It can't be said that Senior fails to meet its modest wallpaper-ish aims, yet it hardly represents the best Royksopp has to offer.

Earth vs. the Pipettes sounds like not just a different group, not just a lesser group but, in sadly off-putting ways, almost an opposite group.

Blues is as thoughtfully and carefully constructed as either of Matsson's albums, revealing the nuances of his sound and subtly putting the lie to the notion that he needs anything besides his weathered voice and beat-up guitar.

Maybe Funstyle will be liberating for her; maybe, as with Self Portrait, her deck-clearing exercise will let her shake off aspects of the way she's understood that she finds burdensome. At the very least, it's a shrewd way to lower expectations. After this, whatever she does next can only be a pleasant surprise.

Love Remains, because of its construction, feels like music that comes from inside, as if the act of listening completes it.

Without much variety to spice it up, the overall sluggardly pace is energy-sapping. An album of the sort of tracks on which Eskmo earned his reputation might not have gone amiss before he ventured a more songwriterly statement, but there's no reason he can't regroup and pull that off yet.

As important questions about music's worth in the age of free continue to swirl around him, Sufjan's still combating instant-gratification culture the best way he knows how.

Wayne has already done better versions of almost every song on I Am Not a Human Being, which was released on his 28th birthday last week. It's not exactly what we're looking for now.

Swanlights might be Antony's richest album yet, with musical and thematic charms that take their time to take their hold.

it's still not quite as successful as the Orb's classic material, and a little too subdued, lacking both the goofy sampleadelic grandeur and the ear-grabbing pop pulse of the Ultraworld era. But it's still the most focused and listenable Orb album in years.

The dusty melancholia of Lucky Shiner feels earned and lived-in. It's a far cry from just naming your new bedroom-pop band Double Dare.

Frustratingly, most songs have great ideas in them, sitting alongside creative dead ends. The overall sound of the record--to be reductionist, rave-rap--is a welcome trend, and it proves they have their ear to the ground.

Foreign Landscapes enters a deadly boring lull before its second half and never recovers. The result has the energy of a cup of tea slowly going tepid in the Sunday afternoon sun.

To Dreamers is one of Stoltz's most satisfying efforts to date, sounding bolder and more invigorated than nearly anything before it. Yet, when Stoltz sneers "Do you want to rock'n'roll with me?", exactly who's doing the asking gets a little lost in the tune's glammy shuffle.

Mostly a failure, but with enough glimmers of a true comeback to tease fans into checking out the next one.

Nevertheless, as much as Bubblegum evidences a lot of thought and effort on the part of the band, it still has the sound of musicians going through the motions and sticking too close to their formulae.

This album's strengths-- its intimacy, its containment, its subtlety-- are not the qualities that made Sleater-Kinney great, but it would be ungenerous to dismiss this because it's not as thrilling, confrontational, or exuberant.

There's plenty here for musicians to analyze and dissect with envy, but first and foremost, this is an album for the body and the soul.

Performing as Nudedragons, the group took the stage at the Showbox in Seattle this past April and played a set that showed as much love to Louder Than Love and Ultramega OK as any other album in their catalog, giving each portion of their career equal respect without resorting to simply playing just the hits. Succeeding at this sort of task is easier said than done, but it would've been nice if Telephantasm at least tried.

As with most of Kasher's work, the main draws of Monogamy aren't really musical--words always get prominence over melody. Simply put, if you get a spark out of idealizing your romantic failures by doing things like drunkenly Googling ex-girlfriends (as he does in great detail on "There Must Be Something I've Lost"), listening to Monogamy as a whole is like dousing yourself in gasoline.

Even if those tracks ["Repeating Angel" and"We Have to Mask"] aren't great on their own, they don't nearly break the spell of Crush, whose combination of hard-charging energy and world-weary moods is less an unexpected curveball than a well-earned step forward.

Less ferocious, more deliberate but in many ways more compelling, Everything in Between finds No Age matching a new, nuanced approach to their expansive noise.

Young may be famous for his maelstrom guitar, but in this case the apocalypse sneaks up on us with a whisper, Young's voice steeped in decades of watching the world go to hell.

While that title may suggest a navel-gazing bedroom-auteur beatshop, Record Collection proves a surprisingly gregarious album, varying up the sounds and styles and making better use of cameos by his famous friends.

We'll never be able to parse every lyric or tease out every technical intricacy - though somebody will probably try - but that is what Halcyon Digest is all about: nostalgia not for an era, not for antiquated technology, but for a feeling of excitement, of connection, of that dumb obsession that makes life worth living no matter how horrible it gets.

So even if I Am the West is little more than another reminder of what Cube's day job was before becoming a Hollywood supermogul, if it does result in someone's hearing AmeriKKKA's Most Wanted or Death Certificate for the first time in 2010, it's done its job.

At first listen, Public Strain is impenetrably cold. But deep down, beneath the blizzard of noise and hiss, something's burning.

King Night, accordingly, finds Salem pushing their sound far enough to create artistic distance from the rest of the pack.

Ring is electic, beat-heavy, and easy to like. A sneakily confident debut that should please listeners at almost every turn.

Even with the apparent shifts and changes, all four of Swedish's songs would have fit snugly on Heartland. But Pallett is hardly running in place, either. In fact, he's created such a comparison-resistant framework for his unique sensibilities that no matter where he takes his sound, he'll sound like no one other than himself.

The songs may be catchy, but their intricacy and thoughtful storytelling makes them stick. And for its impressive sonic sheen, the album's skillful restraint makes it sound better with every spin.

As it stands, Good Things feels like hopping into a time machine, dialing it to 40 years ago, then forgetting to bring a stack of recent 12" singles with you to completely blow 1970's mind.

It's easy to hear the decades of dance music this guy's absorbed and appreciate how he's able to spin that into sounds that are at once reverential and future-forward. This doesn't happen on every track, but when it does, it's something special.

My Father is less about the Eno-esque sonic tapestries and more about Gira's love for apocalyptic country blues.

While I wouldn't say that Postcards From a Young Man is quite the late-career masterstroke Journal For Plague Lovers was, it is still a product of a re-energized band. Whether or not it actually garners them the hits and mass audience they're aiming for (and at least in Britain, it seems inconceivable that it won't), they've managed to make an inviting, populist album that deserves the attention.

If your interest in Jamaican music is limited, then Duppy Writer will probably be of even less concern to you than the usual Roots Manuva album. But you also shouldn't dismiss an album this end-to-end pleasurable as some dry retro curio.

This record is the SoHo-boutique equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner: it tastes all right, but good luck staying awake 'til dessert.

The Trip feels like an expansion into new territory. Without Gane and his spacey-cool affectations, Sadier is free to revel in warm, rich balladry.

Pattern + Grid World sounds fully formed and precisely assembled. That shouldn't be surprising, considering Ellison's growing reputation as an album artist.

For a record this simple and, even at its punchiest, seductively serene, it might seem far-fetched to compliment it for being daring. But considering its own orbit--and her eschewing lo-fi recording techniques--Rose cuts right to the chase, making lean, elegant music that practically glows in the face of exceptional fuss.

As Epic progresses, her vocals couple with an array of sonics and styles (see: the pedal-steel country saunter of "Save Yourself", the electric punch of "Peace Sign"), though it's the slower, more atmospheric numbers that remain the album's most arresting.

Dull tempos, disengaging moments, recycled ideas--all egregious offenses, yes. Luckily, Les Savy Fav have earned a decade's worth of goodwill to cushion a just-OK album or two landing in their discography, which makes Root For Ruin a well-deserved victory lap, if nothing else.

You can't deny that Cuomo feels no shame and is making exactly the kind of music he wants, and there's ultimately something disarming about that.

Solo ultimately reveals little we didn't already know about Vijay Iyer as a pianist, but to hear him explore these facets of his sound on his own, with no one to lean on, is still interesting. The central suite is where the album and the artist truly shine.

He's sad and pathetic and needy and yet somehow still smooth, which is sort of the central animating paradox at the heart of the Walkmen. They make these wounded, anxious songs, but they make them so confidently, with such unearthly rich-guy assurance.

More money means more studio time, and more studio time can lead to more experimentation; as such, Business Casual's most successful moments are the result of genre-related leg-stretching.

Like much of Cave's work, there is an ominous sense of dread always creeping. But unlike previous work, there's a speed and intensity to Grinderman 2 unheard before.

False Priest is billed as a more collaborative effort, both on the production end with musical savant Jon Brion and in the spotlighted duets with divas Janelle Monáe and Solange Knowles.

Phosphene Dream is a step up, if only for the little bit of variety that the tighter arrangements and genre-hopping provide.

For an album that presents a more assured, swaggering Black Mountain, it's a minor disappointment that Wilderness Heart doesn't so much climax as gradually wind down, without a show-stopping finale to crown the victory lap. But even in their quietest moments, the band can still leave you unsettled.

Significant artistic development of any kind probably would've been a bad idea for this band-- they were, as the saying goes, small but perfectly formed. Still, it's also not quite satisfying to hear 40-year-olds come back to what they were doing half their lifetime ago and approach it exactly the same way.

Rather than protest the state of the world, Staples is toasting human endurance-- hers as well as ours.

Summer of Hate felt meek at times, content to retreat into its own shadow; Sleep Forever's many oversized melodies and wider-reaching sound prove that these guys do a lot better taking a few steps into the light.

Outside of a distorted vocal on "Not Getting There" and a slowly blooming and surprisingly gripping waltz ("Everything Is Wrong"), the arrangements seem done up like hospital rooms, every sound picked for maximum sterility.

Much of Majesty Shredding seems to concern the importance and difficulties inherent in maintaining a fantasy life as you get older, but it's not a morose or self-involved album. Instead, they've made a total wheelhouse record, and a very good one.

On the other hand, Fields' dearth of surprises makes it a little disappointing even for those with more conventional tastes -- listeners who generally value stuff like quality and consistency more than the shock of the new.

So Barking stays the course, with the added prospect of a fitter, happier Underworld on the horizon. It's about time.

They tease out old ideas and combine them with new ones, affixing Appalachian folk to classic rock, ambient, avant garde, and a kind of musical entropy that pushes many of their songs into sputtering, oddly compelling noise.

While there was an unspectacular battle-rap anonymity to his past lyrics, they were at least spit in the service of a strong overall style. Now he's grown a bit, upping the emotional dimension subtly and letting some more specific humanistic details come through, even in the lines that read like average boasts on paper.

The upside is that it sounds warmly familiar, a reminder of why we missed them in the first place, but the downside is that the album gives very few indications of what Fink and Taylor have learned during their hiatus.

Pop Negro feels transitional. El Guincho has a clear abundance of talent; he simply didn't harness it this time around.

People who've appreciated the band's last three albums will find time for this once it has a chance to sink in, but it's not essential for people who got a charge out of Ta Det Lungt and passed on the rest.

Light Chasers improves on 2008's Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) by focusing on what Cloud Cult do best, though it lacks the colorful songwriting and hooky inventiveness of the band's most endearing songs.

Expektoration is DOOM at his live-show peak, and people who go into this knowing this set's from six years back might feel a bit more charitable. But releasing a concert album with an "Act 1"/"Intermission"/"Act 2" structure instead of a telltale tracklist, and obscuring its actual place in a years-distant history? That's not supervillainy, that's antagonism.

Were its songs more dynamic, its arrangements less haphazard, its tone more even, its sentiments a bit more clearly stated, Elf Power could really be affecting. But as it is, it just feels affected; the sound of a band in mourning seeking a musical catharsis they can't quite extend to the listener.

There aren't many hooks on this record, and the tempo shifts are sometimes subtle, so it can feel overwhelming-- kind of a constant onslaught of sound. This is a taste issue, but if you require a respite now and again, it might be a difficult listen.

There are glimmers, in the various half-ideas that surface throughout No Ghost, of a vision that the band could have taken and run with. Klausener's lyrics can be appealingly morbid.

Minor quibbles and missteps aside, Body Talk Pt. 2 is a perfectly solid-- and occasionally awesome-- record.

The good news is that they're too skilled, experienced, and important to make a record that's just a mess, and for a while there's nothing so terrible about this one.

Personal Life is hardly a failure; much of it is excellent. But it's also missing that anger-meets-energy urgency that made the Thermals' early albums so undeniable.

Though it is abstract, Old Punch Card is playful. It's like the sound of a guy bumping around in a room filled with weird noisemakers, trying out one and then another until he finds one that sounds especially interesting.

Throughout Fin Eaves, the kaleidoscopic growth of the tracks feels both natural and chaotic, and you get a good sense of the sounds and patterns evolving. Sometimes the album's lo-fi and static-ridden production can induce a dulling sensation.

Expertly paced, Cubehouse's highlights are judiciously spread out, its occasional down note always quickly offset by something more boisterous. It's the Spaceships' most consistent listen; with no lows to speak of, it's easy to see this becoming the go-to for fans.

The album is also a much more modern-sounding pop project, though it similarly owes its success to the chemistry of its creators.

So yes, on Minotaur they continue draw deeply from 60s soft-pop; if you've enjoyed the Clientele's last few albums, you're guaranteed to enjoy at least 6/8ths of this mini LP.

Fans of shivery folk music with subtle plateaus will surely find things to like, but the rest of you might find yourselves wishing the "black dog" in Selway's basement had a bit more bite. At least he let it outside.

Quest for Fire's sophomore release, Lights From Paradise, is less stoner rock than stoned rock, marked by a patient pace and a foggy-headed whimsy that lingers even as the VU levels surge into the red.

Everything Everything's debut LP, Man Alive, is proof that enthusiastic experimentation can't save your end product when the underlying elements are so incompatible and unappetizing.

Strange Weather, Isn't It?: you'll enjoy it plenty while it's on, but once it's over you might forget it ever existed.

Hawk is very much Campbell's album. She made all the big artistic decisions, her face is front and center on the cover, and Lanegan shows up on only eight of the album's 13 tracks.

Eels' latest, Tomorrow Morning, is far too insular to mean much of anything outside itself. It's an exercise in self-referentiality, which might be more impressive if the music didn't sound like the folk-with-beats path Beck was smart enough to avoid.

Ra Ra Riot sound overly self-conscious, the rural environs of their recording space failing to provide the warmth, empathy, or exuberance of The Rhumb Line.

Those great choruses? Still great, but not when songs are dragged out this long and the payoff arrives right on schedule, about four times a song. It's indulgent, but it's hard to make songs sound this big. Fortunately, it won't be enough to wring-out the magic found in a great many of these songs, and surely won't be able to stall Land of Talk who, with Cloak and Cipher, are progressing quite nicely.

The Sword's songs seem to follow the same basic blueprint: Opening-riff trudge, part where Cronise sings about magic, solo, more crunching, more magic, another solo.

Sugar is notable as much for what's missing as for what's been honed and emphasized. Morris no longer howls like Kurt Cobain, nor does he drawl so studiously. There are no 12- or seven-minute stoner epics either; instead, the songs are shorter, more compact, punchier. Almost missing: personality.

Special Moves--which pulls at least one track from all six Mogwai albums, but no more than two--strategically positions the band's latter-day material among the old warhorses to build a set list that gradually intensifies and explodes like the band's best instrumental epics.

Memphis, their debut LP, bottles all of that up with remarkable skill, but often to disappointing effect. Its many flourishes are much more satisfying than its songs, each dissolving on contact no matter how much buoyancy or sugar they boast for stretches.

Not every song achieves such effortless drama. At times, Carey comes across as more a student than a master. He has obviously consumed a tremendous amount of music, but he hasn't fully digested some of his influences.

Past Time certainly isn't background music, but the vocalists' missives might be understood as simply the core of the band's sound--and perhaps something more, if you're able to divert your attention from the charms of the music.

As a whole, the harder Wolfpack Party tries to be a fun party record, the more forced it feels. And as solid as L's beats are, they can't stand up on their own.

while Surfing occasionally fails and does so loudly, but there's something thrillingly unfashionable about how Klaxons take aim at their grayer peers with a tommy gun full of glowsticks--they don't always hit their target, but it's a gloriously fun mess all the same.

The scrapbook-like cover of All Delighted People makes sense then, as its contents serve as a humble and friendly keepsake, songs that deserve to be heard, but belonging to a chapter in Stevens' artistic livelihood that he needed to close to maintain his vitality.

Lissie's voice is haunting as always, but the band doesn't match this tone, and as a result it no longer sounds like Lissie's song. Hopefully these missteps aren't enough to put people off, because Lissie is still a significant new voice.

After a supreme early demonstration of pastiche, Alive As You Are's back half reveals a capable pop band writing capable pop songs.

The production is as inventive and immersive as ever, but what separates this album from the last is that Dear mostly sticks with one theme all the way through.

SSLYBY have every right to feel like they have a chip on their shoulder, and if they can somehow manage to inject some grit next time out, they could be looking at a success that's an even greater revenge than "Critical Drain".

The transcontinental breadth of the band's influences keeps Chief from coming across as pallid piggybackers of any one scene, but for a group that hasn't yet demonstrated an ability to nail down a particular sound, keeping so many balls in the air could be stretching its talents too thin.

Whereas many modern film soundtracks are glorified compilation discs with a seemingly random track selection, the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World soundtrack is very thoughtful in its curation and stands as a very accurate interpretation of O'Malley's fictional world.