Panthers offers more than enough to tide listeners over until a potential follow-up album.

Even if Lonely Crowd doesn't quite live up to the bar set by Broken Record Prayers-- which was, after all, a singles collection-- there's still something dependably refreshing about a new Comet Gain record.

For die-hards, the most alluring part of the package may be the second compact disc, which features 18 mostly instrumental demos recorded in Gaye's post-What's Going On honeymoon period, when his vast artistic ambitions and abilities were being embraced by the greater public. These somewhat experimental demos--deep, in-the-pocket funk in the vein of Sly Stone, George Clinton, and Jimi Hendrix--clearly laid the groundwork for much of his subsequent 70s material.

Together with the ultra-mellow atmosphere, this lack of cohesion makes the album feel messy, and maybe worse, a little boring.

Through the Green can scan as simple or nostalgic, but either misses the point (and neither is the album a "modern take" on disco). It's an album of execution, of Tiger & Woods sharing sounds that aren't elusive and chasing feelings that are.

Electronic Dream is pretty, but it's pretty like the morning sun twinkling off of a dangling machete blade--you don't want to fuck with it.

It's not that they're not real, it's that the shivering vocal timbres dominate the mix to the point where large shifts in tempo and style are obscured. It's during these moments when I think that Room(s) and its elevation of the vocal sample was perhaps a better idea than an album.

This reissue of Peace Sells, celebrating a quarter century of Megadeth's second but first truly great album, is probably more a sop to those diehards than anything else, but if it turns one curious party into a convert then it's worth it, even in this time of bald cash-grab reissue ugliness.

In execution the whole thing comes off as nothing more than a thinly disguised, crass attempt to smoke latent Oasis fans out of hiding. Unfortunately for them, Beady Eye already beat them to the punch.

Legendary Weapons' greatest asset is nearly two decades of goodwill, but at what point are you just flat-out going to admit that Ghostface has been badly coasting downhill for at least five years?

Field Songs is Whitmore's seventh full length (not counting a collection of demos in 1999), and stylistically, it's right in step with his previous albums.

Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped, Krug's first post-Wolf Parade LP, feels like ritual music infused with 1980s nostalgia.

Self-serious flaws and all, Section.80 still stands as a powerful document of a tremendously promising young guy figuring out his voice.

Grooms' aims give off a whiff of vague danger, a static unease occasionally broken by detuned guitars and skins-smashing breakdowns.

His lyrics' power stemmed from the imagery and humor he used to render in full color a world that for most rappers exists only in black and white. To the tape's considerable credit, Gucci disappoints here only when compared with himself.

Grieves is more than game to match his collaborator's slick, itchy Okayplayerisms, switching between rapping and singing as his partner stacks up the soul chords and funk flourishes.

It's "Sam Baker's album" by name and ownership, but it's also another beat tape in a very crowded field, one where it's easy to get lost amidst the increasingly innovative producers working now.

Blackenedwhite pushes them closer to humanity without sacrificing the weirdness that's so central to their appeal. They're not out of surprises yet, and they probably won't be for a long time.

The band works via accumulation, gradually building up to moments of muted drama, yet LaCount's leads wreck that momentum.

Mostly, though, this is a depressing reminder of the distance between what Depeche Mode once were and what they've become.

Dyer and Sanchez are the sort of artists who will continue to challenge themselves at every turn. As long as they can keep that boundless creativity from going in a million different directions at once, their listeners will reap plenty of rewards.

Some of it will be a little too out-there for some people, and some of it will be a little too harmless for others. But overall, it's an interesting assemblage of artists, and the music is good, covering just enough ground that you can feel the variety but no one's likely to be overwhelmed.

There are bum notes, and rhythms that wander. But Eternal Tapestry and Sun Araw mesh well. When they hit a groove, they're a match made in a UV lamp-lit and sage-scented stoner-rock heaven.

The Men's treatment of their well-curated influences is less akin to that of fan-boys playing in a tribute act and a lot more like an irreverent hip-hop producer's approach to breaks--key in on your sources' coolest moments, change the context, and ride that perfect sound forever.

Sure, there's no avoiding the fact that some of these songs are appearing for the third time. The nagging "what now?" question isn't going away. But it can be filed away for later.